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- 🤿 idea maze
Have you heard of Granola yet?
I use it in every conversation to take notes and it’s quickly become a Twitter darling (btw I asked them to offer a great discount for you and they agreed 🤑).
But it was a winding journey to get there…
So in this episode their co-founder and designer Sam Stephenson gives a behind-the-scenes of what it was like going 0 → 1 on an AI startup.
Some highlights from my (Granola) notes:
1 — How they identified the right problem to solve
Sam and his cofounder Chris started interviewing people to “fish for problems in their work days”.
The best technique they used was having people walk them through the previous day’s calendar hour by hour.
“Observing what people actually do gives you very different results than asking people what they think they do. This way it’s not idealistic. It’s straight facts.”
Eventually they honed in on the pain of being in back to back meetings and forgetting what you promised to other people.
From there they started experimenting with all kinds of different products and note-taking interactions 👀
2 — When to let go of good ideas
The first tipping point in the Granola journey was Christmas 2022.
They had a simple web app to take notes during meetings where you could type a word, hit tab, and the AI would turn it into a note for you. It looked something like this and was a big part of their fundraising story 👇
If you remember from Become a 10x startup designer, one of the key traits is to be willing to throw away ideas.
Even though this interaction was a big reason why they went all in on Granola, eventually they realized it wasn’t the path forward.
“We tried a long time to make tab auto complete work. The idea behind it felt seductive and very sci-fi. In some ways it still feels cooler than using Granola today”
Sometimes navigating the idea maze successfully means being willing to let go of the ideas you’re most passionate about.
This is a lesson I’m actively learning while designing Inflight 😅
3 — A fresh approach to onboarding
Designers typically group these two goals together:
making a useful product
making it easy to understand
But these are best treated as independent problems when you’re an early stage startup. So Granola focused exclusively on making a useful product and hand-onboarding the first ~150 users on a video call.
When you’re explaining your product 1:1 every single time, it’s easy to get by with unnecessary complexity. So in the early days, they let a lot of their experiments stick around in the product.
“The product was kind of a Frankenstein at this point”
And that was ok! The only thing that matters when you’re focused exclusively on making a useful product is retention.
Only after they confirmed people were continually picking the product back up again did they switch to goal #2.
“We kind of switched modes after it was working to figure out how to get some random person on the internet to start to use it for themselves”
As someone currently designing at a startup this episode was invaluable.
Like out of the 10,000 people who listen to this conversation I might get more out of it than any of them… but I think you’ll really like it too :)
Oh and definitely download Granola if you haven’t already. It’s crazy good.
🤝 WITH RAYCAST
Raycast has a new announcement… but it’s not what you’d expect ☕️
It’s a partnership with Terminal to create Flow coffee. AND they released this beautiful behind-the-scenes video to go with it.
I scooped a bag but not just because I love coffee and the Terminal website is beautiful. The whole thing is a window into what Raycast cares about and stands for as a company.
And their commitment to quality and making things they’re proud of goes way beyond productivity.
And it makes me proud to support them as a company.
So definitely check out the new Terminal collab. You can learn more here 👇
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Dessn → How I ship like a design engineer
Framer → How I build my websites
Genway → How I do research
Jitter → How I animate my designs
Play → How I design mobile apps
Raycast → How I do most things on my computer
Visual Electric → How I generate imagery
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