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This week on episode 5, we talked about:
- The music you listened to between ages 12 and 20 (and how it’s the best, no matter how old you are)
- Revisiting the music video for Cannonball by The Breeders
- Speaking at a Stanford BioDesign class led by the founder of Cala Health (we ran a sprint with them in 2016!)
- Lightning Demos, a quick way to gather inspiration for new solutions and a key part of every Design Sprint
- The amazing cover of Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath (and why Jake had a copy within reach!)
- A study showing how outside inspiration leads to better ideas
- The three reasons Lightning Demos work so well
- Lightning Demo Demos — we do live Lightning Demos of three websites
- Shiny Object Syndrome
- Playdate’s hardworking headline
- Aligning your “why” with your customer’s “why”
- A great podcast episode: Seth Godin on Animal Spirits
- And much more
📩 Get an email about every episode at JakeAndJZ.com
💸 Learn more about our seed fund Character Capital
Chapters
00:00 Musical nostalgia
03:40 Technology and pop culture
06:08 Speaking at Stanford BioDesign
08:15 Lightning Demos
14:00 Outside inspiration leads to better ideas
17:35 How we used Lightning Demos with Cala Health
21:35 Lightning Demo Demos
23:04 Lightning Demo: Oura Ring
27:47 Lightning Demo: Fathom
32:35 Making a palette of Lightning Demos
35:33 Lightning Demo: Playdate
43:55 Review of today's Lightning Demos
45:12 The viral Mr Beast production memo
47:27 Seth Godin on the Animal Spirits podcast
Creators and Guests
What is Jake & JZ?
Weekly podcast about startups, design, marketing, technology… and anything else we’re thinking about. 🤓
Hosted by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, co-founders of Character Capital and bestselling authors of Sprint and Make Time.
Jake (00:00)
John, I grew up in the eighties and nineties. And for me, the prime music era was the 1990s. Growing up in Washington state, it was all grunge rock, alternative rock. And so those albums for me still really evoke all of this.
JZ (00:12)
Totally. Yeah, yeah.
Jake (00:19)
memory and emotion and angst and, you know, good feelings and everything. it's the prime stuff. Like it is, I assume for everyone, it's the music that you grew up with your formative years,
JZ (00:30)
it's like ages 12 through 20. Like that is the best music. That's the most important music. Nobody can tell you otherwise.
Jake (00:33)
Yes. Yes, that is the best music. Yes. Yeah. So there's this one album that is not such a hugely popular one, I think overall, called Last Splash by The Breeders. And The Breeders, if anyone has ever heard of them, it's probably because of this song, Cannonball, which was like a pretty big hit on MTV back in the 1990s. But briefly, yeah, not like a huge, huge one.
JZ (00:58)
Okay, I don't think I know this one.
Jake (01:03)
And anyway, for whatever reason, I got that album and I really liked it. And I've listened to it over the years again and again and again. It's like frequently and heavy rotation for me. It's 90s alternative music with good rock elements.
but it's not such a downer as the others. Most of the Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, those are some of my favorites. They're all pretty, pretty dark and Breeders was a little bit just more fun. I think over the years, it's kind of developed in my mind to being artwork almost, this classic effort in musical history.
And I had this funny experience where I was in the Apple music app listening to it. And then it says here's the videos from this album. And so I'm like, it'd be fun to watch the video for cannonball because I haven't seen that.
JZ (01:58)
Like the original, the music video that was on MTV. Yeah.
Jake (02:01)
the music video from MTV. And this is from like, you know, 1993. So we're talking about 31 years ago. I'm like, wow, what a great blast from the past. That's what got me interested in the breeders in the first place. And I can't wait, you know, and I play it and it was just so funny to see it because in my mind, like I said, I built them up to being this paragon of just like, they masterminded everything and figured everything out.
JZ (02:07)
Crazy.
Jake (02:27)
And they were just so clearly just screwing around in the video and just looked like, they just sort of showed up. It's poorly lit. It's just kind of half-assed production. It cuts between them just playing music and what looks like a, a nightclub or like a backstage somewhere.
JZ (02:37)
You
Jake (02:44)
And then a cannonball rolling down the street, which you assume is a cannonball. What might be like a styrofoam ball painted black, just rolling down like a sidewalk. You know, I wonder how many things in my life I have ascribed this, this special importance to, know, this, man, this is a work of genius and the reality is somewhere in the middle. It's like, yeah, they were really talented. they made something really great. It were in the right place at the right time.
JZ (02:51)
you
Yeah.
You
Jake (03:12)
musically for their skills and everything, but they also were just like kind of screwing around, having fun and just sort of, you know, made this thing. And, anyway, I thought that was an interesting, little way to think about products and design and startups, because I think there's often we talk about the elements of genius, the planning and practical things you can do. And I think there's also an element of just being in the right place at the right time, having fun.
JZ (03:28)
Yeah.
Totally. Yeah. Well, and the technology of the recording of it, the production of it also changes so much. And I wonder like in the 90s, if people felt the same way about stuff from the 60s, right? So like 30 years before that, because on top of what you're describing, which I think is like the people themselves and what they were doing, and maybe they weren't as, you know, intentional or put together as you imagined. There's also the fact that it just kind of looks like an old
Jake (03:46)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, right.
JZ (04:07)
video, you know, because it is, versus if they made it now, it would at least probably look pretty polished and have some cool graphics and that sort of thing.
Jake (04:15)
Yeah, that's true too. And it is something that I really like about those music videos from the eighties and nineties because musicians and like, especially, you know, the most popular musicians, they're often the paragons of idolism, popularity, the people who, especially when you're in those formative years, the people you're looking up to and
JZ (04:33)
in that moment.
Jake (04:39)
now you see those folks in photos or videos or whatever and everything just looks so glossy and perfect. And it's like, well, yeah, these are superhuman entities. I have no, I have nothing in common with, you know, like whoever it might be. and you look at the stuff from the eighties and nineties and you're like, yeah, but that's actually literally a human being just, you know, grainy, this grainy video, like that kind of shabby outfit that they were somebody.
JZ (04:46)
Right, yeah.
Right.
Jake (05:06)
told them to put on at the last second.
JZ (05:09)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I wonder what people will say about this video in 30 years.
Jake (05:15)
Or even now.
JZ (05:16)
Or even now. All right. Should we, should we do a podcast?
Jake (05:22)
Let's do a podcast.
JZ (05:43)
All right. Welcome to Jake and Jay Z the weekly podcast about startups, design, technology, marketing, and basically whatever else we're thinking about. that's Jake. I'm Jay Z. We are the founders of character capital and the authors of two books sprint make time. And this is our podcast. You can read, listen.
Learn more at jakenjz.com. A couple of weeks ago, we got to do something pretty cool, which was we got to speak at a Stanford class. Stanford has this program called bio design, which is a cool sounding name. And basically think what it means is it's about applying new technology to the world of biology, medicine, healthcare, et cetera.
Jake (06:23)
really is.
JZ (06:32)
from Google Ventures, from when we worked there, we heard about that program a lot. There were companies that were started by people who had been in that program. we had some of our colleagues at GV would speak there, the classes. And so this would have been really cool, no matter what, for couple of guys who graduated from state schools.
Jake (06:51)
Yep, yep.
JZ (06:52)
both coincidentally called UW, mine Wisconsin, yours Washington. But this was extra cool because were invited founder of a GV portfolio company called Cala Health. And Kate, the founder, she wanted us to, well, it's kind of crazy just to rewind. we ran the sprint back in 2016 at the time.
The company, they did not have FDA approval. They had not released their product to the world. And we ran a sprint about, what was the best way for patients to kind of get set up, essentially onboarding, with this, medical device, this product that they were creating. so, all these years have passed and the company pretty successful now. the product is in the market. A lot of people are benefiting from it.
And Kate reached out to us and said, first of all, the company is doing really well. second of all, I'm teaching this, bio design class and three, part of what I'm teaching is, design sprints and using some of the lessons and techniques that, that we did together in that sprint back in 2016, will you come and tell the class about it? so it was super cool. It was really fun. And the specific thing that Kate wanted us to
Jake (07:59)
Yeah, it's really fun.
JZ (08:02)
to talk about of all the stuff, you know, it's kind of interesting to see like what sticks with people over the years, but of all the things, the thing she wanted us to talk about was lightning demos, which, Jake, maybe can you just give it like a, can you explain for anybody who's not familiar, like what are lightning demos? How do we use them in InDesign Sprints?
Jake (08:19)
Yeah. Yeah. Lightning demos are a quick, I mean, it's kind of what it sounds like. It's a very quick demo of something that might inspire a solution to the problem that, we have at hand. And kind of comes from, we've got a bunch of people in a sprint and in the earliest days of running sprints, some of those people, were.
designers, when I was first running sprints at Google, when you and I were first running sprints at Google ventures, there would have been our design team, you know, so a few designers. And then we've got folks from the startup, some of whom, maybe there's a designer, maybe not. Most of them are not designers. Most of them are, you know, the founders, there's engineers, product people, marketing people, any kind of mix of folks might be in the room. And one of our insights has been.
Hey, you can get a great solution. could come from anyone on your team because they might have the right insight into, this is the key element and this is kind of the form to put it in. And they might create a great solution to the problem, but you're not going to get those great solutions from non-designers unless you give them every tool possible to sort of operate as much like a designer as they can.
And lightning demos becomes this tool at first where I was thinking, I want to help the non designers see the world, way a designer does, which is there are all these solution patterns out there. These kind of like recipes that you can reuse. Hey, this thing works really well in this context. Maybe I can reuse this framework or structure in another context. And so what we're looking for is like, Hey, here's this thing I've seen. It's really cool. It's this website. It's this.
marketing page, it's this app, it's the software, it's this experience. I've seen it somewhere else. It worked really well for them in that industry or domain. And I think it could inspire us. And then we try to say, okay, what's the, core pattern there? Try to identify the pattern so that before we start creating our solutions, everybody on the team has a library of patterns that they can work with, whether they're a designer or not. And it turns out that working in this way.
It also, it helps designers too. mean, everyone kind of benefits. certainly benefit from a good round of lightning demos.
JZ (10:37)
Yeah.
Yeah. Designers like to steal. That's sort of part of the, of the job. It's not a bad thing, but designers like to steal ideas. like to look for inspiration from, you said, other companies, other products, other experiences. a lot of what we have tried to do with design sprints is bring tried and tested techniques from the world of design to other people. So things like.
looking for inspiration, lightning demos, things like building prototypes, testing with customers, user testing, things that are really common in the design world, but a lot of teams aren't using on their own. So lightning demos are good example of that.
Jake (11:16)
Yeah, and we.
I was very encouraged to pursue this line of thinking in design sprints by something I read in made to stick by Chip and Dan Heath, which is one of my favorite books. Actually, I'll lean over and grab a copy for video folks.
JZ (11:29)
yeah, totally.
Jake (11:34)
so you can see what it looks like.
JZ (11:36)
That is the test of a true fan. you can, without getting up from your chair, if you can lean and grab a copy of a book, that means that you must really like that book.
Jake (11:38)
right there.
have to actually give a, tip of the hat here to my friend Blair, who in case, in case she's listening, gave me this book for my birthday last week. And which is amazing. you have to really see straight into my soul to know that this would be the perfect gift for me. Like that, you know, me, you know me really well, cause this is not a new book. And in fact, I, I read this book.
JZ (11:55)
cool.
You
Jake (12:08)
probably around the time it came back, have reread it many times since and did not currently have a copy because whenever I have a copy, I'm always giving it away to people because it's so good. It's still so good. Made to Stick. Yes, this is a true friend. So in Made to Stick, one of the many
JZ (12:16)
So this is a good friend, a really good friend.
Sorry, we should also pause to acknowledge the cover of Made to Stick, one of the great covers of all time.
Jake (12:26)
We should look at this of all time. And, and we happen to know because our editor, Ben He's the editor of this book as well. I believe it's him who told us that this was a last second cover design. I believe by the Heath brothers that the last second they said, and sorry, for those of you listening on the podcast, what we've got for the cover, it's orange. It's a great color of orange home Depot orange, would say.
JZ (12:41)
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, it's a nice rich orange, pretty saturated orange, not too bright.
Jake (12:55)
Boog a great orange.
Simple, sans or sorry. Am I a designer? Simple serif on says major stick. Yeah. Totally undermining the whole premise of this podcast. so it's made to stick in white letters, but under the two, there's like, it's a big strip of duct tape. And if you, if you really look close at it, if you've got a physical copy, it's got that texture. It's got that little wrinkle. Cause I can never get duct tape to go down flat.
JZ (13:02)
You're giving yourself away.
You
Hahaha
Jake (13:28)
It's just, it the cover's matte, the duct tape is glossy. It's like there's a piece of duct tape on it. It will never be surpassed. this is the Holy grail of book covers in my opinion.
JZ (13:30)
So good.
Yeah, that's it. The rest of the books just have like Times New Roman on a white background. It's not even worth trying.
Jake (13:43)
Yeah, just comics ads. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just walk it off. So.
JZ (13:48)
Anyway, sorry for that tangent. You were going to say something I expect quite interesting about Made to Stick. It was part of your inspiration for a lightning demo.
Jake (13:54)
Well, it'll be hard now to live up to the cover. Yeah. Eventually we'll talk about lightning demos, but the point in made to stick the thing that, that I read in that book. I was like, Ooh, that's, gives me some encouragement to, incorporate this lightning demos idea into the actual process that we do every time was it refers to a study where they got folks who had no experience.
making making advertisements. And they said, well, we're going to ask you to make an advertisement. Now I, I haven't reread this. may be sort of butchering the details a little bit, but essentially here's what happens. We've got a bunch of people. We're going to run this experiment where we take half of them and we say, okay, make an advertisement for this product. Just try to come up with something, write it, film it just do it, And then the second group we're going to say, okay,
Same brief, make an ad for this product, but also here are some templates for advertisements that tend to work well. then they took a group of advertising experts who knew nothing about the program. so they're sort of.
double-blind, whatever, and they evaluate the ads that these folks produce. the people who were shown the templates, their score way better, like way, way better than the folks who have no sort of structure to go to. There's making everything up. And I thought, wow, bingo. This is great. This is just what happens when you're going into design something, you need a template. And so often we go in.
JZ (15:28)
Yeah.
Jake (15:30)
And we're like that first group. don't have any handhold. We're just kind of trying to come up with something from zero. And if instead the best stuff. Yes. Staring at the blank sheet, like what? Yeah, totally. And instead, if you build on top of something, Hey, this thing's proven. It works already. Great. Start with that. You can still a ton of room for creativity originality within that framework, but the framework can really work well for you. And of course.
JZ (15:34)
Right.
Right. You're just staring at the blank sheet. You're like...
Come on, come on brain.
Jake (15:58)
Movies show us this all the time, the hero journey, all of this stuff that we see again and again, these structures work and they do provide a ton of freedom for us to do new things on top of them, but it's that structure that really makes it work. So, okay, that's the deep background of Lightning Demos. And I think we've seen how powerful they can be in a design sprint in terms of, mean, if there's one moment
JZ (16:03)
Yeah.
Jake (16:26)
where you might really boost the chances that a team is going to address their risks, find something that clicks with their customers, it's probably that they really got a good set of lightning demos and there were some patterns in there that helped them solve the hardest problems that they face.
JZ (16:42)
Yeah, there's a couple of things that I think we've seen, a couple of reasons why lightning demos work really well. And these are sort of off the top of my head, but tell me if you disagree or have additional ones. Like one, think bringing people through to concrete, sort is really helpful because...
Jake (17:05)
Yeah.
JZ (17:05)
You people might talk about an idea. They may have an abstract idea in their brain. But even if you're just seeing somebody else's concrete idea, you're seeing something that's already out in the world. That's a helpful mode shift to like bridge people from fuzzy cloud of ideas into concrete, this is what it could actually look like. So I think, yeah.
Jake (17:23)
That's a big deal because if you're a person coming into this challenge, you're trying to come up with a solution for something. And maybe I wonder if to make it a little bit concrete, for, for slight tangent, shall we share a screen and show Cala health's website today? So we can kind of show what that product looks like. Talk about it for a second. That might be kind of cool. Cala health. I it's a device that treats.
JZ (17:42)
yeah, totally. That's a great idea. Yeah, let me just pull it up here.
Jake (17:48)
A condition called essential tremor. And so this is neurologic condition that causes tremor in the, in the hands and the device, you know, probably oversimplifying here, but we'll deliver electric impulses. So this is a device kind of like a, it's a bracelet and it delivers electric impulses that. You know, stimulate the nervous system and they can help, to sort of offset or,
control to some degree, the, the tremors in the hands. this is a condition that previously the treatments for the therapy was a medication. you're taking like a systemic nervous system, suppressant, which to, you know, put it in sort of plain terms would make you really sleepy, drowsy, drunk feeling maybe. And so the idea of just sort of going right to the nervous system and.
using impulses to control it. It's a great way to allow people to, in their lives, be living it without sort of the brain fog, the body fog that would come from the medication.
JZ (18:51)
So this is CaliHealth. This is homepage. And you can see that it's sort of this wearable device that, like Jake said, uses kind electrical stimulation helps with essential tremor.
Jake (19:06)
And it just looks like a start watch.
JZ (19:06)
And this actually reminds me of, yeah, yeah. It actually reminds me of one of the other things that we've seen work really well in lightning demos is to look for inspiration outside your industry. when we were working with Cali health, it wasn't obvious that it would have this sort of smartwatch form factor. And this was 2016. So there were Fitbits, there were
other wearable devices, but you have to realize that this is a very deeply medical team. they're not coming from the world of product design, the CalHealthy, and they're coming from the world of, medical research and developing new therapies. And so one of the things that was really helpful was to look at lightning demos, to look at examples from outside of.
medical industry look at wearable devices, things like Fitbit, that you can sort of see how they really shaped the ultimate form of the product.
Jake (19:59)
And so this device that's like a watch that you put on that delivers these impulses, it's a thing that your doctor would prescribe to you. And one of the big questions from this sprint was, well, okay, if the doctor prescribes it to you, can we deliver the device, this watch sort of thing? Can we mail it to the customer's home? And then when they get it at home, will they be able to?
to fit it, the patient be able to adjust it, do all of the things that need to happen in order for, know, the settings need to be right. It needs to be tuned in. Will they be able to set that up on their own? Because if so, that opens a much larger path to reaching patients for Cala than if it has to be configured by a physician in the hospital, in the clinic.
That's just going to make it much more difficult to access this thing. So anyway, we foregrounding for this, we're, doing lightning demos, trying to find what are the kinds of solutions that would exist out in the world and would unlock this ability for patients to understand how this thing works, understand how they need to configure it, get going with it and evaluate whether this form factor is going to work well. And so there are a bunch of different key risks and questions. It's one of the coolest sprints we ever did, partly because all of those
fun little details and maybe, maybe we should wait and on a future episode, we should have Kate on interview her talk about everything that happened because it's a cool one, but to come back to lightning demos here, well, you and I were talking about, might be fun in previous episodes. Recently, we've been looking at marketing messaging and this idea of, know, what is it? Why does it exist? How does it work?
JZ (21:24)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Jake (21:41)
actually, Calla does, I think, pretty good job of this here. We thought maybe we could go back and look at some of those and then show how we would turn those into a lightning demo, just for a quick little activity here on the pod. Exactly.
JZ (21:53)
lightning demo demo. yeah, definitely. We should do that. And it's good setup for like the third kind of reason lightning demos work. So the first was move people from abstract to concrete. The second was look outside your industry so that you're getting fresh inspiration. And then the third one, the third sort of key idea is to not just look at them and be like, that's cool, but to actually capture the
the core idea, the thing that really sparked some inspiration for you that really got you excited, capture that in a specific way so that not only can you go back to it, and this is what we can demo, not only can you go back to it, but the rest of your team can look at it as sort of their palette. They can kind of have this palette of ideas and inspiration that they can incorporate into their own sketches during the sprint. Should we demonstrate, this?
Jake (22:48)
That's great principles. Let's do it. Let's have a demo.
JZ (22:53)
All right. So one of the examples we looked at a couple of weeks ago as a good example of this, what, why, how framework for homepage messaging was the Aura ring. And they have since made their website less good at the top. for a good reason. The good reason is that they have a new model of the ring. As a result, though, the
Jake (23:08)
Hahaha.
JZ (23:16)
top of the page no longer really says what it hopefully that's just a temporary condition The rest of the page is really good And one of the things that I love about this website is it has of the way down, so toward the top of the page, it has this really nice section of kind this might matter to you.
benefits essentially of the specific things that the aura ring that a smart ring can can do for you. I think that, you know, when it comes to these types of devices, people understand at a high level, like, it's going to kind of keep track of some data, help me be healthier, live a better life. But I really like how aura brings that down to to earth and down to the everyday. So they have this card that says get the best sleep of your life. You can like open it and learn more about how it does that.
Don't just live longer, live healthier. Bring your fitness goals into focus. Listen to what your heart is telling you. Understand the ins and outs of women's health and put your stress to the test. So I just really like this. They're very clear. And I think for anybody browsing the site who's sort of curious about the aura ring, there's a good chance that one of these is going to catch them and they're going to think, yeah, like I have been trying to solve that problem. I have been struggling with that issue and the aura rings going to
help me do it. Jake, how did you capture that? You mind showing?
Jake (24:46)
Yeah. Well, so I was, I was drawing as quickly as I could. And traditionally, historically, when we run design sprints in person, as one person is sharing, Hey, this is the, this is the thing. This is what is cool about it. Another person is writing on the whiteboard, trying to draw what, you know, that key element would be, but
JZ (25:05)
Yeah. So in this case, I'm giving the lightning demo. So that was hopefully less than two minutes of me sort demonstrating. This is a website I like. This is what I like about it. Jake, in this case is the facilitator for the sprint and he's part of his job as a facilitator. He's capturing the good things. He's capturing. Here's what's good about
that demo.
Jake (25:28)
So here's what I drew and there's not a lot to it. It says, there's a row of these chiclets. And so the first one, says, get the best sleep of your life. And there was a picture of a person sleeping. But one of the things I really wanted to capture was that notion that the chiclet expands and has more kind of concrete detail so that at a glance you look over all of them and you see. These are some of the key benefits that actually
JZ (25:46)
Yeah.
Jake (25:54)
Some of these, some subset of these might be meaningful to me. So there's a lot of them I can go through quickly and hopefully spot one that, that appeals to me two, three, four that appeal to me. And then as I click in on it, It'll reward me by showing it like really concretely. This is how it works. So now I have to rely on my memory because unlike if we were doing a real sprint, I'm sharing my screen. Now John would normally be, we could see his screen and the whiteboard at the same time, but.
JZ (26:16)
Hey.
Jake (26:20)
There's like a screenshot showing, something happening and.
JZ (26:22)
Yeah. And there was a quote from a real customer at the top that was relevant to this problem.
Jake (26:30)
So we've got like a real customer quote up here. And then maybe I'll just to imply that this kind of expanded, I'll make that like a dotted line in between the chiclet and the sort of expanded chiclet that has more detail. so this idea of, you know, going from chiclet to expanded detail, we probably would want to come up with a name for it now so we can help people on the team. Remember, okay, what is this pattern called? What do we call this? And you might call it expanding. What do you think expanding? Why chicklets or.
JZ (26:59)
Yeah, Maybe benefit cards or why cards?
Jake (27:03)
Yeah, it's called benefit cards. It's good. Benefit cards.
JZ (27:08)
And the goal with this sketch is not to perfectly represent the demo. It's to provide just enough of a handhold so that when I look back on this, Jake looks back on this, imagine we're in a sprint with five other people, anybody looks back on this and they're like, yeah, like that was a thing from Aura. cool. I do remember that. It's just enough detail to trigger the memory.
Jake (27:30)
And that's a key too, that we would write, this was from Aura. And so this thing would be on the whiteboard, this little drawing, and then we might have, we might end up with a dozen of these little drawings. But for now, I'll erase this one. And why don't you show another one and we'll, let's do this a couple more times. It's kind of fun.
JZ (27:47)
Yeah,
All right. So let's do another demo. think the second site we looked at a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about the, the what, why, how was Fathom, which is one of our portfolio companies, a character. So, yeah, in full disclosure, we have run a design sprint with, with the Fathom team. So we have a lot of, a lot of knowledge and a lot of skin in the game here.
Jake (27:59)
Full disclosure, we're biased.
JZ (28:10)
So as we scroll down the page, the headline here is Increased Productivity with the Number One Rated AI Note-Taker. This is a really strong headline because it gives you the what and the why. It tells you that it's an AI note-taker and that it's going to help you increase productivity. Below that, there's a subhead that says Fathom Records, Transcribes, Highlights, summarizes your meetings so you can focus on the conversation. Even more why.
and a little bit of how, but really good why and like, hey, this is great. You don't have to be there scribbling down notes, furiously trying to keep up with what was being said. You can really engage in the conversation that you're having. As we scroll down, we have a series of screens that essentially just kind of walk through the benefits. So I'm looking at one that says no more post-meeting data entry, which really resonates for me because
before we started using Fathom, was like after every single call, it was this chunk of 10 minutes of 15 minutes where had to get all my notes organized and put them into Notion, which is what we use at Character. I'm going to keep track of everything going on. And then to the right, it has a really nicely done animation. So it's showing the summary from Fathom and then clicking copy and then it's
It's opening HubSpot and it's sort of showing this data automatically sinking into HubSpot as an example of how you can avoid post meeting data entry. So this combination of clear headline describing a benefit and then very clear animation, showing how it works, I find super effective.
Jake (29:50)
So let's take a look at how I started to capture that. the key elements that John talked about that are the most essential parts, because on any screen that you look at, there's going to be a lot going on and it can be overwhelming.
If you're trying to think, what is it that works so well about this? And one of the key lessons I think over time is that it's usually the most basic essential stuff is the heart of what works well of what's, what's most important. it's the text. It's the, the key pictures, the animations, those things that draw your eye. Those are the things that usually either work or don't work. It's not to say that fine tune details aren't important. Of course they are. But when you're at this stage where you're your startup, you're
beginning something, you're trying to explain the key idea of something. It's usually the big stuff. So in this case, the headline increased productivity with number one AI note taker. This is the what, so label this. This is the what right here. What is it? And then, how does it work? So there's no post meeting data entry. And then that little picture of that animation, that's another key.
So having this auto animation, animate.
And this whole thing then, what should we call it?
JZ (31:07)
We could just call this one what, how, sort of a meta pattern demo.
Jake (31:13)
Yeah, it's almost like the most quintessential what, how, and it gets at the what, how, with as little work for the customer as possible. The headline is absolutely on the nose, increased productivity with the number one AI note taker. And this idea like, Hey, this is an AI note taker. We're just going to tell you what it is right off the bat. And the last one we looked at the aura ring.
JZ (31:16)
Right.
Jake (31:40)
I think the headline was something like sleeker smarter. They're assuming you already know what the aura ring is when you come there. And I hope they're right because they've, they've just rolled the dice on that here. saying like, we're going to tell you what it is. It's the movie phone thing from previous episode. talked about, just to tell you what the product is. And then if that's not clear enough, here is the, maybe the most important, the first next most important reason why you'd want to use it. No post meeting data entry. And then if that doesn't make sense to you, you don't even have to think you don't have to press play.
JZ (31:44)
Yeah.
Hahaha.
Jake (32:09)
You just look over here, there's a silent animation that's showing you how it delivers on the why. So yeah, great quintessential what, why, how here. And we would label this on our board. Okay. This was from Fathom and then our imaginary sprint. Now we have two lightning demos. have the what, why, how, and then we have the benefit cards. And if even just with those two, you might already starting to think, okay, if I was making a marketing page, now
I've got some paths I can take, some things I can build on.
JZ (32:39)
Yeah. If you imagine you're in a big conference room and there's a giant whiteboard and on that whiteboard, Jake is starting to draw in, different frames, you know, one frame for the benefit cards, one frame for the what, how, as we continued to go through this exercise, you know, if there were seven people in the sprint, each person did two or three lightning demos. We'd have. Well, 15, 20.
different demos all sketched into a frame and it becomes this really helpful palette of inspiration that you can draw on as you create your own sketches.
Jake (33:11)
It starts to feel like you're not on your own. You're not by yourself as you go into trying to solve this problem and the blank canvas challenge of, here's this page. need to sketch a solution to this big problem that we all agree is the top problem for our company right now. it starts to not feel like, my God, it's all on me, but like, no, there's
JZ (33:14)
Yeah.
Yeah, and it becomes a group brain, you can see everybody's ideas in one place.
Jake (33:37)
And there are always dangers to a group brain because a group brain can lead to group think. And so one of the reasons that actually why we like lightning demos is that this kind of thing happens anyway with lightning demos, you make it clear. So what I mean by that is a lot of times I've seen and even participated in this where a team is working on a problem and somebody, especially it's the boss often.
JZ (33:40)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jake (34:05)
they see something, they've downloaded a new app or their kid is using a new app.
JZ (34:08)
Yeah, it's the shiny object. It's whatever the new and shiny is.
Jake (34:14)
the new and shiny object, and they come to the team and, you know, they say, Hey, look at this great way of doing X. And now there's this huge recency bias on that solution framework on that pattern. Everybody's saying, this is the thing we're getting, we got to do all the solutions start to look like that thing. And if that's the right pattern, well, great. But what happens with lightning demos is you say, okay, there's that pattern. There's the one that you just thought of or just noticed, but then here, hopefully here are a bunch of others to choose from.
So we're actually making a conscious choice. And because when we start to work on the solutions, every person's working on their own independently, you hopefully will get a little bit more divergence away from like the group think. So you have the group brain like, here's patterns. We can all see it's not the designer has 20 patterns and everybody else has two. Everybody's got 22, but now each person makes their own choice. What shall we do one more?
JZ (35:09)
Yeah, that's super good point. Yeah, let's do one more. back to that episode a couple of weeks ago, the third example we use was one that you're quite fond of and maybe a quick demo of this website and then also sketch it. Sorry, I know it's a work you early in the morning. So the next one is...
Jake (35:20)
Haha,
Yeah, we'll see if I can make it through all of this.
JZ (35:33)
Playdate.
Jake (35:34)
Play date. This is a product that I love. It's a handheld video game system reminiscent of the Game Boy, which I bought when the Game Boy first came out. And I think it was 1989. I remember saving up money and buying it at the mall. And it came in this package. you want to look it up online later for fun listeners, it's like a, it's got like a grid on it and like what looks like robotic hands holding the game. I mean, it's just so
how the future appeared from 1989. was amazing, Nintendo in your hand. the play date has recaptured for me some of that magic. So certainly nostalgia play here, but they've really had fun with this device and it's got a crank on the side. It's very small. It's a black and white, gray scale screen. And it's got all these kind of quirky games. And when you buy it, you get a season of games. So you get like once a week,
A new game just sort of downloads and appears on your, on your play date. Pretty fun. What I love about this website, there are a couple of things that really interest me about it. And if you scroll back to the top, John, you'll see that it leads with a, picture of the play date itself that is animated. So it's a 3d, photographic 3d rendering of the thing
JZ (36:35)
Yeah.
Jake (36:56)
kind of slowly moving in space. So you kind of get the sense of the physicality of it. And I'm maybe not going to dwell on too much for my design pattern, but I'll sketch it in at any rate. This is thing that inspires me to say, hey, we can test almost anything in a sprint because they sold tons and tons of these consoles before the product actually existed.
JZ (37:17)
Hmm.
Jake (37:23)
based on a marketing page that had a rendering of what the finished thing would look like. And actually hearkening back to Calla Health in 2016, long before the Playdate came out, but we were using renderings and images of this device. It didn't exist yet to test, does it make sense to people? they see it and does it click together and get it? And I think disproves a common objection to...
JZ (37:24)
Yeah.
Jake (37:49)
testing with prototypes early on. If you're doing something that's really complex, that's not a product you're going to be able to build and finish and hand to people in one day. You can still prototype how you would market that thing. You can always mock up a screen of that super complex software or render the hardware device and test it. Anyway, I love that. That's a bit of a tangent. It's worth calling out.
JZ (38:09)
Yeah, that's a great point. And you can learn so much through the marketing of a product. Not everything that you could learn from testing the real product, but a lot. And if the alternative is learning nothing because you are just in the garage, cranking away on making the first version of the thing, then the promise of learning something by testing the marketing is pretty appealing.
Jake (38:36)
Yeah, it's a big deal. It's a big time warp that you're offered to see how people would react before you go through what could be years of getting this thing right. And it's not to say that you can predict perfectly how people will respond to this thing from the picture of it, holding this device in your hand and actually playing it. It's different than the experience of looking at the marketing for it, but, you can learn something. Now, the next thing I love here, it's this headline. It says.
JZ (38:39)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Right. Right.
Jake (39:05)
It's a new tiny handheld game system with a bunch of brand new games. We made Playdate just for fun. And there is so much packed into that sentence that I'm just going to write it down.
JZ (39:15)
Yeah.
Jake (39:17)
All of that plays a role. That is not just sloppy text that's there casually. It's written in a very casual voice. It's something I love about the Playdate marketing site is how casual and friendly and real the voices. But there's also a key job being done by each of those sentences. I'm going to share my whiteboard and talk through what those different.
elements are doing, in my opinion.
JZ (39:42)
some hard-working copywriting right there.
Jake (39:44)
and some hard working copywriting.
if you're watching on YouTube, you're to see me mark this up, but I'm also going to talk through this little drawing.
So I've drawn the little picture of the play date on the top. It's a 3d rendering, but that's not the most important thing going on here. It's interesting. We went on a tangent about it. What I really want to talk about, as I said, is this headline. So it's a new tiny handheld game system. this is what it is. This is great on the nose, what it is with a bunch of brand new games. This is kind of what, and also why.
The playdate gives you the chance to play these games that they're not like the games you get elsewhere. They're different. People are making special, weird games for this weird console. So this
JZ (40:24)
also an important differentiator because there are other tiny handheld game systems in the world. And one of the reasons you might buy this one is that it has a bunch of brand new games.
Jake (40:36)
Totally.
but Y plus, it's different. And that's a bunch of brand new games. That makes it different from the other handheld game systems out there.
tiny handheld game system is why, what it is. Bunch of brand new games is why and what makes it different. And then we made playdate just for fun. This is another, I think part of why it's part of what makes it different. And it says so much about the playdate. It's actually a huge part of the experience. You know, I've, I've got one of these who used it a bunch being my son have made games for it. It's really fun. And it's.
JZ (41:04)
Yeah.
Jake (41:17)
This notion that like, yeah, it's just for fun. They're not trying to make the best video game system in the world. They're not trying to scale it to sell like millions of copies. They're not trying to compete in the same world as those other game systems. And that tells you actually a whole lot about what it is. So it's very casual sentence explains to me immediately what's going on here. And between the picture of the thing and this two sentence headline, I get it. And from the first instant I saw this thing, I was like, I get what this is.
JZ (41:21)
Yeah.
Yeah. think anytime the teams, why can be the same as why the customer should care. that's just a golden, golden place to be. think a lot of times, the team does their best to, explain why their product is better or different than what exists in the world. And everybody has their own motivations. Of course, that's why
Jake (41:55)
Yeah.
JZ (42:06)
they're doing the hard work of creating something new. But in those rare cases where there's perfect alignment between why we made this and why you should care as a customer, in this case for the Playdate, because it's just fun. everything just kind of clicks into place. You don't have to think about how do we optimize, the thing that's good for us that may not be what the customer cares about. you can just act wholeheartedly and it all works.
Jake (42:31)
Yeah, it's, it's really cool. And they kind of zag a little bit here. Well, in a lot of ways, this product and this marketing page zags with other zig. I think one of the big zags here is a long headline, a two sentence headline at the beginning. We saw the aura ring and they were trying to cram everything into like three words, and here, of course the aura ring is a much bigger business than the flight eight. So let's not throw them too far under the bus, but I do love this two sentence thing that explains to you.
JZ (42:43)
Yeah, totally.
Jake (43:00)
what would you say if we were labeling this lightning demo pattern?
JZ (43:03)
I'm tempted to call it the hardworking headline.
Jake (43:06)
Ooh, I love it. love it. You know, one of the things that we have done over the years running, I don't know, hundreds, hundreds of sprints and we've done thousands of lightning demos is to try to come up with memorable names for the patterns. It helps people is sort of get at the essence and understand what the essence is. The hardworking headline. Of course you don't want to go too far with it. You don't want to obscure.
stop being clear about what's going on. But, and then we would label below this came from Playdate. need to draw a line over where my fingers have smudged out. So the hardworking headline Playdate. So there we go. There's our third, pattern pulled out of a marketing page for today. So to recap, have the hardworking headline, this combination of what and why it's a longer headline, but really well written to address what the customer needs to know right away.
previously on Fathom, saw this classic what, why, how, with, very clear descriptors, very clear images, just on the nose, right down the middle. Great way to do the classic what, how, with the least effort possible on the customer. And we saw the aura ring and these expandable cards that you could use to.
See the benefits, the, the why, and then dig in to see a little bit of how each one of the wise is delivered. So that was a lot of abstract there, but concretely, it helps you with your sleep. There's a picture of a person sleeping. Maybe I'm interested in that. The card expands shows me what this UI will look like that I'll get sleep feedback on shows me a quote from a real customer and how it benefited them. So good stuff. And that would feel to me, like if we were about to start
sprinting on a marketing page today, I'd feel a lot more ready to go.
JZ (44:56)
Exactly. Yeah. So next time you're working on something new, consider lightning skip this Look for inspiration. Capture it in this specific weird way. If you're listening on audio, look up the YouTube video so you can see the way that Jake captures share it with your team. So it's really helpful.
the other thing that you and I were talking about recently, was this mr. Beast production memo that went viral. and I, I found it, I found it. mean, that makes it sound like I create it was some great discovery. I saw it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I unearthed it. I saw it, on hacker news and,
Jake (45:25)
You hacked it, you hacked into Mr. Beast's productions, lifted the PDF.
JZ (45:35)
Instantly, I was like, okay, I have to read this. don't watch MrBeast, but of course, I'm quite interested in YouTube having worked there and helped design the YouTube channel's platform. So I'm always interested in the sorts of content, videos that people are making for YouTube. And MrBeast is the most successful YouTuber, I guess, YouTube creator. I don't even know how many subscribers he has, but it's approximately a gazillion.
Jake (46:01)
Yeah, just slightly more than there are humans on the planet. Subscribe to the channel. Yeah, somehow. It's that good.
JZ (46:01)
and his videos are.
Right. Yeah, somehow. And his videos are absurd and very entertaining. But this memo that leaked or I don't exactly know the story of it, but it's a memo. mean, it reads as though it is truly an internal document. This isn't marketing. This seems like it's just something that got out somehow. And it's for people who are joining his production team.
It's advice for them on how to be effective, how to be successful. If you are working for Mr. Beast, you're making these outlandish and entertaining videos. I thought there were a bunch of really interesting ideas. and you just read the whole thing or you read most of it just the other day, right? Yeah.
Jake (46:45)
yeah.
I read the whole thing. marked it up. In fact, you know, John, I'm kind of thinking we should save it for the next episode. I think it should be a recommendation. optional reading before you listen to the next episode, the Mr. Beast PDF. I'm sure you can find it. What's the title of it?
JZ (46:54)
Okay.
think it's how to succeed in Mr. Beast production. Yeah.
Jake (47:06)
Yeah. If you type in Mr. production PDF, you'll probably find it we'll go in detail in the next podcast about our thoughts in reading it because we have some takes, we have some takes and there is actually a connection to lightning demos, which we can elucidate in due course,
JZ (47:15)
We have thoughts. have some takes.
Yeah.
a really good idea. I have a recommendation, which is a podcast episode.
Seth Godin is one of my favorite authors. I just find everything about him kind of amazing. I think his ideas are really helpful. think the clarity with which he communicates them is really helpful. And I think his consistency and longevity is remarkable. The guy's been writing a daily blog for like 15 years or something like that. think he's written... Right. Right.
Jake (47:52)
Wow. mean, you had me at daily blog being impressive. think if someone could write a daily blog for like a month, 15 years. Yeah, I'm out like day three. I'm like, I'm out, John. can't do it. 15 years.
JZ (47:59)
Yeah, do a month, one month challenge, you know, daily daily blog. I'd be impressed if you did that.
He's written at least 10 books, prolific, really, really good. one of my favorite podcasts, which was in fact, part of the inspiration for this podcast is a show called Animal Spirits, which is all about markets and investing. in addition to being a VC investor, I'm sort of a personal finance nerd. And so I really liked this show, Animal Spirits.
two guys who work at a wealth management firm and they're just kind of chatting and they're talking about what's going on in the markets. They're sharing what they're interested in and reading and watching. And so it was a real scroll stopper the other day when I was in Spotify and I was like, wait a second, Seth Godin was on Animal Spirits. for anybody listening who happens to occupy that same weird intersection of interests as me,
You should definitely check it out. I also thought it was a good episode because it was quite short. was less than 30 minutes. And Seth, being as he is so concise and so direct in his communication, was able to distill a lot of wisdom and knowledge and a lot of good advice into that 30 minutes. final thing I'll say about it that I enjoyed was that the host of Animal Spirits, Ben,
He's a self-proclaimed fan of Seth's also, but he was able to kind of get a little bit of live advice almost or feedback from him. So I just felt like I was sitting in on a 30 coaching session between Seth Godin and Ben Carlson of Animal Spirits podcast. So if you have 30 minutes and you like either of those things or ideally both of them, you should check it out.
Jake (49:28)
Have fun.
that is a great recommendation. I'm going to take you up on that. I will listen to that today. So, you can hold me accountable if I'm not ready in our next podcast to talk about what I learned and potentially apply it. I don't know. Is there any Venn diagram with mrbeast, a production memo? Do you think?
JZ (50:02)
There might be. There might be.
Jake (50:03)
There might be. Okay. it'll be my job to try to, root it out. And bring it back next week.
JZ (50:07)
Excellent. final thoughts for our dear listeners, dear viewers?
Jake (50:15)
have so many more thoughts, but I'm just going to bottle them in. I'm going to suppress them and save them for next week because I'm so excited about the MrBeast memo, but we'll, we'll hold it, we'll hold it in and just dive in next week.
JZ (50:25)
Awesome.
Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. This has been episode number five of Jake and Jay Z, the weekly podcast about startups, design, technology, product, marketing, copywriting, all the other stuff that we like to think about and talk about. Jake. I'm Jay Z. This is our podcast. If you want to see more, check out jakenjayz.com and we'll talk to you next week. Bye everyone. Thank you.
Jake (50:53)
Bye, everybody.