When I finally read this “Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley” post, it reminded me of some notes I had made a year ago under the heading of “Focus on the feeling.” A slightly different take on the same big-picture theme —>
When I watch a film, I focus on the feeling: how do all those elements come together to make the viewer feel?
Functionality (plot, dialogue, acting, costume, camera angles, lighting, locations) matters. But that’s table stakes. There’s a big difference between a synopsis that you could read on IMDb and a film that’s complete with the things that makes the story come alive.
The nuances of the execution of the film matter. It’s in the little details that define the character and the world, the scenes that release tension and make you laugh (even in a tragic story), and how the viewer is carried along on the journey.
A good film doesn’t have to twist your arm to carry you along.
During some films, I feel light, hopeful, filled with possibility. For the protagonist, and also about the world. After some films, the weight of the film stays with me. I leave thoughtful, aware, and perhaps a little sad.
Tech products can have the same effect. In 2013, I used HipChat to communicate internally. It was fine. It was functionally complete and did everything we needed it to do. And then Slack came out. The functionality of HipChat and Slack were so similar, and HipChat had an entrenched user base. Why, then, did Slack pull away and take the lead?
It was the choice of color, fonts, and interaction elements that created these “feelings.” When I tried Slack, it made me feel light, happy, less stressed. HipChat, in comparison, felt formal, almost stifling with blues and grays. There were also key product decisions on how you could start using Slack (easily), and onboard your colleagues (easily) that were heavy contributors. But, in order to even want to use it and get your colleagues to use it, you first had to fall in love with it. And love it enough to get everyone to move to a new platform. The feeling of joy and lightness was so significant that it caused mass adoption of Slack and mass abandonment of HipChat.
A good product doesn’t have to twist your arm to carry you along.
Same goes for the Apple Store vs. Best Buy. One draws me in, encourages me to be in my own bubble (even if the store is crowded), and look at and explore delightfully beautiful products. The other feels cluttered and overwhelming, even if it’s empty of visitors—and even if they’re also selling Macs and iPhones. Instead of products, I get to see aisle after aisle of boxes – a well-lit warehouse. Even the shelves – ugh – such a lack of care for the products they display. It’s an experience I avoid if I have a choice. These feelings of drawing in and repelling are a huge part of the design and care (or lack thereof) that each retailer has chosen.
Another example is Turo1 versus airport-based car rentals. With Turo, you rent a car from a real car owner, you know exactly what the car will be, you meet the person who owns the car, and you have a warm, more-personal experience of delight for a car you actually want to drive. Turo focuses on the feeling, through the design of the customer experience from booking, to delivery, to the rules around having to clean the car (you don’t!), to return.
You want your customer feeling: That was awesome! Now I’m in a good mood. It makes me lean forward and want to do this again. Behind that feeling are the many careful decisions that make the process delightful.
In tech, there is a big difference between the functionality—”allowing users to communicate inside an organization”—and the details of how they do it, the feeling they get when they’re onboarded, the joy of a shared gif that gets the “room” laughing.
Focusing on the feeling is what will truly separate the winners.
Disclosure: I am an independent director on the board of Turo. ↩
Everyone wants network effects. A profile page can be an essential element to this—just imagine Github or Twitter without a profile page. Would people still join?
While it seems simple on the surface, there are tens (if not hundreds) of decisions that drive a profile page that will deliver value to your users, and therefore to your company.
Let’s dig deeper into some of the key choices and the behaviors they create.
1. What can the user control about her profile page? What does the company control? What can other people do via her profile page?
How much of the content of a user’s profile is self-determined? Some platforms, like Instagram, are all about user-generated content. There’s a lot you can control about what shows up there.
How much of the content is passive? Transaction-based sites, such as Lyft and UpWork, tend to include a lot of passive content—there’s a log of user actions and the feedback related to those. The profile page owner doesn’t control this information; it’s generated and placed there by the company and by other users.
Some platforms are all about allowing users to showcase themselves to the “outside” world. In the case of Behance, the profile page serves as your proof of work or portfolio:
On GitHub, your page is also like a portfolio, but the company automatically adds some cool visualizations of your contribution history:
Pinterest is curation vehicle. It’s not a portfolio of your own creations, but it allows users to curate their choice of images and content from around the web:
Once a user starts filling their page, the next step is to think about whether the page can serve as a resource for others as well. Once a profile page starts being a resource for others, everything that is added to the page adds value to the network. This starts to compound pretty quickly.
On the other hand, there are sites where the user can’t control the profile page very much at all. For example, on eBay, the original profile page was a purely factual log of interactions and transactions. It was created while you interacted on the site, and you couldn’t curate it. This served a very important function: laying out the buyer’s or seller’s trustworthiness by listing every single transaction and the feedback that came out of it. It’s an enabling page for the whole site (much more so when eBay started at the early stages of the internet). The user didn’t choose how the page was presented to others—it was all controlled by the company, like this:
More recently, eBay made this page into a tab and made the main profile page into something that gives the user a little more control over how they come across:
eBay likely made this change in response to its competitor Etsy. The people who built Etsy understood that control has two elements: one is permissioning (what can you do?), which we have spoken about so far. The second is personalization. Personalization leads to an investment of time and effort, and, eventually, it leads to love for the page and the platform.
When a site limits personalization too much, it can start to to feel utilitarian. A segment of sellers viewed eBay as a business. But they viewed Etsy as a place they could infuse with their personality, vision, and dreams and communicate that to their buyers and their seller friends. This allowed a whole new multi-billion dollar business to be built (Etsy is now over half of eBay’s market cap with with only a handful of the eBay categories).
On Wikipedia, users have one profile page where they can describe themselves however they want, and another page called “User Talk” where other users’ comments and questions (e.g. about contributions that you made) are logged and publicly visible.
If you’re building a page which is the spine of the product, it’s important to think through what information you will include on users’ behalf. And what you will allow the user to personalize.
Small decisions can affect user behavior and user emotion, and have large consequences.
2. Should users be anonymous, pseudonymous, or eponymous? Is this a user choice or the company’s choice?
On Twitter, Reddit, Clubhouse etc., you can choose to use your real name or be pseudonymous. The reason I call these pseudonymous is that total anonymity (where the platform doesn’t know who you are) isn’t really possible on a platform that requires a cell phone number since cell phone numbers are usually traceable to a person. On many shopping sites like eBay, you use a “handle” or username, but the platform knows who you are because they require credit card and other information. On Facebook, you’re supposed to be eponymous and use your real name. (Same with Uber and Lyft).
Each of these will lead to types of behavior on the site. When someone is eponymous, most people stay within the bounds of socially acceptable behavior (most of the time). This is positive in terms of hate speech, but it also constraining if the user wants to experiment with creativity or new forms of expression without judgment.
To keep people from pseudonymously impersonating real/famous people, companies can choose to add an extra layer of verification to accounts that get a lot of attention or belong to a celebrity. Eponymous Plus, if you will. A verified account adds benefits to the site by ensuring that the users interacting with them know it’s the actual person and by giving these verified users tools like filters, advanced notifications, and views the plebes cannot access.
Pseudonymous interactions allow more direct, but sometimes harsh or mean, interactions. However, on the positive side, if an artist is exploring a new genre, they may want to experiment pseudonymously. Distancing from real life allows people to interact with others with shared interests without the burden of bringing your “whole self” and everything you have accumulated in your life with you. The site is the final arbiter of excess since they know who the user is and can track them down in cases of illegal activity.
True anonymity can be offered by a platform, but it can lead to a set of behaviors that the company needs to think about. There can be sinister consequences including things like school bullying, predation, and other terrible behavior. For example, Kik became a cesspool that enabled the trading of child porn. The real question is, “What happens if we enable users to do XYZ with no repercussions? And do we want that outcome?”
3. Does every user have the same kind of profile page?
In some communities, some users are faceless by design. For example: Cameo. Cameo is about many, many “normal” individuals who buy cameos from celebrities. The focus is on the celebrities. In Cameo, only the “sellers” have a profile page.
The sellers are famous enough where the people who buy from them are not a validation of the seller’s worth.
On the Seller side, there are reviews, so you know the quality of the work, but you don’t know and can’t see (rightly, in this case), what the final product was. There’s also no way to contact the buyer and ask them questions. User interaction is deliberately limited.
On a platform like UpWork, buyers and sellers have different, but complementary profile pages with a lot of parallels. And on social networks, all profile pages have the same features.
Can users unlock new badges or capabilities?
Sometimes users may be able to do different things on their profile page. This can be seen as a reward (you have been verified by being a good user on this platform, and so have more leeway), or it might be a function of safety on a marketplace. On eBay, you can earn badges based on how many items you’ve sold. Airbnb has “superhosts” who’ve met certain criteria to be labeled as such. This creates a different category of profile page.
Are there privacy settings, and what do they look like?
When it comes to seeing other users’ information, can users select groups to which they’ll reveal more, and other groups to which they’ll reveal less? Is everything public for “everyone on the web” to see, or are there “friends only” options?
There is usually an inverse correlation between how anonymous a user is and how much control they have over their page.
For example, on Facebook, where the user is pushed towards being “a real person” (let’s not get started on how this is violated), you can choose to use the strongest privacy settings. You have levers of control over who sees what information.
On Reddit, where almost everyone is pseudonymous, you need more sunlight to try your best to reduce bad behavior. So here, you can see everyone’s post history without user-set restrictions. Same with eBay, which, more than Reddit, needs a level of trust for you to interact with an unknown person, in an unknown part of the world.
4. How much interpersonal activity is displayed, if any?
Through the profile page, can you look at interactions with other users? On Clubhouse, the profile is a vehicle to interact at the moment that you want to interact, but there’s not much logging of the history of a person’s participation in rooms.
On Twitter, there is a fair bit of interpersonal activity on the site, but only if the user chooses to have the interactions publicly. They could also choose to have the conversations behind the scenes (in DMs). Clubhouse with their private rooms have also enabled this (which in their case, seems to have hurt app usage1 – wouldn’t you rather see people have spats in public and bitch people out to an audience of several thousand?).
Showing interpersonal activity can enhance trust. On a shopping site, repeat purchases are an indication of a happy buyer, but it could also be an indication of a behind-the-scenes relationship. Sunlight is a great disinfectant in these situations.
There’s a spectrum of the importance of the data. On one end is financial data. On the other is likes of photographs (for example). The more closely the site works with deeply personal data, the more user controls of visibility matter. The Venmo situation (where Joe Biden’s transactions were visible), is a great example of this.
The question du jour is does any of this apply to Web3? I’d say yes. Right now, your profile for a Web3 community is distributed between your wallet and your Discord presence(s). This feels pretty basic — if the whole point of many Web3 apps is community, it should be much stronger. And it will be. Tools will develop differently, but the principles outlined here are likely to remain valid.
All of these decisions are crucial because the profile page can become the centerpiece of network effects.
Why? Well, there are two aspects to it:
First — you can’t have a network without nodes in the network. Users are these nodes, and the profile page is how you can identify and locate them. It’s a way, potentially, for users to get introduced to each other and, in doing that, come together into a true network.
If you’re building a platform and aiming to develop a community there, this is especially important. The profile page might be the most essential part of that. It’s central to community as a way for people to understand who another person is and learn what they’re about before and after making a connection.
Second — network effects will start to take off when the profile page itself becomes an asset worth owning. For example: it’s advantageous for a business to own its Google Business and Yelp pages, because people go to those platforms for information about businesses and companies. Even if the business owner doesn’t care too much about emerging websites, at some point, it becomes impossible to ignore the value of the page as an asset. Similarly, if you’re setting up any kind of personal or brand web presence, you want to own the same handle on each major platform (Shripriya.com, @Shripriya, medium.com/shripriya, etc). Even if I’m not active on one of these platforms, claiming my “location in the network,” via a profile page, is valuable to me.
Think a few years down the road. As your company grows, what will motivate someone to take ownership of their profile page and invest in it?
Do they make money?
Do they make friends?
Do they find shared interests?
Do they learn about something they care about?
Are they entertained?
Is there something in a user’s profile page that adds value to every other user (or to one other user)?
Is there a way for one user’s efforts to reduce the effort another user needs to put in to achieve a goal?
These are the situations in which value is created, and that value is attached to a profile page which represents the user’s place in the network. The more obvious this value is to users, the easier it becomes to nudge users onto your platform and keep them there.
TL;DR — these are the key questions as you build this important platform component:
What can the user control about her profile page? What does the company control? What can other people do via her profile page?
Should users be anonymous, pseudonymous, or eponymous? Is this a user choice or the company’s choice?
Does every user have the same kind of profile page?
*How much interpersonal activity is displayed?
This is crucial if you want network effects, for two main reasons:
1. You can’t have a network without nodes in the network. A profile page is how you create and identify those nodes.
2. Network effects will start to take off when the profile page itself becomes an asset worth owning.
Many thanks to Andrew Parker and Sara Eshelman for reading drafts and sharing thoughts on this post.
I do not have access to any Clubhouse data, this is conjecture ↩
Chanel Miller said her New Year’s resolution for 2020 was to fail as much as possible.
“Making things that are really crappy and undeveloped until maybe they can be good. I’m way too young to confine myself to one lane and lose the ability to openly experiment.”
This is exactly how a the first draft of a film script develops. Characters and ideas float around in your head, and one day, they’re done with the floating and demand to live on the page. The script gets written, and when you’re done… it’s shitty. It’s embarrassing, you don’t want to show it to anyone, and you wonder how on earth your magical characters and ideas amounted to this pile of doodoo on the page.
But, it’s really important to have this first draft. Because as Miller said, yes, it’s crappy and undeveloped, but you need the crappy and undeveloped to have hope for the good and the great.
Struggling, wrangling, failing, crying, working, pushing forward allows your characters and your story to breathe, thrive, and for the bones to slowly emerge from the pile. Experimenting openly, taking the story in unexpected directions, adding or removing key characters, and messing around with no pressure allows the sparks of creativity that makes the script sing.
Every creator needs that messy time.
The same is true for startup creators. Ideas for a product form in your head over time, sometimes over years. Then one day, you’re ready to put it on the “page” — to code something, to craft something. And it may be a sloppy, messy ball of hair, mud, and hope. Don’t clean it up, polish, and shine it in order to raise money too early.
Love your messy stage, because it is so important to relish that stage. You can only do it once for each startup, and it’s when experimentation, ideation, hanging out, and trying weird things is entirely possible. It’s where ugly is awesome.
At some point, a screenwriter will have to share the script with producers. At some point, you have to share your startup with users and, if you want, with investors. If things go well, they love it, and you build an amazing company. Fantastic.
If you’ve grown your company into a wonderfully world-changing one, it’s worth finding ways to go back to being messy. Get into small groups. Make room for experimentation with ugly, creative things that may fail, because that can lead to new lines of growth. If you have the urge to start again, you could start another company and embrace the new ugly ball of mess. Whatever path you follow, the messy part of creation can be the the best part of creation, and the challenge of it makes your ideas and your company better.
When investors look at companies, one of the things we try to understand is whether the company can build a moat. In tech, a moat is a conscious business design choice that allows a company to develop and maintain a sustained competitive advantage over other players in the space.
Economies of scale and network effects are two of the best-known moats. But there are others—like deep tech, etc. Today, I want to propose a new moat: hardware. I’m talking about products like Peloton, where the hardware is central to having the full experience.
In the wellness space, software solves real problems, and the app ecosystem in these spaces is thriving. These apps help with things like meditation, period tracking, sleep tracking, and exercise of all kinds. But in a crowded market like that, investors ask, “How does a company win?”
Now, when you have “just” apps in these spaces, with no connected hardware, they are fungible. To move from one app to another, you just… click. If you have paid an annual subscription, you might wait until it expires, or you might just eat the cost and try a new app regardless. With these apps, there may be UI differences or instructor differences, but the experience is largely similar. The customer choice is being made based off of relatively small differences.
As my colleagues and I have written, in a software-only space where differences are minimal, a product-led community can be a great moat. Another moat could be sales to enterprises, where a company buys the app/service as a benefit for employees. If you lock up as many companies as possible, very quickly, the employees of those companies become your customers. But this kind of lockup, while valuable, may not be driven by passion or love for the product.
So, a moat that could be longer lasting is hardware. Yes, hardware often scares VCs, because it can be complicated. You need to create processes around mailing things out, dealing with returns, production challenges, and more. There seems to be an endless list of issues.
However, hardware has changed over the past few years, becoming easier to manage than it was 10 years ago. A whole ecosystem of companies has emerged to support hardware companies with many of the logistical issues. And engineers, product people, designers, and marketers who have built and shipped multiple versions of good consumer hardware are available in the market.
In a crowded software market, hardware can be your moat.
The most successful of these companies is Peloton. If you buy a bike (or presumably a Tread), to just get your hardware to turn on, you have to pay Peloton $39 a month for a subscription. And while your parents’ generation ended up using exercise equipment mainly as a clothes horse, these new devices are a joy. They are well-designed, they are connected, they often have community elements, and they have a rich user experience that’s compelling and powerful. So, sure, much like your parents, you could turn your Peloton into a dumping ground for your shorts and t-shirts, but once you’ve bought a device that costs several thousand dollars, the additional monthly pinch of $39 is likely making sure that you are using the device. Their numbers back this up: their S1 claims 95% 12-month retention for those who buy their hardware. Even if it is a bit lower, like some analysts debate, it’s still incredibly strong. Also, just yesterday, agreeing with this point of view, Lululemon bought Mirror, a connected hardware exercise mirror, for $500M.
Photo Credit: Core
It is even better when the hardware gives you unique data. For example, our portfolio company Core provides your Heart Rate, your HRV, your minutes of calm, and your minutes of focus for each session. Because you are holding a device that vibrates to give you a point of focus, and that same device gives you all this data, once you’ve bought a Core, you’re unlikely to want to use anything else to meditate. Same goes for Peloton.
In addition, unlike another apps on your phone, which are all behind the black glass screen, hardware is visible. You can see your Peloton bike in your house, your Core trainer on your desk or bedside table. And by being visible, and by being well-designed, they beckon to you to use them and experience the tactile, live user experience with them. They exist in the real world.
These are still the early days of connected hardware, but between the physical presence, the cost paid to acquire the device (which could be a proxy of customer commitment), the tactile experience, and the data generated, these devices can serve as a moat in crowded software markets. Over the next few years, companies will evolve their model and create fantastic new experiences for consumers. Both as a user and as an investor, I am excited to see where this world goes, and I’m excited to use these beautifully designed products and apps to achieve my goals.
I’m bought into the whole standing and working thing. I don’t do it enough, but sitting hurts my back and I feel better when I stand.
While this is starting to be a fixable problem in the work environment, one place where there is no alternative is the car (or any kind of transport). Why can’t we stand and drive?
Or how about seats like this where you are sit-standing? Even this, would be a huge improvement over the one option we have today.
Cars would get taller, yes. That’s bad for aerodynamics, so the designs would have to change around them.
The only other alternative is where you are almost reclining, like a race car driver – but I’m not sure people want to crawl into their cars.
I hope someone in the car industry is thinking about this as they rework most of the other things about how cars and transportation work.
*Image of standing driver made in Paper by FiftyThree
*Sit-stand seat is the Focal Seat
