When I joined Microsoft in 2000 working on Visual Studio the vision was always to remove the barriers that stood between the people with the vision and the output.
Meaning.. ideally you wouldn’t need to know C++ to make cool things. You could have a vision for a cool thing and work with simpler tools to make it real.
It’s getting closer to that vision now.
OpenAi was not the first at creating AI personas. But they’ve done it best so far.
The future will be personas paired with knowledge workers optimized for specific tasks in daily workflows.
The job of the worker will be fact checking, refining, and doing the most fun parts of the work.
Meanwhile the paired AI will be refined on feedback from each output and business results.
Going to try and start small, today, and prioritize a few things.
Next two videos recorded for the KickoffLabs series on Startup Validation: www.youtube.com/playlist
Two more “training” sessions for the KickoffLabs AI features. Which, at this point, are a workflow on contentspark.ai with cut/paste into KickoffLabs for customers.
Experiment with some much needed editor UX work inside of KicoffLabs to make it easier for people to edit landing pages.
If time permits, later, update @contentspark.ai to support customizable prompt inputs. Which will help with #2 above. :)
Some people think #AI is overhyped and that AI products are going to crash hard.
Knowledge workers, developers, lawyers, etc will learn to work with AI or lose jobs. That’s already happening. Just ask the Hollywood writers.
We’re on the cusp of developing new ways to work with this alternative form of intelligence. There will be a lot of displacement as companies figure out what that means, but the surface has only been scratched to date.
I’ve talked to a lot of small startup founders and ALL OF THEM have already figured out a way to save money with AI (replace cheap knowledge work) or expand their product (add-ons that help customers inside the service).
This isn’t going to stop. They’re just starting and the trends are going to hit big companies soon.
Am I biassed because I’m developing contentspark.ai
Sure. It could flop. But worst case I’ll be figuring out what the new work models are and how to work better with the new tools AI put’s in your backpack.
Good read if you run, or are thinking about running, a SAAS business. Things that rang true:
Prepare yourself for Zero click marketing. Clicks and attribution are going away FAST.
The economy is weird right now and it’s effecting everything.
Word of mouth is becoming more important.
Doing features that Sell VS Gel can both be good.
Someone was told that video games cost money and now KickoffLabs has a summer intern. :) He’s completed the editing, production, and publishing of the last 6 videos on our YouTube channel with Descript so far.
Tomorrow he wants to create new thumbnail templates for our videos because ours are “boring”. So I’m going to set him loose with Canva.
Tesla really missed the branding on all their driver assist and autopilot features by calling it “full self driving” today and it gets a lot of hate it doesn’t deserve.
No. It can’t fully drive itself in thr city of Seattle. But it drives a lot better than the woman staring at her phone going through the stop sign in a giant Cadillac SUV that almost ran me over running Tuesday.
In fact the Tesla FSD won’t even let you look at your phone if the car is moving. It yells at you and pulls over pretty quickly if you don’t keep your eyes on the road.
I’d rather everyone have that feature than not.
I’ve been enjoying Mastodon so far, but I agree with this article’s warnings:
I think the solution needs to be some sort of mixed mode, subscription-based, not-for-profit semi-centralization.
Yes - that’s a mouthful, but imagine wiki-pedia-like foundation with centralized servers that offers some form of feature enhancements for subscribed users that would get enough of them to pay in order to pay the bills.
An approach like this could solve many of the issues from the article, but the leaders at Mastadon seem reluctant to do it.
I’d like to think BlueSky would head down this path… but it’s tough to trust the founder/source of BlueSky to do anything beyond a profit motive.
We should build a museum to honor billionaires in DC. A “Capitalism hall of fame” if you will. Have an annual ceremony where we give them a medal and a plaque that people can see on tour at the museum. We celebrate their “winning” the game of capitalism.
“Congrats - you won the game! Here’s a plaque that can be celebrated for eternity. Oh - just one more thing…”
“Now you are going to be heavily taxed. Very fairly, but differently from everyone else since traditional tax laws didn’t previously include you. The taxes will help pay for health care and education so that others can play and, per chance, win the game. It’s clear you were just going to use the money to fuck with everyone else anyway.”
There’s all sorts of crap that, while totally believable, is still grating to anyone with good sensibilities in the social media algorithms. If you thought they were bad… it’s worse.
KickoffLabs is a versatile platform designed for creating and managing landing pages, lead generation, and email marketing campaigns. A good use for the product is to launch and promote a new product, service, or event by leveraging its various features. Here are some scenarios where KickoffLabs can be highly beneficial:
Product Launch: Use KickoffLabs to create a pre-launch landing page that captures email addresses and generates buzz. The platform can help you design an engaging and responsive landing page with its easy-to-use templates and customization options.
Event Promotion: If you’re organizing an event, like a webinar, conference, or workshop, KickoffLabs can help you create a dedicated landing page to capture sign-ups and provide information about the event. The platform also has built-in email marketing tools for sending reminders and follow-ups.
Content Upgrades: If you have a blog or content-driven website, you can use KickoffLabs to offer content upgrades like e-books, checklists, or templates in exchange for email addresses. This helps grow your email list and nurture your audience.
Online Course Launch: Use KickoffLabs to create a landing page for your online course or educational program, showcasing its benefits and capturing sign-ups from interested students.
Referral Marketing: KickoffLabs has a built-in referral system that allows you to create and manage referral campaigns. This can be useful for encouraging word-of-mouth marketing and rewarding customers who share your product or service with their networks.
Waitlist Management: If you have a limited availability product or service, you can use KickoffLabs to create a waitlist landing page, allowing potential customers to sign up and be notified when the product becomes available.
A/B Testing: KickoffLabs allows you to conduct A/B testing on your landing pages to optimize conversion rates and find the most effective design and copy.
Overall, KickoffLabs is an excellent tool for businesses and marketers looking to generate leads, grow their email lists, and launch new products or services in a streamlined and effective manner.
It’s trendy for people to attack the use of ChatGPT copywriting, but I believe there are very legitimate uses for it. I love the branding Microsoft is using for it’s AI additions. I think “Copilot” is the sweetspot. Hell - it would have been a better name for Tesla’s fraudulent “Full Self Drive,” but that’s a different post entirely. :)
It can give you keywords for actual research. Yes - it’s been shown that ChatGPT can just dream up research papers and statistics it thinks make sense. However, a core problem people have when learning about a topic is not even knowing what keywords to search google for.
You can just ask ChatGPT for an overview of the topic and you’ll get a reply with all sorts of relevant topic-related keywords you can use for actual research.
Some people are terrible writers. They can feed it a post and have correct spelling, grammar, and even the content structure to make it sound more professional like it does in their heads. You can feed it your post and have it, correct, update, and even rewrite entire parts of it.
You can change the tone. Give it some text and ask it to make the tone more cheerful or analytical or anything else that would be more welcoming to your audience.
Progress beats writer’s block. A blank page is just a ball of anxiety and stress for some people that don’t even know where to start. Progress begets progress, even if the first step is saying “Hey - write a sales email that pitches our latest release with a focus on speed to software developers.”
What you get back won’t be a good pitch. It doesn’t know anything about your product or your customers. But it’s progress and I’ve found that progress makes you feel like you can then take the next step and rewrite it for your needs instead of staring at a blank page for, what feels like hours.
Sometimes, an article’s genius comes from the idea and outline. You can feed it an outline and get a professional-sounding representation of the idea you gave it that’s more readable to others.
Apparently, my son knew this day would come in 1st grade when he was asked to design a robot that would do things he didn’t want to do. So he imagined a “home work” robot. :)
Now his middle school teachers have to tell the kids that ChatGPT papers are not acceptable and remind them it’s not really learning the topic or (more importantly) how to have an informed opinion on a topic. :)
Consider ignoring this old man as he yells at his lawn…
Does anyone have any magic bullets to sell people? That would be way easier. I imagine email service providers get this:
Customer: Hey - why don’t people open my emails. How can you fix your service?
ESP: Here are some tips on writing better subject lines, pruning your list, and ideas you could use to engage your audience.
C: Yes - but what if you switched servers for me?
ESP: We could do that, but it’s not why people aren’t opening your emails. Mind sharing an example email you don’t think performed.
C: <Sends over a terrible email that’s just shouting at their customers about a sale>
ESP: Here’s a better way to approach that instead (sends good examples)
C: Sure - but what if we switched email templates instead with the same copy? I think the email template is bad and that it is causing the performance issues.
No one wants to do the work. Learn something. Try new things. Talk to customers. Find out what copy works. etc.
which is why Chat GPT (and alike) will be better than most people at tasks that should be core competencies.
Ok - I’m more than a couple hours into this. I do product demos all the time, but condensing it down to a single < 5 (and ideally less than 3) minute home page video is time-consuming.
What do you think about what I have so far?
KickoffLabs is an amazing audience growth platform that supports you and scales with your company.
Here are just a few examples of how we help customers every day.
B to C companies run bonus entry sweepstakes that turn existing customers into influencers with fun giveaways and contest marketing encouraging referrals.
Startups and established brands build excitement around new product launches with Kickofflabs using viral waitlists where leads move up in line for early access with updated mechanics based on the launch of Robinhood.
Milestone reward campaigns were made popular by the launch of Harry’s razor. Still, the basic psychology works for growing almost any list where by customers can unlock rewards for reaching referral counts or total points earned through contest actions like following, liking or promoting your content online.
You can also use KickoffLabs for: Every day lead capture forms with optional coupon or digital download delivery. Learning more about your customers with a voting competition or asking them questions.
Finally, there campaigns designed for growing specific social channels or verticals, like Kickstarter launches and subscription boxes.
As a platform, Kickofflabs is flexible for your brand. You can customize the scoring mechanics for referrals, points earned through contest actions, both referrals & points, or no scoring for just basic lead capture.
We have a library of over 50 contest actions, can track purchases made, and even reward custom events from your site or application, like taking a survey or attending a demo.
You can run the campaign with our drag-and-drop landing page templates, pop-ups, and page embeds, or even just use our campaign Script or API to turn Any existing form into an engagement opportunity with 100% your own designs… even if it was built on another landing page service!
In Addition To Platform Flexibility
Every campaign is mobile responsive. We can store your leads as a lightweight CRM You get insights into how referrals are going and what actions your leads take Leads can be sent emails on signup or scoring milestones We can ensure the leads you collect are valid with multiple levels of automatic fraud detection mechanisms, like ensuring unique IP addresses, captcha, email, and phone number verifications.
KickoffLabs is supported and scalable. Any good technology will be copied, but our goal is to support you through the process with professional 1:1 onboarding and proven scale to meet the needs of fortune 500 companies if that sounds like something you need.
Signup for a free account now and kick the tires. We don’t require a credit card to get started. You can also learn more on our site at KickoffLabs.com.
Got a windows laptop as a gaming/school PC for my oldest. First time in windows seriously for years for me. I have some thoughts.
I got well reviewed medium/high end hardware and I like the aesthetics. Asus Rog 14
14” is a great size for what my son needs and it’s not a monster at under 4lbs.
The trackpad experience is trash compared to MacBooks that cost less. It feels terrible and even with the touch sensitivity turned way down I can’t scroll without two finger right clicking.
The fact a touchpad has a right click is just evil since you can’t physically see/feel it.
Logging into windows defaults to using your Microsoft account. Ok… but it takes 5 seconds to load the login and another 5-10 to verify you. Does this stuff not come up in performance testing as lag?
The parental experience is also rubbish. Can’t share a Game Pass account with your family. Each one is told they have to buy their own games. Kids accidentally bought Minecraft for a 3rd time. Maybe that’s the point? It’s not even a higher priced option to share GamePass.
Found a hack that said you can log into the windows store with the main account under your kids log-in.
Lost an hour with that edge case. When I go to log in to the store it asks for my “security pin”. It says my pin is wrong. Go back and forth for a while until you realize it wants your kids security pin… but it’s clearly asking for yours. The kids pin worked… while it asked for mine. No one has really tested this experience.
The screen on this thing is great.
Windows 11 has a pleasant look, but OMG some of the icons look like they were ripped straight fro95 and scream like Mick Jagger asking you to start him up.
The Steam game store doesn’t make it obvious, but you can share your game library with up to 5 people! Sweet. Just have to “enable steam guard”. Log into other accounts first and request access. Can’t just give access to an email address.
Windows mail claims it connects to iCloud email. It does not.
I like the keyboard on this better than some Mac keyboards.
The fan noise could drown out Mick Jagger.
Tried to buy Kerbal Space Program 2 through their choice of online store.. XSolla. Was getting an error message. Contacted support. They claimed I had issued a chargeback on their service for $5.57 four years ago and therefore block me (and my IP address now) from buying anything. They would unblock me if I emailed them that bank statement from 4 years ago and told my bank the 5.57 was not fraud. Thanks, but no thanks. Steam to the rescue again. People want apple to open up more app stores… wait till they get that experience.
I would totally miss iMessages.
Now that the basic setup is done it seems to be running smoothly and the gaming is much more diverse than on a Mac.
I just hope I don’t have to enter my password 100 more times in the next week for more tech support.
My kids now prefer to ask ChatGPT for things than search google. My daughter, who likes cooking, will default to asking AI for recipes.
Not because there aren’t good recipes elsewhere, but the google results are terrible (ads/junk) and the sites all shove the “SEO” story about the recipe down your throat.
It’s a race to see if AI improves data accuracy before Google fixes search.
As soon as they reach end users…
“Google says my page is slow. “
Me: you have 5-6 5MB images loading. One is 10 MB.
“Yes, but can you optimize 5k of CSS?”
Me: you have scripts for YouTube, Facebook, Google, and 5 other ad networks loading first.
“We need those, but google said you’re only using 20% of the code”
Me: You are also using 7 different fonts and have 5 YouTube videos trying to autoplay.
“Those are for conversions! We’re going to find a faster platform. “
Me: ok.
100% this tweet:
It’s a big reason we started KickoffLabs.
a. It was the idea we proved we could sign people up for. b. To help others validate the same.
Don’t rush to build an idea YOU can’t sell.
Prediction: within 3 years google will start seeing ad revenue truly decline. Eaten away by apple, Amazon, and anyone with the budget to train their own AI systems.
Business will struggle since this will cut ad effectiveness in a similar way to the Apple “privacy” changes.
They will have to replace paying google with referral based word of mouth and more algorithmic based longshots like Tik Tok.
This resets the cycle back much closer to old school TV ad models.
Yesterday I said that now is the time to plant seeds for your business. I had a couple of replies that questioned my logic and wanted to explain it more.
Some of todays biggest businesses were born of the 2008 recession. They rode the wave back up.
The recession also meant they rode the wave with less competition.
Like a fire the economy cleared the playing feild by taking out bad businesses, made good employees available for hire, and reset the market.
A reset means it gave businesses and people a forced opportunity to reevaluate the how, why, and whats of their operations.
So… what do I mean by planting seeds? There are lots of ways to think about it.
Expand your market. If you already have a product consider expanding the reach into a new segment or vertical. Your existing base is going to be converting at a lower rate so you may need to think wider and not deeper.
Build wider on demand. We recently launched 20!!! new contest templates at KickoffLabs. But we launched a lot of them without dedicated contest designs. Why? We wanted to see where the demand was first so we could save money and build them out later. The results have been surprising and saved me time. :)
If fewer people are making demo requests and you have more time… invest it to make your product 5% better for existing customers. Fix annoying bugs and improve onboarding. Just take the breath, walk through your product and fix what feels off.
Test pricing. Maybe the way you’ve been doing it doesn’t work anymore.
Start a new business. The economy doesn’t mean people stop needing solutions to problems. In fact… because a team may have ditched a costly incumbent means they may be looking for the newcomer. Someone thinking about the same problem in a different way.
Try new marketing channels. For you it could mean trying ads while the prices are low. Or it could mean figuring out if TikTok works for your growth. Or see if Mastadon takes off. It all means a chance to engage new audiences while things start growing again if you start planting content now.
Test new markets with a waitlist or trial balloons. Of course KickoffLabs makes it easy for people to test a new business, but you can also test demand for expansions of your existing business. See if you can fill a waitlist for a new feature as one way to test demand. If you can’t… maybe don’t build it.
So I maybe wrote this as a pep talk to myself, but maybe you found it useful. The next year won’t be easy, but you can make it worthwhile.
I’ve been running an AirBnb out of my basement for almost 6 years now. Last year we added a full home in Bend OR as well. There are lessons to be learned, and relearned, from running an AirBnb that apply to running any online startup or small business. I wanted to take the time to share those with you in case you are thinking about launching your own business.
Get thick-skinned
There will always be people will leave crappy reviews. It’s possible they had legitimate issues you should address or it’s possible they just picked the wrong place to stay or it’s possible they just woke up on the wrong side of the bed with issues in their lives that make them feel like being terrible to others. Sometimes you won’t know, but you need to work on not taking the feedback too personally.
Categorize feedback objectively
You have to remain objective and ask yourself what category the feedback falls into. Actionable and worth doing, actionable and not worth it, or just not applicable to your core business and best customers.
Sometimes you take it to heart and add extra blankets and towels that people think you need and other times you just have to admit that they weren’t the best fit because they imagined they could walk to the Space Needle in two minutes from your place even though they could see it on a map!
Know who your best customers are
It took a while to learn, through watching the feedback, that the best customers for the basement in Seattle are older couples looking to visit their children, or grandchildren that live in a more hip Seattle neighborhood. Once we started changing the descriptions, rules, and marketing to make that clear we got more of those customers.
For example, We put the neighborhood name in the listing. When people look it up they find out it’s a flat area that’s a little further away from the main downtown. We also added a handy guide to show how far away certain attractions are. This wasn’t just to draw in new people… but to help people that wanted to be in the middle of the nightlife to opt out so they wouldn’t be disappointed.
Use feedback from your best customers to update your marketing
The home in bend is much closer to the downtown area and people often commented on how nice that was… so we called that out in the headline. Same with the hot tub and outdoor areas of the house. People would mention it specifically in reviews so we made sure to feature those things.
Set Expectations
This could also be written as setting expectations for your customers. For Airbnb hosts it’s important to set the guest’s expectations about your rules (quiet hours, guest limits, etc) and anything else they might experience during their stays. In Seattle, we also live upstairs so we mention that you’ll hear a family upstairs if you stay there in the copy and in communications with the guests.
For your product, you might need to tell people what platforms/integrations, for example, you support and don’t support so they know ahead of time. Figure out what the important expectations are, set them, and meet them for your customers.
Beware the Platform Risks
Yes - Airbnb is 90% of the market for people searching outside of hotels. That’s a huge platform risk for hosts that can be de-listed, lose super host status, or just fall prey to any one of Airbnb’s UI updates. For that reason, we’ve worked to get listed on other sites as a backup and also will be setting up our own site in the next year.
If you build a business on Shopify for example… know they could kill it with one feature release, pricing change, or de-listing your integration from their store. Just be ready to eventually outgrow a dependency on a single platform.
Don’t neglect onboarding
The most common questions we used to get as Airbnb hosts are:
The commonality in all these questions are things people generally need/want to know within the first hour of checking into the place. So we’ve made sure to include ansers to all these in multiple locations… emails they get before check-in, on signs in the house, and guest books we leave.
At KickoffLabs anytime we can improve the onboarding experience for people in their first 30 minutes of usage we almost always see a bump in revenue. You could have a great product… but if you don’t show people the basics they aren’t going to find out what sets you apart or have a great experience.
Set boundaries
Another common request from guests is: “Can we check in 4 hours early/ Check out 4 hours late?”. We could drive ourselves, and the cleaning crew, crazy trying to turn things around in a couple hours… or we could say no and focus on making sure the time they do spend at our place a good one.
Your online business is no different. You are going to start having customers with all sorts of random requests.. for meetings, features, improvements, etc. You have to be OK with saying no to the things that aren’t your core business, or strategy, or would just simply drive you and your employees crazy.
Delivery unexpected delight
I hear other hosts have stopped leaving welcome packages for guests. I think that’s crazy and offers the rest of us a chance to stand out more by offering a bottle of wine, bottled water, coffee, chocolates, etc available to people when they check-in. Who doesn’t like to nice surprises as a first impression?
Know what to hire out
We used to use a management company that handled everything. There were two problems with that:
We found tools to automate a lot of the customer setup and communication and even let us maintain a list/newsletter for past guests that want to know about booking direct or discounts.
We still hired out the cleaning and house setup to a great set of people that get the place way cleaner than we could and set the locations up exactly how we wanted for guests. Totally worth paying for and still a lot less than 40%. :)
Something will break and that’s OK
The heat will go out, a toilet will clog, and your online servers will go down. The important part is to be prepared to communicate with your customers and make things right for them.
Sometimes it’s just getting it fixed right away and other times it might include sending a partial refund for lost time and service. It sucks… but you can’t just ignore it when problems pop up. You have to have a standard way to being open and understanding of the impact customers may experience from an outage. Just be prepared for things that are out of your control to go wrong.
Leave small tips around the house for anything complicated like the TV. :) Once you get past onboarding customers they still need help with the next batch of features. Integrate small tips into email sequences and the product UI directly. Obvious to you is NOT obvious.
Decorate your space. This is more about your brand. How do you want people to feel in your house also applies to how you want them to feel when they use your product. Decorate appropriately.
Have plenty of supplies on hand. No one likes running out of toilet paper or not having a flash light should the power go out. Does your product handle the customer volume? Do you have help articles on the ready should something go wrong with common solutions?
Price well. We did a lot of research on the compatible AirBnbs in the area and even found a nifty tool to set dynamic pricing and custom pricing rules. Are you charging enough for your business and the experience you are providing or are you drowning in too many low-end customer support requests for people who will ultimately churn?
This year I took more steps towards going “Off-Grid” for social networking.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about “Big Social” owning the content I posted there. Yes, they make it easy for people to follow you, but the trade-off is that you don’t really own or control your content. They choose how and when to display it in the feed, monetize it, and train AI models that we don’t get to really benefit from. It’s always made me hesitant to trust them.
Here are a couple of small examples…
I would cross-post this feed to Facebook… but Facebook silently killed off posting from outside apps for individuals. Not for businesses. There is no technical reason for it other than to ensure the eyeballs are ALWAYS trained on the app.
This week Twitter seems to have decided to kill off 3rd party clients for posting OR reading to the network. They also want to lock you in.
They want you locked into their feed, their algorithm, and their monetization strategy and hope that the easy distribution to friends makes it worth it to you. But they choose what to amplify or hide behind the scenes.
Also this. There’s a lot more but this is a recent list.
It just feels icky.
Micro.Blog is an excellent mix of allowing micro-content, full posts like this one, photos, and even a video podcast if I wanted… all from the same feed. It’s a good catch-all solution with a small ecosystem of apps and a way to back up my content automatically.
There’s even a way for some family and friends, who want, to subscribe to email updates once/week where they can skim highlights. I think my dad subscribes. :) There’s even an RSS feed if you are so inclined.
I can post any type of content I’d like.
I don’t worry about public or private. Private content is for family shares, friends, and text messaging, and I just know if I post here, it’s open to anyone.
I’m already getting more engagement with a much more limited follower count on Mastadon.
I view Twitter and Mastadon feeds as my comment reply feed. I’ve been through hosting comments before, and I just don’t need to moderate or see them on my own site.
I’ll still browse other social networks to stay up to date and comment where appropriate.
I can’t say off-grid living is for everyone, and that’s OK. Big social networks will come and go but we’ll all still be here and it’s nice to have a quiet little corner of the internet to myself.
Last week I spent a day or so seeing how far I could get with building a SAAS app with a popular no-code tool named Bubble.IO. Here’s my first impressions as someone who’s a developer that owns a traditionally coded SAAS app.
My goal was to build an app to help automate some content tasks with a sprinkle of AI. The MVP… give it a blog post, get a series of tweets back, get those tweets posted to social.
OMG there are full SAAS app templates that include the most of the fundental plug-ins and data models for auth, Stripe, and exposing APIs.
Just add your API key for stripe and you could be selling your hello world app as a subscription service in under sn hour. Amazing.
It even supports some back end workflows to send basic user emails like verification. Cool.
I know I want to use the OpenAI API and I already have a dev account there. So I searched the bubble plug-in market place and found a couple of options the community has already built.
The plug-in marketplace is pretty well stocked. Not as big as pulling gems or node packages, but the basics are all covered and most trending things like AI tools.
The plug-in I downloaded didn’t support the latest API parameters and I couldn’t open up the code to add it. I guess that would have been cheating. But it would have saved a bunch of time.
Thankfully Bubble supports a custom API call builder with a no code form. So I built my own OpenAI api calls.
Debugging the official Bubble API calls is limited at best. I kept seeing errors and you can’t just open the network tab in Chrome or get easy errors back from the API you are calling. Took way to long to fix this issue with trial and error.
The developer for the first plug-in i tried to use got back to me. Considering it was a free plug-in I was impressed. He added support for the newer parameters. Maybe I shouldn’t have built my own calls. :)
Now I could really try building out the UI. I found it mostly combersome.
It supports global styles, colors, and UI elements that can be edited and reused. That’s the good part.
Building new UI I assumed would be as easy as something like webflow or another website building tool. It’s not. Layouts are hard to follow and most changes get made in a UI pop up that’s not quick.
Managed to build a quick form for entering a blog post URL and some content to summarize time to wire up the UI to the API call I added.
Click on a button and it was obvious where to add actions. You chain auto completed inputs and outputs together with some simple operations in a visual way. It works, but the UI for building complex statements like “take this string and split it at the “,” and generate a “list” of responses to be used in the repeating UI is very small. I would love to see a dedicated logic screen where you could do it more like scratch or other UI programming tools.
Lost a lot of time watching videos trying to figure out why my results UI wasn’t populating. The “debugger” goes step by step… but it stops just short of really giving you enough insight as to why something isn’t working.
Ok. So yellow workflow text means it’s bad and blue means it’s good. Basically I had a type problem. The UI was expecting one format and my result set was in another. Something that would be more obvious in a regular coded app.
The debugger does let you inspect the data being passed around. Just not how what the response was from the UI. The yellow text was a warning I missed.
Got the first part of my MVP working!
It’s not worth it if you can’t deploy so I upgraded in order to publish a live app. Totally worth $29 in hosting a month.
Connecting my domain https://contentspark.ai easy and it was live very quickly.
Invited a friend to signup and it worked! Not bad for a days work especially considering the learning curve of a new tool.
Got feedback the mobile UI sucked in this template. Tried it out. They were right. It doesn’t flow well.
Back to the cumbersome UI tools I had to admit this would be way faster for me to build in pure HTML and Tailwind or Bootstrap CSS.
Made some improvements… but it’s too janky for my taste.
Hit a limitation with my app. Couldn’t find a good way to get people authenticated with Twitter so I could post on their behalf as a job behind the scenes. I still don’t know how to write my own plug-ins to get around this. But at that point I’d be writing code.
Bonus: Super easy to drop in the KickoffLabs contest box on the home page to create a waitlist. :)
At this point my time was up for first impressions.
Overall going from Zero to MVP is insanely fast with a tool like this. If you can’t code it’s a great foot in the door and levels the playing field a lot for the early stages of a basic app. I could be getting way more real feedback on Content Spark already that would be making the full app much better.
If you do code you are going to be frustrated. It’s like learning a new language and a platform all at once. Not starting from scratch mind you.. but going from one to another. There are several times you’ll wish you could get under the covers to make it easier or do just a little more than what’s possible.
This is a thought experiments about what I’d do if I were suddenly put in charge of a different company. Today’s experiment: Peloton.
I love the product. My wife and I both probably come across like we make affiliate $$ with each new bike or tread we’ve recommended.
www.telegraph.co.uk/business/…
They clearly thought the Pandemic was going to be a game changer for the industry rather than the small accelerant it ended up being. They built too much hardware and couldn’t sell it. You can find used bikes for sale on Craigslist by the dozen. (Which I do recommend picking up if you haven’t tried. )
The hardware is solid. I’ve owned a bunch of home gym equipment and the bike, tread, and rower are all well designed. You pay more, for sure, but they are solid. I’ve never been worried about breaking them with hard work.
The software is well integrated with the hardware. Incline and resistance can auto-adjust with the online classes and the leaderboards help to keep competitive people engaged.
The content is top notch. It’s well produced and the instructors each match up well with different demographics and workouts.
They have a pretty good brand.
But this isn’t mean’t to be a love letter.
Realize the real money is in the subscription software. The hardware is just expansion revenue.
Yes - I just told you how great the hardware is… but I started with Peloton using my own bike on an indoor stand and just a monthly subscription to the classes. The hardware was expensive and I had to be convinced I’d get value from it first. The home page doesn’t even suggest that you can just download the app and start working out today… it’s even Fremium! Hell - even write content about how to setup your own poorleton. www.cnet.com/deals/diy… Go ahead and sell a branded bike stand with minimal integration.
Start onboarding non-hardware people into the strength, yoga, meditation, and other classes without the hardware. It’s an on-ramp that people may eventually leave for a Bike, Tread, or cheaper Guide (https://www.onepeloton.com/guide). Some people may never leave the low level subscriptions.. but it would still be profitable. Make it a priority on the website.
Then expand the app. If people are starting without hardware the app should become more holistic with fitness. The instructors are always talking about diet, drinking water, sleep tracking, mediation, etc anyway… Add those things to the app. Let me use it to track my calories and then offer diet classes like Noom does. Expand the monthly challenges to diets, overall fitness, and weight loss goals.
Go further with the outdoor and audio only classes for people that want to trail run, hike, or cycle in the real world. Augment their realities.
The guide hardware looks cool, but what can it do that a modern iPhone on a Peloton branded mount connected to your TV can’t do? Start there and then upsell to the dedicated solution for people.
Then become the fitness social network. They are so close and don’t even realize it. You can already sort the leaderboard by location if you try. Why not make that more obvious?
First start pushing the “local leaders” and the make it easy to join peloton fitness clubs that meet in person and online for group training. Doing this will make the experience more sticky and help people create bonds around shared goals that are much stronger and healthier than typical “social networking”.
Make it the best platform for personal trainers. Personal training is big business. Peloton hardware and software is great at tracking progress towards fitness goals… especially after you expand the app as I suggested.
Instead of competing against personal trainers… make it a tool for them and democratize the personal training industry. Now you could get a personal trainer from Peloton that’s local.. or from anywhere across the world. Start with allowing them to make 1:1 training connections and eventually let them upload their own classes, guides, and programs that they could charge extra for. The equipment (and app) already all has a microphone and a camera set for live 1:1 connections.
Let them charge what they want, run the billing for them, and take a small cut. Become the App Store for personal training. While you are at it let people connect with nutritionists for diet analysis and personal plans since the app will make it easy to track food intake now.
Without doing the last step you make it too easy for someone to copy you. All the other fitness brands are catching up on first party content so you have to look past that and get all the personal trainers talking about signing clients up from Peloton so be generous with them as partners. Cody and his friends are great celebrities, but not as connected to people as an army of personal trainers could be.
Now the hard stuff.
Break into gyms. Beat the MindBody, Sugarwods, etc at their own game. You’ll do it because you are also going to offer free equipment and local broadcasting, recording, and streaming for their group classes so gym members can go in person or take the class online if they’d like. Most gyms I know are still hacking together zoom password solutions for this.
Random feature: create gym mode for the hardware. Today if you go into a hotel you have to sign into your account. Let the hotel sign in and have a local leaderboard like old school, stand up, arcade games.
Then let the peloton affiliated gyms and members compete against each other in worldwide annual challenges borrowing from the CrossFit games.
It’s great, but obviously you still want to be the leader here. Tweaks to the existing hardware will be good while you build out the software platform. Can’t do it all at once right.
They aren’t thinking holistically enough about fitness hardware. Things that could be connected to the ecosystem, cheaper than what they sell today, and offer people another on-ramp to the platform.
Start with a Peloton smart scale for measuring progress in weight and body composition. $150 and comes with a 3 months free app subscription.
Cobrand with an existing fitness wrist watch company and make the software integration seem less. Or build a lower cost fitness band alternative with motion, heart rate, and step tracking for people not into the Apple Watch scene. The Amazon fit watch is $29. There’s room there.
Sport specific equipment and training modes in the app. Hello Dribble Up. The leader is coming for you. dribbleup.com/hp/defaul…
The Peloton + Box subscription should also come with a monthly/quarterly fitness box of accessories, supplements, recipe cards, etc.
Finally - they could learn from Roku. Why isn’t the peloton software the standard used on any fitness device with a screen? Just like there are multiple manufactures producing ROKU TVS there should be multiple companies producing Peloton connected hardware to help assume some of the hardware risk that, until today, Peloton has been taking on all itself.
Ok. That was way longer than I thought it would be. Let me know what you think.
If you were the Peloton King or Queen for a day what direction would you give the company to get back on track?
A few thoughts on Tesla now that I’ve transitioned from “The Bird Site”.
Kudos to Elon and the team where it’s due. They created some amazing cars and figured out how to scale up production in a way others have struggled.
But it’s hard to look at the future and see how they will keep their advantages. I’m working on some future fun posts for “if I ran it” and Tesla is on my list.
