Don’t Focus on your Product;
Focus on your Customers Instead
Don’t focus on making your product awesome, instead focus on making your customers awesome. This may seem like a small semantic difference, but what triggers the word-of-mouth snowball is when your customers can impress their friends because of something you enabled. To encourage your customers to spread your product via word-of-mouth, your product should make your customers “badass”.
Try this: Write a fictional product review WITHOUT mentioning your product or company. Write it solely with a focus on what your product allowed your customer to accomplish
The Power of Simplicity
…and the Scarcity of Cognitive Resources
Cognitive resources are scarce and easily depleted. If you present multiple choices to your users early on, they eventually run out of cognitive resources at a later time. Simplify the things that are not important and save the complexity for critical tasks.
Example: A complex registration process can impact the ability of your user to successfully accomplish tasks later on in your workflow (such as payment).
Willpower
Your willpower resources share the same part of the brain as your cognitive resources. By depleting cognitive resources, you are also depleting willpower resources. This theoretically means that if you are selling vices or guilty pleasures, there may be an evil strategy where you purposely deplete your customer’s cognitive resources via complexity in order to weaken their willpower and sell them a guilty pleasure.
The Evils of Gamification
Gamification works only in very narrow verticals and in general will not produce sustainable or desired results. Gamification triggers similar brain functions to those experienced during slot machine use and is not something that promotes long-term loyalty in your customers.
A/B Testing
Start with a Theory and Test it
When running an A/B Test, ALWAYS start with a theory and then use the A/B test to prove or disprove the theory. Don’t run random A/B tests hoping to stumble upon a magical winning combination.
Statistical Significance
Don’t trust your A/B Testing Toll to determine statistical significance. Use this formula instead:
- Define N as the total # of conversions in A + B
- Define D as the difference in # conversions between A and B divided in half
- The test result is statistically significant if D squared is bigger than N.
Thanks to Jason Cohen at WP Engine for this formula
Profit Sharing
Here is the profit sharing strategy that is implemented at Balsamiq.com (circa 2012)
- All employees have a base salary that is better than market value
- 10% of all profits are shared with employees
- 25% (of the 10%) is divided equally among all employees
- 75% (of the 10%) is divided based on seniority (with the more senior employees receiving more)
- Additionally, 2% of all profits are divided equally among employees for them to donate to the charity of their choice
If there are more interactions than this, then you are not spending enough time either understanding the problem or finding the perfect solution for the problem.
Sitting down is Killing You
Sitting down for more than 3 hrs a day decreases your lifespan on average by at least 2 years. Try to stand up and move around for a few minutes at least once every hour, or consider getting a standing desk.
The Question Sales Pitch
If there is a question you can your customers, and you know the answer they will come up with, and it’s a favorable answer, then asking this question is a much more compelling sales pitch than just leading with the answer.
