Carl: Hello and welcome to the SaaS growth podcast. This week. We're here with Phillip Thomas, the founder of the contraption company. Contraption is a product studio with a suite of products, including booklet and postcard. 

We discussed the challenges of running multiple products, as well as how to find ideas for new products and tips for people who want to build communities of their own.

Hope you enjoy.

 how are you today, Philip?

Philip: I am doing well. The new season of Drive to Survive just dropped on Netflix. So I'm 

eagerly awaiting going to watch that this weekend. But things are well. Yeah.

Carl: cool. 

normally when I start these podcasts, I talk about, The product and how people started a product, but you're a bit special. You've got a single person agency, which has several products. 

so I think we'll start on that. So how did you decide to start an agency and create a suite of products?

Philip: Yeah, absolutely. So I call it a product studio. And product studios, I think are somewhere unique and a lot of people are 

experimenting with what it means to me, it's not an agency because it's not trying to focus on client work. It's not a startup because it's not trying to raise a bunch of venture capital for one product.

And. It's not a venture studio because it's not trying to spin out products to be 

separate companies. I see a product studio as a company independent of its products. In some ways it is a product in and of itself, the company. And its goal is to make multiple different revenue generating companies, 

products within it.

And I took this approach because in my last two startups, 

I raised money and took this high growth path. And 

every time as an entrepreneur that a company either shuts down or exits. I feel this, 

emptiness inside of me. Like with my last company, Moonlight, people would introduce me as Philip from Moonlight.

Like I didn't have a last name. Like my last name was my company. And when I sold Moonlight in 2020, it left this opening where I had to figure out what is my new identity and. Around the time I started the contraption company, I wanted to make this product booklet, which is where I spend most of my time today, but I made this decision that the company wouldn't be like eponymously named after the product that I wanted the company to be able to exist, even if the product didn't succeed, because I think that we as entrepreneurs put so much, 

personal identity into our businesses that I didn't feel comfortable pouring my entire identity into an idea stage product yet.

And that is part of this philosophy I have with the contraption company of dependability. I suffer every time a product I love shuts down. I had a banking app I loved last year and they shut it down and that was disruptive to my life and 

my day to day and that happens all the time with products and technology.

system of failing fast and accepting failure means that people tend to fall in love with products that go away. And so I wanted to be able to structure my company in a way where I would continue to operate products, even if they weren't successful. So that's, 

successes means different things.

But to me, I say I'll continue to operate products as long as they have paying customers. 

companies like. Base camp at 37 signals have made similar, 

pledges that inspired this. And, 

at the roots, like, why do you have a product studio separate from the products? Because I decided I definitely want to start another company.

I don't know which product will generate most of the revenue. And I want to be able to lean into this long term nature of the business and building a brand and building these, 

mailing lists and compounding returns without having to go all in on one particular product that may or may not be a success.

Carl: That makes a lot of sense. I've definitely seen a lot of, 

It's in the startup space and I have always thought about these users who 

put their faith in these products and has had them disappear on them and eventually they're forced to migrate off. They might lose data. There's, 

all sorts of costs.

And that's part of why startup struggle is that 

people have to accept these risks and often they're not willing to. 

Philip: I've never shut down a product on a user like that. It just feels so wrong to me that people who believed in you in the early days could just get left behind. With my first company, StaffJoy, when we decided to shut down commercial operations, we open sourced the entire software and I helped all of our customers set it up on their own servers and continue to operate it.

And same thing with Moonlight. We sold that company and. It's still operating today, four years later, and I still help out the owners. It's changed ownership a couple of times, but I really believe that, 

we need to do a better job of the technology industry of 

helping people believe in our products, because I think people won't try products if they think it's just going to go away in the next couple of years.

Carl: let's talk about, you mentioned booklet, your first product with contracting company. 

Can you give a quick rundown of what Booklet is and how it came to be?

Philip: Booklet was not actually the first product for the Contraption Company. I,

Carl: my bad.

Philip: no, it's good. It's, 

the first product I released was called Postcard, which was a desire for me to delete all of my social media and control my digital identity on my own website. And Postcard is a personal website, can host it on your own domain.

It has this newsletter and it 

feels like you take a Facebook profile and just turn it into a website you own. And. I had been thinking about booklets when I started postcard. And as this indie maker, I felt like my inclination was to try to build something that I thought could get to market faster and be easier to sell.

And that's why I started building this personal website builder postcard. 

And what I realized over time is that thinking big is really important. So I originally shied away from working on this booklet idea in the early days because I thought I should have something easier that I can 

focus on selling and postcard has, 

paying customers and is doing decently, but it's not experiencing that like hockey stick growth, like a traditional sass company.

And so I've returned to working most of the time on booklets. And so the idea behind booklet is it's an asynchronous community platform as an alternative to chat. I hate Slack and Discord so much. I, in previous companies, have just felt like my job was following a news feed of Slack messages all day, every day.

Previous roles, I've been in Slack workspaces with over a hundred channels and just keeping up with all of the messages is insane. And Discord is really good for real time gaming when you need to talk about things in real time. But we're in an age of knowledge work when Intensity of focus and concentration is where economic value is created.

And in order to concentrate and write code, make designs, write copy for landing pages, anything you need to do, you really need to focus and enter, 

a deep work flow state and real time back and forth chatting is not the way to do that. 

So booklet arose from this desire for me to make communications more asynchronous and long form and 

I launched it about three months ago and it's been doing well.

I've 

taken this product led growth strategy where it is free to use. I listened to a bunch of people that have used Slack for their communities and there's no per user pricing, which seems to be a massive problem on Slack where there's people who just want to set up Slack. But some of these communities would have to pay a hundred thousand dollars per year to turn on a paid mode on Slack.

And that's the only option. 

and my vision for booklet is that it. It makes communications more long form, intentional, and asynchronous. I think of communication as 

falling into two buckets. There's urgent communication, and there's important communication. And Slack chat does a really good job for urgent communication.

Like the server is broken right now, or I have a question for you right now. But I think most communication within companies should fall more into the importance category, which is, it doesn't need to happen right away. Instead, I need you to stop and think for 20 or 30 minutes and write a thoughtful 

response 

or internalize this information.

Example there, and I think these past companies I've worked at that were larger, 

the head of engineering couldn't follow slack because they were too busy doing their job. But also if they had an important announcement to make, it would just get lost in slack. It was interesting to see people have to revert to email and then post a slack message saying, check your email because no one was checking email all because.

Slack is just not built for this important long form communications, like CEOs can't announce Q4 plans in a Slack message. We need something different for more important communication. 

Booklet has started with free communities and kind of hobbyist usage. This is something you'll see with a lot of product led growth companies and communication products.

And it's slowly moving closer and closer to like core work usage where companies are using it. For multi time zone communications. And this all kind of comes back to my last company, Moonlight was really focused on remote work. And I think the next horizon after remote work is asynchronous work. And I really hope that booklet can help companies make this move towards being time zone, independence, asynchronous in how they work and promoting deep work and flow States for knowledge workers.

Carl: Yeah, it's, I've definitely experienced some of the issues you've described with Slack. So like my last job, it was quite a relatively small company. There's only about 10, 15 engineers. And it was just, even with that sort of really low quality of messages coming through. 

was really easy to lose things in slack and, 

if you post at the wrong time, if there's something else happening in the channel, it just gets lost off the top and you just miss things constantly.

So I'm curious as to how you've tackled that, because 

as a person, on a personal level, how you've achieved more async communication where you've managed to separate this urgent from important.

Philip: yeah, 

that's a good question. I think one of the core design choices of booklet is a lack of real time notifications. So the way it works by default is it has a newsletter and it takes all of the posts, all of the replies and by default 

creates this email newsletter. uses a bunch of open AI technologies under the hood to make it happen.

But you just get a newsletter summarizing all new posts, all new replies, new members, discussions, and opening. I did a really good job of writing the subject line and everything within it. And that original pattern was inspired by my previous company, moonlight. So moonlight was a developer marketplace and.

We had a Slack community that was really core to our business. And what we would do is every week we would write a weekly email newsletter, 

manually writing a subject line, writing introductions, writing in all this content. And that email newsletter was the core growth tool for our entire company. We had sometimes between six and 10 times as many like daily active newsletter readers as website users on Moonlight.

And it really made me realize how much. You need to structure communication to be easily read, not just easily written. And I think that chat is one of these things that is really easy to send a message, but it's difficult to read a message. And it comes back to 

like writing. I think Amazon with PowerPoints is a really good analogy where PowerPoints are really easy.

You can give a presentation, but the information density and thoughtfulness isn't there. And so Amazon famously requires memos, historically six page memos, and they banned PowerPoints and they said, you must have memos and they start meetings by silently reading the memos and the information density and thoughtfulness that goes in is so much more.

Favorable to the reader because the reader can really think through things and it doesn't depend on kind of the presentation of the slideshows and things and. 

I think that there's an analogy here with Booklet, which is chat is close to 

a Facebook news feed within companies. We need to make communications more good for the reader and easier for the reader to consume.

And that means that instead of encouraging these text message length, 

posts, we need to 

encourage long form writing that's thoughtful because that long form writing is way more friendly to the readers. And 

that's the really core design choice within Booklet. It is harder to post on booklet, and that is an intentional design choice.

The pattern with communication technologies over time is that the easier it gets to communicate, the more often people communicate. And 

When IBM rolled out email instead of physical memos, they saw 

the number of emails was about five or six times the number of memos being sent within a few days, making communication easier, increased communication, and Slack makes communication even easier than email.

You see this when people send a thought spread out over multiple messages and think a little bit, send some fragments. And the result is that it's easy to send, but it's a terrible reading experience. It distracts the readers. And so making it harder to post, I think is okay. I think it's better to put more, 

have 

the writer have to be more intentional about the communications.

And that's what I say is. The kind of core booklet is, it's a slow communication platform. Slowing things down makes it more intentional and it makes it easier to read.

Carl: You've done quite a lot of work around the sort of community products, and so what do you think the value of building these communities is, especially for a business like yourself and people who need to manage these communities.

Philip: I think that people crave connection. 

With remote work, 

there's been a decoupling of 

professional work communities and 

people's social lives. In the past, when you went to an office, you worked around other people, you had a meeting with some people, walking into the meeting, you were chatting about personal lives, you could lunch with people.

if you had, 

structured time when you would maybe talk about, 

professional development, you had unstructured time when you would go out for a coffee and kind of talk through problems. And in some ways, I think the community is a bit of decoupling of work and social. I think that it's not the entire replacement, 

but I think that the internet opens up this ability to connect with people who are like minded and So much of community, I think, is about 

people's identities in some ways.

If we think about 

a sub stack, 

if you subscribe to an industry sub stack, call it, 

Like a product management sub stack. You're not just trying to get a newspaper and read it. It's actually like a deeper fundamental change within you, which is I am a product manager. I am subscribing to this to learn about my industry and to connect with like minded people.

And I think that everybody who has a subscription or membership, 

business should realize that there's a deeper connection that people want to have. Like they don't just want to consume the content. They want to participate. A little bit. And they may not want to participate all the time, right? 

this isn't necessarily, 

group talk shows all the time, but 

you're creating this group of people who have shared interests and want to discuss things and help each other professionally because they're in similar stages in life, or they're finding people who are one stage ahead or one stage behind them and can offer, receive meaningful advice.

And. 

with the flattening of the internet, it's much easier to find people, 

in niche communities. I like coffee and fountain pens and things like that. And with the internet, I can connect with communities around that. And I 

think that this also has to do with, 

an unbundling of social media. I think Facebook was the first and last big social network.

I don't think we'll ever have another social network as big as Facebook. Big and monolithic as Facebook, I think that we're going to see social networks unbundling and becoming more niche and trust based. 

And this trend, I think, plays into that, which is in the past where you may have had, 

a Facebook group for product managers or something like that.

I think now people are 

trying to take ownership of that infrastructure and host it themselves and make their own intentional decisions. And that unbundling is also allowing people to use software particular to their community. If you're a video gamer, discord works really well for video gamers because it's urgent real time communication.

That's what the platform is built for. But if you're trying to make a global product management. Community long form communication that is slow and requires low attention is where a lot of the value comes from not high urgency. And so that's where I think the community aspect is important here is people are creating social connection.

They're working from home. They're participating in businesses online seeking to make it part of their identity. It's not just a consumption. It's a participation that they desire. 

The unbundling of social networks means that people are seeking places to participate online that are no longer just the monolithic Facebook.

Carl: Let's 

move towards this more decentralized and, 

small communities and especially like remote work, and there's an almost growing need to 

create these connections. 

have you got any tips for companies that are doing remote work and want to move async or just how to manage 

their cultures, their communities, their way of working?

Philip: Yeah, 

that's a good question. 

I think that part of the craziness of Slack and the pattern of over communication in chat is a sign of a deeper disorganization within these companies. Peter Drucker, the great management, 

academic. said that knowledge workers need freedom, that you should 

get smart people and let them do their own work.

And I think we misinterpreted that freedom in a way where we have ended up with these technology companies where. The managers tend to push down decision making. They 

set these high level objectives. Like we want to increase revenue, everyone, 

VPs, directors, you 

figure out how to do it.

And the result of that has been 

people are unclear on what to work on. So people had freedom on what to work on, 

but they created this consensus culture that really slowed down technology companies. So when a CEO says we need to increase revenue, everyone 

figure out how to do it. And make it happen.

What you end up with is people being unclear on what to work on day to day and spending a lot of time discussing things and going back and forth. 

And I think 

that's 

partly an issue with the role of management within technology companies, where they have become more of facilitators. Rather than leaders making decisions.

So that's 

set stage. Like I think technology companies have basically had these, had a, the leadership at the top, make the fewest decisions and try to push down decisions. And it's created just chaos and back and forth communication and people chatting back and forth on Slack is just trying to align on what should they work on next?

Why are they doing this? What should happen next? I think the future is closer to Airbnb, where Brian Chesky, as the pandemic was hitting, saw an existential threat to Airbnb, that no one is going to rent vacation rentals during COVID. And he took it as a time to rebuild the company, and he Brought in Johnny Ive, formerly of Apple, to help rebuild their management culture.

And he changed Airbnb to centralize all decision making to him. So he personally picks everything the company works on and tells everybody what to do. I don't remember the exact specifics, but he picks a couple of things. Every six months, he. Tells every division what to work on. And he centralized, for instance, marketing, he went from having multiple different marketing departments operating autonomously to one marketing department that reported to him.

And I think that in an asynchronous team. That works far better 

and coming back to Peter Drucker's idea of freedom for knowledge workers. We were giving people freedom of what to work on and pushing down decision making, but with autonomous or remote teams, I think it's better to have freedom of how to work rather than freedom of what to work on.

I think that individual contributors and technology companies would be far happier if they were being told clearly what they're working on and what they're working on next, and 

that would create much more efficiency within these technology companies. 

So coming back to the communication that also plays into Slack versus something like booklet, something in Slack is all about peer to peer-to-peer communication and discussion and trying to figure things out.

Whereas important communication is about making decisions and telling people, this is what we're working on. These are the feature sets. Figure out next steps.

Carl: It does make a lot of sense. 

I've worked in companies where you have people based all over the world, right? And it's something you're worried, you're always worried about with asynchronous and these sort of shifted time zones. 

is just how long your communication cycles become. So 

if you try to get consensus and feedback from everyone, it can take 12 hours for a single message.

And so it does make a lot of sense that 

to improve that sort of experience, you want to reduce the amount of communication and communicate more at once. And 

and basically, yeah, cut communication is the best way.

Philip: I think Amazon has been a ruthlessly efficient and productive company because of the way they make decisions.

They have a policy internally called one yes, instead of one no, which means all you need is one director to agree to something to then make it happen. It doesn't have to work its way up the decision chain. Whereas I've been at companies where. I make a proposal, it goes to my 

manager thinks about it, makes some revisions and takes it to his manager, makes some revisions, thinks about it, takes it to their manager, and then eventually it gets presented to the executive committee, and everyone in the executive committee hears.

The proposal and you get a message from the CEO saying, looks great, excited to work on this. But one executive says, 

this is going to be hard for me. I don't want to do it. And the entire thing comes to a stop. And you spend weeks just trying to get that one executive on board. And that is inefficient decision making.

And that does not work within remote teams. Amazon has figured out one way to do it. Airbnb has figured out one way to do it. But I think that making decisions quickly. is the best way to speed up technology company progress right now.

Carl: Looping back to the contraption company and your suite of products. 

How are you going about deciding what to work on next and whether it's worth adding a new product?

Philip: I think the contraption company will get most of its revenue from one product. 

So in the future, if you come back in 10 years, I think there's a good chance I'll say, yeah, the contraption company is pretty much one product, but there are some other things floating around in the background. 

That being said, I do think it's really nice to have this flexibility to pursue different ideas.

When you raise venture capital, you make this. implicit promise to work on one thing and only one thing. And the fun of this product studio model is that I can kind of experiment. One example there is Fractional. So F R C T N L fractional. xyz is a community for part time technology workers. And I built it to test booklet actually.

So it's pretty similar to my last company, Moonlight. I was inspired by Moonlight. And thinking, 

what would Moonlight look like if it was built in this year? And I said, Oh, I want to try launching a community for part time tech workers. And I launched it to test Booklet before Booklet was even launched.

Booklet did not have a website. No one knew about it. But I launched Fractional as the first Booklet community. And That has been 

a product within the contraption company. In fact, last month, it was my highest revenue product. 

And I didn't expect that when I launched it. It is making some revenue through referral links for accounting.

And 

that is an example where Fractional and Booklet are complementary products. 

And 

Fractional is revenue generating in a way I didn't expect it to be. I thought it was an experiment. And I like this product studio model for being able to create things that could be experiments. And even if they fail, it can still build, even if they fail commercially, meaning I don't continue to double down on it and put a bunch of time into it for the future.

It can still boost my overall contraption company business and it can be a form of marketing where It can be like a micro site almost that I can share and promote things because at the core, 

I'm a builder. I code all of the contraption company products myself and being able to code and build new things as an experiment is to me fun.

And this product studio model allows me to keep building and follow some inspiration. And I think you have to balance that. I don't wake up in the morning and say, what do I feel like doing today? And just do that. I am very intentional about my time. I put a lot of time into planning and organizing and being intentional with where my efforts go.

But I do also think that we need to, within work, 

have a mix of like focused and play time. I've been really enjoying the book that Ali Abdaal just released about feel good productivity. And a lot of feel good productivity emphasizes the idea of play. And I think that sometimes companies can feel too serious where you're 

fun and exploration time needs to happen outside of the company.

But I've built that ability to 

take a sundae and just act together on something fun and just play with it into the company. And I think that's what's really fun and special. Like Monday through Friday, I'm super serious, but on Saturday morning, if I want to make a community for friends or just a little microsite, I can.

And I think that making sure that our companies don't feel like you can't have fun in them is important. And that's what the product studio enables me to do. I buy domains all the time. I come up with ideas all the time, and a lot of those ideas don't see the light of day, and that's okay. Because to me, it's a form of creativity and fun and play that doesn't cannibalize my day to day work.

I'm still ruthlessly focused on 

coding and booklet and some of these core projects. But my fun and exploratory time doesn't have to be outside of the company. It can be part of it.

Carl: Yeah, 

I was going to say that, 

something that sticks out to me is running a suite of products, even if they're small and relatively hands off, is that you do need to split your focus and how you manage that. But it sounds like the way you do that, as you just have this very intentional, here's focusing on my products times, and here's how I explore, here's when I explore new products.

So it's interesting to hear that 

you do have a lot of, a graveyard, 

of all these unreleased products. 

it's fairly typical of a builder, right? We all start stuff and then, 

you get, you do your 80 percent and you're like, I don't, 

I've had my fun. 

I don't want to do the extra work.

so yeah, 

I was going to say though, like, how do you envisage 

your time, especially as your suite of product grows and you start adding to it, especially because you're committed to never 

discontinuing? 

Philip: that's a good question. 

I 

don't intend to grow the number of products linearly over time. 

I think that 

every product I build. I think it could be my last product I build within the contraption company. 

And I feel like that about booklet right now, where I have nothing sequenced after booklet right now, but perhaps someday I will, 

if it's not a commercial success and I feel like I've reached the end of the road on it, I'll move on to something else.

And that kind of comes back to what I was saying earlier, which is. I don't just work based on my daily inspiration or motivation. Like I'm very intentional about how I approach this business. And my intention is not necessarily to launch a lot of different products. 

That being said, the nature of software is that it has high upfront costs and low marginal costs.

And it's 

closer to a book in some ways than like a manufactured product where so much of the work is upfront that maintaining it is. 

If there are costs associated with it, but it's pretty negligible. Like 

you can build some software and run it and not touch it for years. And it's, 

still going to typically function.

So 

answering your question, I don't intend to grow the number of products and contraption company. But I have the ability to do it where I treat every product as if it's my last product. But if it's not commercially successful, I'd also don't have to shut it down. And I still maintain this contraption company brand as a through line.

Carl: Do you have any advice for other builders and other people like yourself who are just experimenting and creating several ideas at once and how they might, 

just 

any tips for them in building businesses around their software?

Philip: It's really depends on the stage, but at the core of it, I think is 

thinking big and not giving up when things get hard and setting up the systems so that you're able to do that.

I think that coming up with something unique becomes much easier to market. I'm using my example of postcard as a website builder versus booklet as an entirely new asynchronous communication methodology. I think that thinking of something unique is 

harder, 

but it creates more opportunities for creativity because you can 

do more first principles thinking.

If you create something that feels super familiar to people, they come in and say, Oh, this looks like. Something I already know, I want you to build all of these things that already exist. And at that point, your ability to be very creative on it is lower. Your ability to differentiate is lower. I think that it's good to think of something that feels unique and new to you, because you can differentiate the product, which will help it go to market.

And 

The other piece of advice here is I talked about how I don't just follow my inspiration every day when I wake up. I don't wake up and say, what do I want to do today? 

And that's important because every project at some point You realize it's harder than you thought it was going to be. Every software company, every business.

I think if you read a lot of founder books too, 

by the time someone's writing a book or going on, 

late stage podcasts, they're saying, I wish I didn't work as hard. 

I think that lifestyle is important, but if you rewind history, most people really. I do work through significant challenges to make their businesses work.

And I think that's the danger of kind of the indie product studio approach is that every product worth working on will get hard at some point and you need to structure 

your expectations and the company. So that you can continue working through those difficult products, and that's probably why the venture capital model works in some way as you 

associate your identity really closely with one product, you raise money very specifically for one product, and you make it really painful to stop working on that one product, which pushes you through these 

periods of difficulty.

And so 

Perhaps my kind of message for people that are interested in making their own products is if things start to get really hard, 

it might be worth, it's normally worth pushing through. 

no really good business didn't encounter a hard point. Knowing when to stop is definitely a challenge. The other piece of recommendation here is work on the hardest things you can for your business.

There's always going to be 

fluffy, easy things you can build. 

should we do the password reset flow? Or make the settings page layout cleaner. But I definitely recommend, especially for early stage companies, focus on the hardest things, building that feature that customers are asking for that you're, you don't want to commit to redoing the onboarding flows that are not working correctly, or, 

completely rebuilding notification infrastructure, taking on an ambiguous project, 

push notifications or something like that.

Carl: I want to look back to that idea of uniqueness and 

create a unique company because I feel like this is an area that a lot of would be founders or even early stage companies. They fall into traps here where they're trying to be almost too unique because there's obviously like a balance between a completely new idea and difficulty of selling a new idea versus a more established idea people are familiar with and know the value of and

Philip: Yeah.

Carl: certainly in the case of booklet you do have a good sort of merge of both where you have this existing suite of products everyone knows they have a basis to work off and then you've twisted it you're like now we've fixed a problem within that community.

Okay. So I am curious as to what you think, or how unique, 

people need to be and 

thoughts on that.

Philip: Absolutely. 

The only thing that matters is making a product that somebody wants. 

I address that by building a product that I want. Booklet was really inspired by Moonlight. It was the product I wish I had for Moonlight. We were writing newsletters by hand. I had spec'd it out as a feature and just never built it.

And so my advice for these entrepreneurs is 

You have to be building a product for somebody. You create a unique product that nobody wants, that's not a good start. 

You need to build also something that people really intensely love. I think that building something that a thousand people 

somewhat 

is far worse than building something that ten people absolutely love.

And that's a difficult thing to manage and navigate, but on the uniqueness front, 

it's a good sign if 

People use your product, really love it, and you're struggling to 

explain it to other people 

because that means you're solving a problem and trying to explain how you're solving a problem in a new way.

If you've stumbled upon a problem worth solving, you'll figure out how to navigate the marketing. But 

it's definitely a danger if you've created something unique and you're not solving a problem. So just always make sure you're coming back to. Yeah, it's worky. It might be unique, but at the core, is it solving a real problem?

And as long as you can articulate that problem and the people who have that problem can 

understand it and use it, you can simplify over time. You don't get to the short marketing quickly. You start with long marketing. You start with a long Google doc explaining the product. You shorten it to, 

Call that you have with someone and explain the product through a deck.

And then from there you get it shorter to an email where you 

explain things, and then from there you get to 

the one line on the website that really articulates it. And I think 

that's 

a pattern I would recommend for products that are complex or unique is. 

Work on explaining it in a long form and progressively shortened over time.

And as long as people understand the long form, then you can get better at explaining it with less attention. But you should be able to explain a complex or unique product given enough time from people. And 

that's the danger if you can't do it. If you have your ideal customer in front of you and 30 minutes to talk through, 

that means you might not be solving a problem that they have.

But elevator pitches, website copy, that's all downstream of solving that problem.

Carl: So I've run through What I want to talk about. 

is there anything you want to loop back on? Anything you want me to ask you? And we can talk about that. 

Any burning ideas that we haven't managed to bring out yet?

Philip: So your background is in onboarding, things like that, right?

I'd love to get your opinion on what is the right level of onboarding. Because with something like Booklet, 

I need to focus more on onboarding, right? I focused a lot on product led growth and making the experience really smooth after you have a community 

set up. And one of the things I'm not sure about is, do you think it's better to just drop people into the product and make it really easy to navigate?

Or do you think some of these long, multi screen, upload a list, do this, configure this flows are better? Like, how do you think that people should navigate picking between dropping into the product versus having a long setup flow?

Carl: in an ideal world, people would just self teach, so you would love to drop them in and have them work it out, because if people work it out for themselves, it sticks better, and they remember it more, right? 

that's really the downside of these long form ones, and you've probably experienced in the past, you'd get like a user tour, you 

click through it, and you might quickly read it, and it's just in one or out the other, and that happens a lot.

Because when people are in these apps, they don't actually care about 

the onboarding. They just want to get to the offering, the value, right? 

onboarding can often get in the way of that. So what you really want to do is try and get them, 

trim your onboarding to the point where it's 

here's what you wanted to do anyway.

Let me help you do that. And, 

if there's more they need to do, you 

guide them towards those areas. So you 

this mix of like self discovery and 

Sort of pointing them where to go next. 

Philip: Yeah.

Carl: but for the most part, like you definitely want to err on the side of that 

teaching themselves, cause it is more effective, but you need, but you also need to help them, right? 

I like to say a lot, I was, 

yeah, in context links, but like knowledge bases are amazing. We just have this long form explanation of what the hell's going on, but they use the link to it all over the place and through your application. So people, when they get stuck, they're like, okay. I don't understand this and you go, 

I've actually got this explanation of exactly this right here and yeah, that's really helpful for people because they care at that

Philip: I feel like 

I see that developer focused products, but a ton of effort into documentation and knowledge bases. But I've noticed that a lot of super user products don't put as much effort in like superhuman is a good example of a product that is our user focused. People know keyboard shortcuts and all of these things, but they don't have a lot of documentation.

what do you think is? the right level of documentation for early stage products. And are there benefits that people can expect like SEO from them? Or do you think the really core benefit is really just rewarding these users who want to learn more about the product? 

Cause I'm trying to decide how much effort to put into the booklet docs right now.

I have them and I'm not sure, 

should I go and record? videos for every single feature and say, this is exactly how it works with a walkthrough or just 

keeping it up to date with documentation.

Carl: screen caps, usually better. The issue with videos is that first off, you don't have SEO and it's not searchable. 

and it's terrible as reference. So if I want to go back to it later, I have to find the timestamp of the video for the bit I care about. So walkthroughs are great as like a high level.

Especially as marketing material, so something you might show on your website and be like, here's me doing this really easy flow or like this core flow. So people get a sense of how hard it is, 

but for the actual documentation to screen caps, actually run through that way. But,

Philip: I like that.

Carl: in terms of 

whether or not the sort of super user side of things a bit trickier because they're people who need to get 

really deeply ingrained in your product.

and often you, with keyboard shortcuts, you just want to follow established standards as much as humanly possible. 

so people can 

again, there's this discovery process. 

and then you'll often have a, you'll usually see a guide to keyboard shortcuts somewhere. 

there'll be a page, maybe it just lists all the shortcuts.

But it's not the sort of thing you want to, because you can't. 

enumerate them within your application because it's just you use all your screen retail like it's not important information they're not trying to use these the stuff that they're trying to achieve a task 

Thanks. This is what I'm working on next. So it's useful to get your feedback.

 Thanks for coming today. It's been a great chatting.

Philip: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. It was fun.

Carl: That was Phillip Thomas, the founder of the contraption company. If you want to learn more about the contraption Company, you can find that at contraption.co. You can also find booklet at booklet.group. 

Thank you for listening and see you next week.