Jim Zarkadas (00:00)
Hey, I'm Jim, and this is the Love at First Try podcast, a podcast for SaaS CEOs and developers that truly want to learn more about design and care about it, but there are no designers that find it too complex. In every episode, we discuss how to design products that become sticky and unforgettable. We dive into the topics of taste, UX, growth, and conversions, and we share practical tips and frameworks you can add into your development process. Enough with the intro, so let's dive into today's episode.

Jim Zarkadas (00:27)
welcome and thank you for joining me and making the time to discuss today. ⁓ I'm not sure if I mentioned in the past, but I discovered you through LinkedIn. I mean, you sell a LinkedIn tool, we're like it is a normal place to discover you. But I've been following, if I remember correctly, the guy that I've been following and found you was ⁓ Garav, if I pronounced his name right, the superhuman guy.

Mitchell Tan (00:50)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (00:52)
Because I've been following his content and I really like his mindset and what he stands for and so on and he was kind of a promoting you and I think like you work Yeah, you've been working together actually and he was sharing some of the stuff that you're doing ⁓ And I'm using LinkedIn. I hate the inbox. So Konto is like, yeah, I was like I this ⁓ And I started paying for it once I actually took LinkedIn seriously once I was like, okay, this is a marketing time for me I'm gonna invest time

That's where I actually started paying for condo and it was just a nice tool in my wishlist in a way. So yeah, thanks a lot for joining. the first thing that I always ask ⁓ is just kind of a brief intro about you, like who you are and what you're working on so that people that are gonna listen to the podcast, they have a clear idea before we dive into all the design stuff.

Mitchell Tan (01:40)
Yeah, sure. So ⁓ Mitchell, co-founder at Condo. ⁓ Condo is basically, ⁓ for those of you familiar with Superhuman, the email app, it's basically the same thing, but for your LinkedIn messages instead. We basically turned the LinkedIn inbox into a much more productivity optimized interface where just like email, you can sort things into folders. ⁓

Add labels, use keyboard shortcuts to go real fast, set reminders so you don't have to kind of separately track on some other task list when you need to get back to people or follow up with important people. Yeah, so that's a product. It started because we wanted this for ourselves. So I've been in the startup scene for a while doing marketing and sales. I also ran a recruiting firm for a while. So I was a heavy LinkedIn user and reached out to a lot of people.

Jim Zarkadas (02:25)
Hmm.

⁓

Mitchell Tan (02:36)
for various reasons on LinkedIn. I've always had trouble keeping track of these things. So I've tried a variety of solutions for myself, like using a spreadsheet or a Notion table, or even like hacked together a small little extension for myself. ⁓ And yeah, we basically always wish that someone would... We were superhuman users ourselves for a long time, and we're like, why can't we just have the same thing, but for our messages in LinkedIn?

Jim Zarkadas (02:48)
Mm.

Mitchell Tan (03:05)
And we tried a bunch of CRMs and even tried some automation tools which have inbox functionality. And we just didn't vibe with those because we were like, why can't you just make it like Superhuman? ⁓ And so the idea just really stuck in our head. And I mean, actually, there are all sorts of reasons not to build it like Superhuman, which we can get into. But as you

Jim Zarkadas (03:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Mitchell Tan (03:32)
users of Superhuman ourselves for a long time. And as productivity geeks ⁓ and also people with an engineering background, you're used to hotkey navigation for everything. ⁓ So yeah, was an idea that really stuck in our head. So when we wanted to build a SaaS, this was definitely on the short list. ⁓ And we're like, let's go build it since we really wanted it ourselves and see how many people are like us who would actually go pay for this thing. ⁓

Jim Zarkadas (03:45)
Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (04:01)
Yeah, and that's how came about. ⁓ Yeah, so it's just me, my co-founder, ⁓ Leo, and we have one engineer now, Anna. And we've been working on this for about a year and a half. Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (04:10)
Yeah, I saw your post. Yeah.

And you said, because I realized, for some reason I thought that you have a development background, but you mentioned that your background is more marketing sales and like a business strategy. You said you were, you've been running a recruiting firm at the same time, right?

Mitchell Tan (04:25)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I met my

co-founder at a B2B SaaS startup in the zero interest rate era where loads of VC money was flooding around just like in AI now. it was large enterprise software, so I did customer onboarding solutions engineering. ⁓ My co-founder then was ⁓ the front end lead, so we met there.

Jim Zarkadas (04:36)
Hmm.

⁓ Sounds familiar, yeah.

Mm.

I see, yeah.

Mitchell Tan (04:59)
Anna also was a team member who came on board that team later. But then at some point that startup kind of got, you know, some people in the team got acquired and joined another startup, HiTouch, larger company. Me and my co-founder wanted to kind of try our own thing. We didn't know what to do. So we're like, hey, you know, we hired a lot of people.

Jim Zarkadas (05:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Mitchell Tan (05:25)
at that company. we're not bad at hiring people. And most recruiters don't really vibe with kind of like what early stage startups need. So why don't we try do that for other startups? And so we did that for a bit. And actually the recruiting firm still exists. It's called beluga.team. Yeah, beluga.team. So it's named after a whale, helps you find stuff. But yeah, our

Jim Zarkadas (05:35)
That's very true.

Yeah, what's the name by the way, now that you mentioned?

Mitchell Tan (05:54)
Business partner there, Michael, still runs it. They help early stage startups find technical hires. ⁓ But me and Leo decided to ⁓ go back to building SAS, where we felt that we have more, like our skill set had more leverage. ⁓ And yeah, and Condo was quite, it was very top of mind, because we were doing lots of messaging ourselves at the firm. Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (06:18)
Hmm.

Yeah, I opened the website of Beluga by the way. I love the vibe man, like clean, bold, nice branding. Yeah, well done. Like that's one of the reasons that I wanted to invite you on the podcast and have a conversation is because I didn't know Beluga but I've seen Conto and you have a great taste in general. And yeah, I really like the user experience and the overall taste in the product. And I've been very excited to dive deeper. So.

Mitchell Tan (06:28)
You

Uh-huh.

Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (06:47)
⁓ Thanks for the intro and it's really interesting to know the full story because it's always interesting you meet people, you think that you know their story but then you realize you've no idea because you only know a part of their story like the post-conto kind of stuff that have been following on your LinkedIn so yeah it's cool to know the before stuff as well. As I said the podcast is really about product design and how to create delightful and

Sticky products by sticky, we pretty much mean people like products that people actually love and want to use. There is no secret trick into these. So the first topic that I wanted to dive into is the high level product strategy of Condor. ⁓ And you've said that you're pretty much building the superhuman of LinkedIn. ⁓ And I would love to go a bit deeper into that. Like how do you actually, what does it mean to copy superhuman?

Mitchell Tan (07:40)
Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (07:40)
And

what's the overall idea there? Like what is the high level product strategy that you have in mind?

Mitchell Tan (07:45)
Yeah, I

mean, the idea is like, if it isn't broken, why fix it? Right? So like superhuman, again, I mentioned we are ourselves users of superhuman for years. ⁓ the assumption here is that if you use products that you believe that you've experienced the UX to be very thoughtful and ⁓ something that you

Jim Zarkadas (07:58)
Mm-hmm.

Mitchell Tan (08:15)
you see the work in, you should just copy. The UX patterns are not very rarely super unique to your specific product. A list is a list. An inbox is an inbox. There are hundreds of tools of inboxes. There are hundreds of tools of lists. someone else has done the labor of

Jim Zarkadas (08:35)
Mm-hmm.

Mitchell Tan (08:42)
thinking through how this thing should work. And so if someone else has done that labor ⁓ and part of your flows are similar, why not do the same? But I do think the mistake would be in exactly replicating it. First, exactly replicating someone else's experiences is hard. ⁓ It's hard if you want to replicate it perfectly.

Jim Zarkadas (08:44)
Yeah, very true, very true.

Hmm

Mm-hmm.

Mitchell Tan (09:11)
they actually like layers underneath the front end, like just a pic. Like if you dig underneath the pixels, ⁓ there are non-trivial things to like what allows, for example, superhuman to deliver the experience it does. For example, when we started launching Kondo, one feedback we got from our users is, your thing doesn't feel as fast or responsive or as smooth as superhuman. And...

we actually want to compare. We put it side by side. we're like, actually, response time, the interaction time is the same. We measure it down to the millisecond. But it felt faster in Superhuman. And that's because Superhuman does a whole bunch of animations that you don't notice. They detect how you move your mouse across the screen, for example. And it changed how the UI responds, depending on which angle and direction.

Jim Zarkadas (09:54)
Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (10:04)
which angle and speed you move your mouse. So you might not know this. Yeah, you might not know. For example, if you drag your mouse upwards and rightwards on Superhuman, the row highlight response slower than if you move downwards and leftwards because they have a side panel and you slide your mouse right to the side panel. So you might want to go to the side panel and not change row highlight. But then if you move down and left, you're definitely not going to side panel. So you're definitely progressing in rows. So

Jim Zarkadas (10:07)
Ready?

Mm.

Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (10:32)
For example, or when you hit E to archive an email in Superhuman, there is a micro animation in the background that slides the roll out and moves the next thing up. ⁓ So there are all these little things. And so I guess my point number one is, if you find something great and try and copy it, that's already interesting. It's just not easy to copy something perfectly. ⁓ If it was that like,

Part of the difficulty was the labor and thinking about it, which their UX designers or product engineers have done. But also implementing it is like maybe like less work, but it's still work. ⁓

Jim Zarkadas (11:12)
Yeah,

yeah, 100%. And what you said there is like, it's not to just do a one-run copy, it's actually to deconstruct a successful kind of a product and understand what are the principles and what are the things that they've done. Like you said, the micro animations, that they make it feel smoother, that in reality, the loading time is the same, but actually how it feels is different because of all these small details, which is like a big thing on the UX, like the perceived performance versus the actual performance.

Mitchell Tan (11:22)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (11:42)
of

the product. Yeah, and also like, it's really interesting what it says, like, don't fix what's not broken, don't try to fix it, which is, yeah, in this case, it applies also to to on the right, because it's still an inbox of messages you need to manage with a bit of a CRM component on it, but you're not building a full blown CRM at the same time.

Mitchell Tan (12:04)
Yeah, and the goal was never really to build like a CRM, like, you know, there are more than enough CRMs in the market. ⁓ And people ask us for things all the time. Like, I remember early on, recently people asked for this less, but people are like, can I have a Kanban view? Right, like you have a list view, can I make my things aboard? I'm like, nope. But, but, but, but I mean...

Jim Zarkadas (12:08)
Yeah.

Exactly.

Mitchell Tan (12:29)
And our response would be, well, we built the sync to Notion. So you can sync all your data to a Notion table. And then you can visualize your Notion as a Kanban board. Or you can sync things to your CRM. And all CRMs have board views. And some of these things are less clear. Because with email, obviously, CRMs automatically vacuum all your emails up. And then you can do stuff like that.

Jim Zarkadas (12:42)
Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (12:54)
But they don't do that with your LinkedIn DM. So we kind of have to play a slightly bigger role than an email app needs to do. But we also don't... I mean, it's kind of like a product decision not to be a CRM. And so I guess this kind of brings me to my second point, is that ⁓ step one is like copy what's great. And it's a non-trivial achievement to copy it. Secondly... ⁓

I mean, it's a non-trivial decision to copy. It's short of actually hacking the product and stealing the code and copy-pasting it. mean, copying it as in studying how it works and replicating the same, rather than IP theft, which we should distinguish as not ethical and we don't support. secondly, deciding what not to copy is an interesting decision.

Jim Zarkadas (13:35)
Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Mitchell Tan (13:52)
In what small ways are you different? So for example, ⁓ in condo, ⁓ you have conversations with people on LinkedIn. they are actually not like email. your whole, like my conversation with you about five different topics goes on in the same chat room. It's not like we have five different threads, like one about like,

Jim Zarkadas (14:15)
That's a very good point, yeah

Mitchell Tan (14:16)
⁓ getting condos up for it, right.

So the kind of concept of the chat of a thread is different. And so ⁓ that's one. But the implications that has is that ⁓ in superhuman, one feature that people like a lot about superhuman is a split inbox. So you can specify if I get messages from a newsletter at

Jim Zarkadas (14:24)
Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (14:45)
something.com, move it to some other inbox automatically. And then it files it away. But in condo, and your intent might be, if Jim reaches out to me personally, it's fine. But if Jim sends me a newsletter from their newsletter thing, put it in a different inbox. You can't do this in condo. All your interactions with the same person are on the same thread. So basically, you are classifying not like

Jim Zarkadas (14:49)
Mm-hmm.

Mitchell Tan (15:13)
types of conversations, but people, right? And you might want to put people ⁓ into different, the way we think you would think about it is, okay, like Jim is a customer of Condo and that's my primary relationship to Jim. And I want to put Jim in ⁓ a tab of customers where I can just see my interaction with the customers I'm talking to rather than everyone else.

Jim Zarkadas (15:16)
Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (15:40)
⁓ And so how do you do this? Instead of like asking you to create a special split inbox and defining logic of what goes into it or not, we simply ask you to label. So you label a chat in condo and when you label something, the label creates a split tab, right, of just the people that you have labeled that. So that's actually a flow you can achieve in superhuman as well. In superhuman, you can define a split inbox on the basis of a label and then you can label threads and

Jim Zarkadas (15:40)
Mm-hmm.

Mitchell Tan (16:10)
threads will move to that split inbox. But we chose to pick. And I actually never used superhuman that way. And I didn't know you can. But I figured out later you could do the same. But basically, we took ⁓ one specific flow that you could set up in superhuman and made it the default and only way you can split inboxes in condo. And so I think, were we right? Were we wrong? there other ways to do it? These are the hard questions.

Jim Zarkadas (16:10)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (16:38)
I think choosing what not to copy and what to do slightly different, that's one thing. And then the other thing is if you go copy everything, you'll end up incurring... For example, we take reference from tools like linear a lot, which we use, right? And there are some things that if you were to copy it or replicate the same UX, you would take a lot more engineering time, right? And obviously, as a startup, you have...

Jim Zarkadas (16:41)
Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mitchell Tan (17:05)
like tiny company like Condor, have a lot less resources than a company with tens of engineers or hundreds of engineers. so choosing which corners to cut and which things not to copy, ⁓ which things are less impactful, ⁓ it's also hard. I think, yeah, point number two is choosing what not to copy.

⁓ or choosing what to do differently requires you to really understand the intent behind why it was designed the way it was, right? And then understanding whether your intent is different or how your use case is kind of different from what you're copying. ⁓ Yeah, so we often have conversations like, hey, linear does this flow this way. Why don't we do the same? And then, well, we'd be like, well, we don't do it the same because

Jim Zarkadas (17:34)
you

Hmm.

Exactly.

Mitchell Tan (18:00)
all these reasons, right? Like, here's how things are different for us. ⁓ And yeah, so I think having all these, if we were just to merely copy paste everything, would not be a good product, because we are not building the same product.

Jim Zarkadas (18:02)
Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. You need to understand pretty much everything that you said to understand why everything works and what is the right way to copy what to bring into your product, what not to bring and so on. I fully agree. Cool. And now that you mentioned what to build, what not to build... ⁓

What is an interesting topic to discuss before we dive into the more design specific things is a bit of the road mapping. You mentioned that you don't have any public roadmap and general you don't build based on custom requests. And that sounds very interesting. Like to understand more your culture of how do you decide what to do next? ⁓ Of course, it's a bit of a abstract question and it's not that, okay, here's the way we do it. Like it's not as simple as the answer itself, but I'm looking more to understand like

Mitchell Tan (18:43)
Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (19:08)
thinking, like the thought process of something comes up, maybe we could discuss about some recent features you rejected or some recent features that you actually built or both to understand a bit kind of the thought process that you have. Like you explained really well, ⁓ like how you go from superhuman or linear to condo, like how do you translate things and patterns that they have and decide if they're gonna be ⁓ useful for condo and they're gonna serve the product in the audience.

Mitchell Tan (19:32)
Mm.

Jim Zarkadas (19:35)
So yeah, I would love to discuss a bit about the roadmapping ⁓ in general and how you approach it. What is the culture there?

Mitchell Tan (19:43)
Yeah, so-

The context for this is we're somewhat of a horizontal tool. A lot of different kinds of people use it. We're not building specifically for recruiters or specifically for salespeople or founders or solopreneurs. A mix of all these people use Condo. Therefore, something that could be a killer feature for a recruiter would be completely irrelevant to a salesperson, for example.

And so as a result, would be like if we just had a, like a lot of people have these feature request boards. If we just did a feature request board and let people vote on it, the votes would be meaningless because obviously we would have to then decide which constituency of users we serve more. they'll, right? And so should you be disappointed in condo because we are building the next feature for salespeople and our recruiters and you're...

Jim Zarkadas (20:34)
Hmm. Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (20:42)
a recruiter, right? That's kind of like, I don't know, right? That feels like a net negative. It's like you asked us to do something and we choose not to do it because we thought that you were not important. But it's not that we thought you're not important. It's just that ⁓ if you were in our shoes and the same percentage of your revenue came from these different personas, what would you do, right? We can't serve everyone. ⁓ And we also can only build features that

Jim Zarkadas (20:42)
And that's a good one.

Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (21:11)
everyone would use. Right, because there are some...

There are some people who choose Condo just because it does some very specific things. those are segments of our user base that have maybe high growth potential. Or there are some things we think that we should just have that makes Condo very different as a product or superior as a product that maybe not everyone will use, maybe 10 % of people use. But maybe having that makes the product a lot more powerful. And it's something we can talk about. So they're like, it's

Given a horizontal user base, I would be supr... I don't know. Superhuman doesn't have a public roadmap. Why? Never mind that. Does Gmail have a public roadmap? Does Atio have a public roadmap? Lots of different people use CR. I don't think so.

Jim Zarkadas (21:56)
Yeah

Nope.

Mitchell Tan (22:11)
⁓ And I think the reason is that because it's not very helpful for anyone. It's not very helpful for the product team deciding on what to do next. It's not very helpful for the customers requesting it. It's not like they, your votes will end up like changing this decision that much because the decision is like not just like how many people want it. Right. ⁓ So like, what's the point? ⁓ Maybe the point is like, what's coming next, right? Maybe people just want to see, I wonder what you're building next. And I think that's fair. And

Jim Zarkadas (22:16)
Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (22:39)
we can tell people what's coming next. But also what's coming next changes. And what's coming next might take time. So if I tell you we're working on this big thing for the next three months, it doesn't matter. You'll see when it's done. And so I think.

Jim Zarkadas (22:51)
Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (22:55)
For all those reasons, think it's like, and also like maintaining a public roadmap and communicating all these things is like extra overhead. ⁓ And maybe that's fine if you have like someone dedicated to customer support and success, but it's like, again, it's like me, there's a three person team with thousands of customers, right? So we gotta be really careful when we like choose to do these things because you need to like dedicate X hours a week to making sure it's done well. ⁓ So yeah, that's why we don't have a public roadmap.

Jim Zarkadas (23:21)
Yeah.

Mitchell Tan (23:24)
And that being said, I'm not sure whatever we have landed on is a lot better. We basically look at all the things that we a combination of things we think we should build and things that people tell us we should build. And we look at all of them and be like, this looks like high impact and low effort. We always find the sweet spot between something that you can build in not too long and

Jim Zarkadas (23:40)
You

Yeah.

Mitchell Tan (23:52)
but then have a big impact. And then we do those, we try and do those first, I think. ⁓ But I'm also learning about this. I asked another Bootstrap founder, Neil Gandhi, who's building this product called send.co. It's basically like a ⁓ DocSend alternative that lets you send Docs and then you can AI chat with the Doc. The people who send it do can AI chat with it ⁓ and ask it questions.

But I asked him, how do you like, how do you, if you have all these like custom feature requests, like people email us all the time, and like, can you build this? Can you do that? Like, how do you like decide whether to do it or not? And he said, ⁓ ask, ask yourself, does it do one of three things? Does it like let you charge people more money? Does it make people pay you that wouldn't otherwise pay you? And does it reduce your churn? Right.

And if the answer to all these three is no, then don't build it. Which is like quite kind of like, yeah, maybe simple enough and how you should think about it to begin with. Right. There are some things that will make some people really happy, but they're not going to turn if you don't build it. And yeah. And they're not going to pay you more. And if you ask them to pay more for it, they wouldn't do it. And so then at the end of the day, it's we're not, we're not an internal team.

Jim Zarkadas (25:02)
you

That's a very good point.

percent.

Mitchell Tan (25:18)
building for internal stakeholders. we are ultimately a software service business where our goal is revenue. And our revenue comes from retentive usage of users who also like us and talk about us. So I think that from a user's perspective, obviously, I don't think about it this way. If I think you should do something, I just write an email and be like, can you build this?

But I think on the receiving end, it's important that we have these frameworks that ultimately tie to like, hey, we're running a business here. We're not just like building, we're not maintaining an open source repository software where, you know, like it's like, let's go build this for fun. So ⁓ I think that's maybe something I'm learning that it's like your passion for the product needs to be tempered by the fact that this is a business. And if you need to make, you need to grow and growth is measured in dollars. And if you don't grow, then your business is not very healthy.

Jim Zarkadas (25:47)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. Yes.

Mitchell Tan (26:18)
And so all product efforts ultimately should be subservient in some way to revenue growth. ⁓ The hard part is predicting that, predicting what will. But this is the secret sauce of the best PMs in the world, the PMs that can say, hey, if we build this, we're going to make X more dollars. And if they're right, that's the kind of PM you want to hire. ⁓

Jim Zarkadas (26:18)
Yeah, yeah.

100%.

Yeah, yeah, very true. And like, I really agree on every single point. I'm going to make some quick comments, like to share my personal experience from SAS, like from a SAS company that we've been designing for and we've been working with for the last three years, it's called ZenMate. I'm not sure if you know them, they're also in the bootstrap scene, Amar, from ZenMate. It's a scheduling software for cleaning businesses. So it's a vertical software. And we do have a canny board. So I'm not sure if you know the product, it's just kind of a public roadmap tool.

Is it useful? I mean, it's a nice to have, I would say. I cannot say it's like not useful, but we could live without it as well. And ⁓ to explain more on this, like we have customers, for example, requesting one of the features that they've been requesting is checklists. So they have, in May, they create the cleaning schedule for the week, they assign the cleaners, and then they can create a checklist for the cleaners so they can go with their iPhone or Android phone and mark everything as done.

They've been, it's by far the most requested feature. It took like three years to see it or something because it never became a priority. Even if it was the number one, was it a huge success in marketing? Like the drove a lot of sales? Not really. Did people turn because we didn't have this? Only small percentage, maybe some people, but only small percentage, but it was like the number one item in the list. So in theory, this would make money for the business, but in reality it doesn't. And you can see many features that are very popular that people are asking.

but they also pay you without it. And that was for me, a really kind of a big lesson of to become more mature as a product designer as well is like, don't take every feedback point seriously. Like people say things, they say, I want this, this doesn't mean they're gonna pay. Like if you want something and if you're willing to like pay 20 more dollars per month for something, these are two entirely different questions. People want stuff, but the moment they pay money is what we say, when you pay money, you pay attention. So you really think.

Do I need this? Am I willing to upgrade to make your plan? So really like on what the, I don't remember the name, like the send.co guy, like the other founder told you, like of these three basic questions to ask yourself. And I've seen it in practice also with EnMate, which is a pretty successful SaaS product as well. yeah, yeah. I really love the answer and how you articulated it.

Mitchell Tan (29:04)
And I think it's also

a bit different for B2B. We have a consumerish app, right? ⁓ So even if you personally said, hey, I will double my subscription with you if you build this thing, we'll probably not do it just because, right? If you are our largest enterprise customer and you're like, I'll pay you.

Jim Zarkadas (29:10)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mitchell Tan (29:25)
I'm paying

you $20,000 a year. I'll pay you $50,000 a year if you build this. Then this is a different story. But even then we'd be like, well, am I built? I don't want to be a custom desk shop just for you, right? I want to build this thing so that 10 other large customers will have. So I think it's very different. and I wonder, honestly, sometimes it's also people don't understand what they're asking. for example, people ask us all the time.

Jim Zarkadas (29:36)
Yeah, yeah.

Hmm

Mitchell Tan (29:54)
when are you going to build a condo mobile app? I'm like, I would love a condo mobile app. I get the frustration. I use LinkedIn on my phone. I wouldn't really be cool. But, this is an example where there's potentially moderate impact, right? Like some people only do LinkedIn on their phone. And so if we have this thing, right, maybe we'll get them to pay. But this is going to be like, not just like large amount of engineering effort, but like unknown amount of engineering effort.

Jim Zarkadas (30:08)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (30:20)
Like, we don't know how to build this thing, to be honest. It's quite open-ended in what we haven't investigated. All the problems we'll find out when we try and make condo work on mobile. ⁓ Plus, again, don't like maybe the answer is very different if I had like five more engineers full time. ⁓

Jim Zarkadas (30:20)
Mm-hmm.

Mitchell Tan (30:44)
Yeah, so I think the problem is that when you ask for something, you are not thinking how big this is actually. And it's not your job to as a user. You're just like, want this. Right? then, which is why you shouldn't take it that seriously, because people haven't thought about it a bit. Very few users think about it that deep. To give you a concrete example, actually one of our customers ⁓

Jim Zarkadas (30:52)
Yeah, exactly.

Mitchell Tan (31:11)
One of the things we do is we send data somewhere else. So ⁓ you want to sync your LinkedIn messages to your CRM or something. So we have a few options for you right now. You have webhooks where you can, whenever something updates in condo, it sends an event. And then you can specify an external destination. If you have a CRM, then you can catch an incoming webhook, or you can send it to an error table.

Jim Zarkadas (31:20)
Yeah.

Mitchell Tan (31:40)
or something like that. And a customer actually wrote to us and saying, yo, you're sending lots of duplicate events. And this is costing me a lot of deduplication work. And it's costing me resources on my infrastructure. And they actually wrote a long essay about how we should prioritize this, because it's reliability or like,

They said reliability, but the performance of this webhook service is very core to our value prop. They said that. And they said, and therefore, you should go build this thing. they said, we're not the only ones dealing with this. Your other customers probably are, and they are wasting their time handling all these duplication issues. And my response to that was, yo, that's not our core value prop.

⁓ right. Like, where, where, where, where better inbox? Like, like, just to be clear, right? Like we're better inbox where you can like do your messages much better. And so if you told us, yo, like your reminders on working, then I'd be like, 100%. We should drop everything we're doing and go make sure that reminders work. Yo, your list don't update or my messages don't show up. So how can I, you're sending the wrong message, right? Like that, that is like very like, or like,

Jim Zarkadas (32:36)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Mitchell Tan (33:01)
It takes me like 20 clicks to do this simple thing. And you told me that condo is supposed to be faster than LinkedIn. it's not like all these things. They're like, you know, when people say these things, they basically escalate things to a very high level of urgency on our end. But when people say like, you know, you have web books and your web books could be better. they're kind of crummy, right? It's temp. I mean, we do have that feature. So like you would think that we should make it good, but it is not. I mean, it's honestly, it's.

What is good about it is that it exists, that it allows you to sync your LinkedIn messages elsewhere. And there very few other ways to do this right now. There are very few solutions for this. But we don't claim to be the best at it. There are definitely better ways to do it. And there are tools where you can build a tool just for doing that. And you should go pay them instead if that was your goal. ⁓ So this is a hard one. Because if I was in their shoes, I'd be like,

Jim Zarkadas (33:58)
Mm.

Mitchell Tan (34:00)
Yo, like, you know, this is a problem. Like, like you're making me do a lot of work that I shouldn't be doing. Like this is like, but we have to, and so my approach to that is we'll look into that. We'll see if there is like a low amount of effort we can put into making it better. Like, can we put like a days, even a days feels like a lot, but like, yeah, like half a week of work into improving things.

Jim Zarkadas (34:20)
Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (34:28)
And if we can, then we'll do it. But we will not spend weeks on it. And that's because that's not why people buy condo. Or that's like, will you stop using condo because of that? Maybe you'll stop using that feature because of that. But it's not our only feature. And again, yeah, so.

Jim Zarkadas (34:31)
Hmm.

Yeah, exactly.

Not the product itself, yeah.

Mitchell Tan (34:55)
Long story short, users say things. And sometimes users give you context. But usually the context is them. And that's actually OK if you have 10 customers paying you $200,000 a year or $1 million a year. And you should absolutely go build whatever the hell they want. But when people pay us 300,000, people

Jim Zarkadas (35:03)
Hmm.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Mitchell Tan (35:19)
Again, we're very horizontal user base. So some people are like, yo, I'm paying you hundreds of dollars a year. You should do stuff. I say, I'm like, no, like, like, you don't understand. You're not paying me $300,000 a year. Right. Like, like, like let's put things in perspective. Right. Like, um, like you don't understand. That's not the software costs money and time for people to go build it. Right. And, um, if in the grand scheme of things, this is not, you're not paying a lot at all.

Jim Zarkadas (35:26)
You

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Mitchell Tan (35:49)
Um, and so, yeah, so I think that's why a horizontal tool, if you're a bootstrap, you don't, you don't have like a ton of engineering, like just learning to pick better and making difficult decisions that will inevitably disappoint some people, um, is important because if you try and like go do everything everyone says or the top voted thing, your business is not going to do very well, I think. Um, yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (35:50)
Exactly.

Yeah. And

another thing that I wanted to add like on the product strategy and we can move on like to the, the important part of, ⁓ of condo and the design stuff there is that like in product strategy, feel like the tools, like the public road bumps and so on, they're cool, but they

This is my personal experience. I don't want to generalize in general that what I've seen in the past from myself and from other founders and product people that I work with is that they love doing roadmaps and public boards because they have this false sense of control, right? Like they feel that they control, they have certainty, they have data and be like, okay, here's the way that I should build a product. But building a successful company is way more dynamic and complex than that. And there's so many moving variables, like you said before, like many things happen every week and...

Now my current take on road mappings, like I don't like road mapping. I like saying what are we gonna focus on for this month? And that's it because I like this, if I remember correctly, base camp, the base camp team mentioned is that when you plan for five months ahead, it's like assuming you're not gonna learn anything new in the next five months. Like every single week or day you learn something new from your customers, new ideas come up, the market changes, new opportunities show up, and you need to be flexible enough to respond to all these.

Yeah, it would be beautiful if building a company was as simple as I create a board, people tell me what they need and then I go and build it. Like everybody would be a millionaire if it was that simple. yeah, like product strategies, I would even say that it's almost like an art. Of course, there is a lot of strategic thinking in there, but there's a lot of intuition, a lot of taste to be added into the whole thinking. yeah, yeah. It's very, very interesting, interesting topic. And I'm personally, my personal take is like, I love the way that you

Mitchell Tan (37:42)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (37:57)
operate, but also I love how you describe it, that it's not, it doesn't mean that this is the right way for everybody. Like the separation you do between vertical or like enterprise, more enterprise, SaaS versus and more. Yeah. You're, you're like B2C, B2B, like you're a mix of both condo because you're like for, for LinkedIn people, many people using use condo like on a business context. So yeah, very, very clear. ⁓ So

Mitchell Tan (38:04)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm.

Jim Zarkadas (38:23)
Now, like one of the next topics that I wanted to discuss is the onboarding design. ⁓ Before we dive into the podcast, I was discussing about the video review where I tested the onboarding and the new ⁓ onboarding that you seeped, which is the pretty much like how you call it, like a tutorial where like you learn the shortcuts and you actually get a ⁓ solid kind of a flow that you have to follow to learn how to use Kondo.

Mitchell Tan (38:42)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (38:52)
So I have a bunch of questions on the topic of onboarding. I'm gonna start with the very mainstream one because I'm really curious to see how you're gonna react to it is how do you define an aha moment and what is your aha moment? And do you even have an aha moment defined for condo when it comes to onboarding? How do you approach onboarding in general? Why I'm saying it's a mainstream one is because the aha moment is a jargon for many people like in the industry around onboarding. And I'm curious to see your take because what I love with bootstrappers is that many times they...

don't follow kind of the what is best practice or anything and they have a different way of thinking so I'm curious.

Mitchell Tan (39:27)
I think we have some kind of rough activation definition, which is that if you do in your first hour, if you go send a message or do some triaging actions, like archive something, set a reminder, or label something, then you are more likely to keep doing that. Because if you haven't done that, then maybe you haven't figured out how to do that. Honestly, it's something we still struggle with.

Some people still go through a tutorial. We literally teach them how to do stuff. And they stay around. It's not like they completely bounce. They run around a product. They scroll around. They look at the different tabs. And then they don't do anything. And then I'm like, why? And maybe, I don't know. We're still figuring that out. So I think we have some kind of activation definition. And obviously, not everyone gets activated. ⁓

If you don't get activated and you are less likely to use it on week two, then you're less likely to retain on month two. So getting activation rate up is interesting. But it's hard, actually. It's hard also because it's horizontal and the mix of users are very different. ⁓ Maybe. I don't know. So I'm still figuring that out. But I'm not sure.

Jim Zarkadas (40:48)
Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (40:52)
The aha moment's a bit different. And I think it's really different for different users. For some people who are like, especially if you come from, let's say, if you were me and you're coming from using superhuman and with some users like that, the minute they see the thing and they have their messages that look in the same layout and then they try to use the same keyboard shortcuts as they're used to in superhuman, they're like, OK, done. This is exactly what I wanted. Say no more. I'm paying for this thing so long as it doesn't break five seconds later.

Jim Zarkadas (40:58)
Hmm

Exactly.

Mitchell Tan (41:20)
Right. So the aha moments for some people is like, yo, the UI looks better. Like I can see all my messages now. I scrolled down, like I once did an onboarding call early on. Actually, I'm not sure if this user is still a customer, but he signed up and we've at some early point forced people to an onboarding call. And he's like, okay, yeah, onboard me. And then we got him set up and then he scrolled down, right?

Jim Zarkadas (41:28)
Mm-hmm.

Mitchell Tan (41:44)
I don't know, a few months to a few months old messages. He's like, okay, I'm done. Because he's like, in LinkedIn, if I go try and scroll down and find messages three months ago, the LinkedIn UI kind of bugs out because you have to scroll a lot and it loads a lot and then it jumps on you. And so he's like, all I wanted to do is get my messages from three months ago. That's it. And he's like, I'm done. And then he literally said, you can go on your whatever you want to do, but honestly, I'm done. And there's nothing more for you to say. Yeah, she's like.

Jim Zarkadas (41:57)
No way, yeah. ⁓

I'm paying, yeah.

That's a beautiful story.

Mitchell Tan (42:13)
And so the aha moment's really different, generally different for different people. ⁓ think what we're trying to do, and I think that's a challenge as well. if all we did was help you label messages, if we labeled your message and put it into folders kind of tool, then it becomes very simple. Can I label things or can I not? But we're promising a lot more.

Meaning to say, if you build a product, all it did was label LinkedIn messages and print folders. You wouldn't actually be able to take all our customers away. Because we offer you the idea that you can inbox zero your LinkedIn messages, or go through them a lot faster, or get to a state where you're a lot more productive through all these workflows. And I think

Bits of this will stick with different people. Like there some people who would buy it just for the keyboard shortcuts. There are some people who would buy it just because you can filter your messages by who wrote you the last message. ⁓ But ideally, like the whole package kind of keeps you in the thing. And I don't, yeah, so I don't know what the aha moment, if there is an aha moment you're chasing. I know we should get people to actually do stuff and we still fail in some cases. ⁓ So yeah, success looks like you actually.

We asked you to do these things and do you do them or not very quickly? And if you don't, then why are you here? Or like where, like, do you not understand how to do these things? But you just did it because we made you practice, right? ⁓ Do you not, are you paralyzed because you're like, shit, I have like a hundred messages now, what do do? Right, help, right? ⁓ Do you not get-

Jim Zarkadas (43:45)
Mm.

Mitchell Tan (44:05)
Maybe it's the layout very foreign, like you're used to seeing your LinkedIn messages in this little pop-up thingy and then now like, you know, they're in a list and maybe that's very foreign and it takes a while to get used to. So we're still like dealing with some of these questions, like, you know, a year plus in to product and maybe we'll figure some of it out. Maybe we won't.

Jim Zarkadas (44:26)
Yeah, yeah, like with the activation, it's kind of a tricky, tricky kind of a topic that I've been also spending a lot of time thinking. Also, if we take again the example of Zen made from my side, like you, we sell a lot of different features. Like we have invoicing, credit card processing, payroll, scheduling, automated communications. Why do people pay? Like what, when I'm designing the importing experience, what should I be focused on in terms of the activation? ⁓ What is the primary goal? And

Like one thing that I found with talking with experts as well, need to find like, should think also in terms of like the majority of people, like what do most people look for and like optimize your activation around that. So for example, for Zenmade, we know that the core reason every, almost everybody comes for is automated communications and to keep everything in one place. They say that we're using Google Calendar, pen and paper and so on, and we need centralized info. So when they create the appointment where they can see beautiful sidebar with all the info organized about the appointment, the customer.

And after they create the appointment, now we're working on this design, once so a pop-up to say, hey, you just created your first appointment and now all these automated communicate, all these communications are automated. You don't have to send them manually anymore after you create an appointment. So that's a tricky one because the aha moment is actually the automation, but the automation is invisible. So how do we make it visible in the UI was this confirmation pop-up to let them know that you just hit create and boom, now you automatically schedule like 10 different messages.

to go to the customers of the team. In the case of Kondo, yeah, it's very beautiful the example that you shared with the person that was scrolling down. It's like, this was the selling point. And on this, again, from my experience, ⁓ one thing that we tried with another team, Knowledgeall, which is also another cool bootstrap company on the knowledge base space, ⁓ it's to create a help center and to know knowledge base. ⁓ We have a survey that I was inspired from Talia.

Wolf that is a big kind of a CRO expert. ⁓ We have a survey for new customers. So when somebody signs up and becomes a customer, we send an email and we ask a few questions. The most important question is what is the number one reason that made you pay for knowledge all? And it's a question that we saw that we get some interesting answers because you don't see what they need. Of course, people have many things that they're going to take like does the UX field right? Is the price okay? ⁓

do they have these specific features that I'm looking for? But the turning point, like the thing that really made them pay, may be something else, right? Or maybe one of these things in the list. And it's been a very interesting survey just to see like the core kind of things that people pay for. And this can help us prioritize also on the onboarding experience that, maybe we should make sure that we explain them the value of this, say, that knowledge all was the glossary feature that many people wanted and paid for.

⁓ So yeah, it's a tricky one. And again, on the industry with all the marketing experts, my take is that they oversimplify the whole thing with activation moments. Like, yeah, just figure out your ha moments, make sure people go through them. Boom, you have a successful and bonus. Like I wish it was that simple because figuring out the ha moment is something that every person that I talk to, they have a hard time also defining what is the right activation. ⁓ And then another thing that I wanted to show on this that I heard from Andrew.

Kaplan, if I remember his name right, he was like head of growth at Wistia, is the whole idea of thinking in activation milestones. So it's not just a aha moment, it's actually different milestones that ⁓ they have to hit. And for me as a user of Konto, it was really what you described in the first aha moment is it feels like superhuman, it's fast, it's clean, it's pretty much your core message in the website.

it doesn't look like shit, which is the case with LinkedIn inbox. Like it feels good. I want to use this. I don't feel like it's a pain to actually respond to my DMs and I can go to inbox, inbox zero. ⁓ yeah, prioritizing what's showcased during the onboarding is a very, very interesting one. And yeah, also a bit mainstream, but like what can help is to have people, to ask people for stuff like

to have on the onboarding, like on the setup account, of a flow of questions that can help you understand what things will be important for them later and prioritize them in the onboarding journey. So what you do, like with the tutorial, teach them. If you see that they're really interested into the multiple inboxes, you can make it very focused there. Or if you ask them, what's your role, let's say, or like what's the interest you're into, which you don't really need because you already have the data from LinkedIn, you could come up with a more personalized, like you could create some labels for them.

Mitchell Tan (49:04)
Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (49:04)
and create different

inboxes and be like, Hey, here are some ways that actually people in your segment are using condo to connect them more to the values. Because if you saw them labels, they also need to understand how that would translate into actual workflows for their business. So if you can kind of fill in the gap, can be, can be useful. yeah, point is, it's not easy. Like it's something that you, from my experience on this, you need to talk to people and understand the motivation they have and design the onboarding from there.

Mitchell Tan (49:10)
you

Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (49:33)
which gets me to another question that I have ⁓ for you, which is about the one-on-one calls. So one you think you did early on ⁓ is that you had everybody to do a one-on-one onboarding call with you to get access. And yeah, from your post, you said you've done thousands of these, it's still an option, but most people still serve. ⁓ And yeah, I'm curious about this part. Like what has been your experience with the one-on-one onboarding and...

if it's been kind of from a product development point of view, like if you feel that this has been key to your success so far in general. I'm asking like about how useful has this code been in general.

Mitchell Tan (50:15)
I think some users find it... I mean, we did it at first because it was early and we wanted to make sure that the product worked, right? And there are only so many things you can test for. And you don't want a lot people to drop off because the product is kind of broken or you didn't think of something, right? And so we just onboarded everyone manually, like one-on-one, and we could see that it worked, right? And I'd say now it really does not work. But...

Jim Zarkadas (50:43)
Mm-hmm.

Mitchell Tan (50:45)
⁓ but you, and you also learn, you also actually just get people to do stuff. Like when there's a human sitting in front you asking you to like, go process your messages, you just go to it. Whereas like if it's just you exploiting on your own, you might be like, ⁓ I don't really want to do this now. Right. ⁓ so there's something that it's like, it, it, it, it's a non-skillable way to like improve your activation a bit. ⁓ I think now there are also people who just want to want a human to help them with stuff.

Jim Zarkadas (51:00)
Hmm.

That's a good one.

Mitchell Tan (51:15)
Right. ⁓ There are people who like, I don't... There are people now who like, they pay and then they book an onward and call for three weeks later because there wasn't availability on the schedule for them. And they're like, I will not do anything until I talk to the human. And I'll wait for the human to tell me how to do stuff. There's some people who like, want to get on a call. And I think it caters to that segment of people as well. ⁓ Honestly, the returns are probably diminishing.

⁓ we, we don't, there are calls which I don't think I should be doing anymore. And there are, and one way superhuman did this was to get, to build a team of people to do these onboarding calls. That was not just like, you know, the founder or the founding team. And we don't want to do that because I don't want to like run a large team. and.

Jim Zarkadas (52:08)
Mm-hmm.

Mitchell Tan (52:12)
Another way is to like offer it to certain people. Like we could, we could get the availability of these calls on like a sort of a higher tier plan. We could like be smart about whether we offer these calls to certain types of people who might maybe be like potential buyers for their team. And we do want to like have that conversation or they might be like potential influencers who can like talk about us more if we had like a better relationship. Right. And so that's one.

Honestly, we should be like, the way to think about this, just like the features is to think about it selfishly from a perspective of a business and think about what, like, when it makes sense for us to be investing time in this. And we haven't done that. So I'm probably doing some calls that I shouldn't be doing and I haven't figured out how to like, not do them. ⁓ I mean, the easy way to not do that is just not do them at all.

Jim Zarkadas (52:57)
Mm.

Mitchell Tan (53:09)
Right, but then, but what do you lose? What do you lose? Right? Like maybe the guy's like, Hey yo, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm I'm a hit of sales at some place and I was testing, want to test this out, but I really want to like evaluate this from my team of 10 people. Right. ⁓ I want to get on that call, right? Like, and if, and if the calendar is right in front of face and they book a call for that, like maybe that's like one out of 10 calls, but like getting rid of all of them means I don't get these calls and I don't want to go like.

Jim Zarkadas (53:09)
Just up here.

Mitchell Tan (53:38)
chase people to book the calls with them if they were already going to book a call with me. so I think that's, yeah, figuring that. I think this is like the complexity of product led sales, right? You do want like some human layer in a PLG company to like get certain higher value conversations. And you do want like a human in the loop. You don't want to self-server entirely. But you've got to like pick. And we so far have had

no way or bad way of picking. And I think that's the next thing we need to learn. Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (54:13)
Yeah, for this, that's what I was thinking like, from the things that I've seen from my experience, like I think Winter, like a product, a market research tool for messaging, they, and also I think Help Scout are doing the same. If you click on the request demo where you can book your onboarding call, they ask you some questions and based on that, they either show you a demo to watch, like a self-serve demo experience or

can book a call and they have their own criteria to decide like many times like size of team and stuff like that and other ways that you just don't allow them to book a call but they request a demo answer a few questions and based on that you can tell what you're gonna do like just to kind of understand that the size of the opportunity and if it's like a good investment of the time but yeah it's every company like to say that every company is unique so it's about figuring out what is right for you and your user base and so on because what you just described is like

a bigger opportunity of the whole team to that wants to use a condo and not just a small kind of a random link the user that just wants some let's say product support. ⁓ It's like entirely entirely different. ⁓

Okay. And one question that I wanted to ask on the onboarding also is you did this step by step tutorial, right? And I'm curious about the following. I was reading an article from Gaurav. ⁓ I remember the word that he used, but the idea was like intrusive opinionated onboarding versus like explore the SaaS on like the product on your own way. he, the article was about how

Mitchell Tan (55:47)
Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (55:51)
good it was superhuman was very opinionated and you couldn't just start using the product. You had to go through a tutorial before you start using it. And I really like this because it was pretty bold and opinionated. And as a designer, I love opinionated stuff because they have like very specific taste and also very specific take on how things should be. It's not like here's the thing, just do whatever you believe is right. And I see you added this. I'm not sure because I'm an existing user if you force people to go through it, but I'm curious if since you were with him and his

being an advisor, like if it's like a mentality here, you want to follow also on condo in terms of the onboarding experience. ⁓

Mitchell Tan (56:25)
We force people to read. We do force people to

read. We used to stick a video in your face. ⁓ the two ways to... You could skip the video by clicking a button that says, already know how this tool works. ⁓ people would watch the Interestingly, we're seeing the results of this release. We do force people to read. And what we're seeing is that people spend less time... The time to activation is lower because people do the...

Jim Zarkadas (56:33)
Mm-hmm.

Mitchell Tan (56:53)
the self-serve kind of tutorial mode thing in a few minutes, whereas some people in the past used to watch the whole video. So I don't know. I'm like, if people are willing to watch the video, we should just let them watch the video. But the difference with a video is that you watch it and you have to remember what it said before you go do things, right? So maybe doing things is more interesting than just watch. And then there's still a very prominent link to a video after you're done.

Jim Zarkadas (56:57)
Hmm.

Mmm.

Yeah, before you practice, yeah.

Mitchell Tan (57:21)
But yeah, we force people through it. The difference with Superhuman is we made it shorter. The current Superhuman one actually takes more like four minutes. Ours takes like half the time. ⁓ What else is different? the Superhuman one, interestingly, forces you to use your keyboard. You can't click. You can go try click buttons, and they don't work. ⁓ In our flow, you can click, because we like.

Jim Zarkadas (57:45)
Really? Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Mitchell Tan (57:50)
We know some people have like, we know that some small edge case where you're on like touchscreen device or something like that. And some shortcuts might not something like that. Right. So we give people buttons to click and we know some people like clicking stuff. They're not like, it's like a huge ramp up to learn shortcuts. So, ⁓ but even then.

Jim Zarkadas (58:09)
Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (58:11)
I mean, it's interesting to observe how this went, right? The first screen is like, hey, E will archive messages, hit E three times. And there were people who would fill up a contact form and be like, I don't know how to get past this screen. I tried clicking everywhere. just couldn't. I'm like, the thing. It says hit E. they were like, oh, I hit E on my keyboard. But that just tells us about, yeah, how you don't want to block people on these.

Jim Zarkadas (58:27)
I to stop three times, yeah.

Mitchell Tan (58:40)
In superhuman's case, they could do that because you only buy it because you're upset with Gmail and you want this super... You buy it for the shortcuts or the navigation experience, right? In our case, you could be buying condo not because of that. You could be buying condo simply because you want to label your messages. And you don't need to use keyboard shortcuts to label your messages. So should we stop you from using it because you don't like keyboard shortcuts? I don't know.

Jim Zarkadas (59:05)
Yeah, that's

really really good question actually,

Mitchell Tan (59:11)
So yeah, mean, I'd say we're still figuring it out and the onboarding flow reflects like we want people to use shortcuts and we want people to clear up the inbox, but guess what? Some of them still don't. So what are we doing? Like, you know. ⁓

Jim Zarkadas (59:11)
Yeah, and

Yeah, if I talk as a user, I share my opinion on this is that I don't use the shortcuts. Like I'm not a, even if I used to be a developer, I'm not a shortcuts person. Like when I do stuff and for me it's really like the speed, even the loading time using LinkedIn is not fun, Like, I mean, you know, you're building Konto, but it's no fun and everything is really cluttered. And I really like the focus of it. Like I wish also like on social media and LinkedIn, I could have something similar.

Mitchell Tan (59:30)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (59:52)
on the fit side where I can just have a focused environment to do the important stuff and not have like 10 different things that are disturbing. ⁓ So yeah, deciding what you're to force people to go through that comes back to what we're discussing with activation, right? Where you need to understand like what is the core value that applies to most people and make sure that they get it. Could be the multiple inboxes. Like labels, I see the value, but personally I haven't used them yet because I don't have so many messages on my inbox.

Mitchell Tan (59:57)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (1:00:20)
But if I start getting a lot of inbound, then 100 % I'm gonna start using them. Now I'm just using the inbox and the reminders. So these can be also different depending on the type of the account, like the amount of messages and all this kind of, all this stuff. Cool. Now let me see. Yeah.

Mitchell Tan (1:00:24)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

We're running out of time, so anyone want

to pick a final question?

Jim Zarkadas (1:00:41)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm looking at the, at the agenda, like what are the other topics you would go for? Yeah, the other topic that I had in mind to discuss, but I don't think we're going to be able to do this today is like the AI stuff. Like you mentioned your message, like that's one of the topics I could also touch a bit, but ⁓ yeah, I don't think it's like that important. I would prefer to go to the last question, which is what's your favorite or like top three?

SAS products and why.

Mitchell Tan (1:01:14)
I mean, don't, it's a funny thing. like, we don't shop a lot for like productivity tools ourselves. ⁓ we like, use superhuman, ⁓ linear. use like, and then they're like, we use Metabase for, for, for like analytics. We use post-hoc. I don't know. mean, like obvious, like, as I mentioned earlier, like we do take a lot of inspiration from linear. They're known for like.

Jim Zarkadas (1:01:20)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Mitchell Tan (1:01:44)
They're known for being super thoughtful. And why? Because linear is trying to say, stop using Jira. And so linear better be a lot better. It's very hard to convince an engineering team to go stop using Jira. So it better be a lot better. It better be super performant, extremely reliable. And engineers are a tough crowd, because if you build product that's kind of crummy, they go start asking, why can't I build this myself?

Jim Zarkadas (1:01:56)
Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (1:02:11)
I think for that reason, they have quite a high bar for product and design. And we take a lot of inspiration from them. But I'm not sure that's because it's the best example. But it's just like we use it a lot ourselves. so yeah. And I guess we also have similar. There are some flows which are kind of similar. In linear, you have tickets. And then you process the tickets. And then you have messages where you talk back and forth in comments.

Jim Zarkadas (1:02:17)
Hmm.

Mitchell Tan (1:02:40)
Linear is an inbox. So there are resemblances in some of the flows which allows us to borrow from them. ⁓ But yeah, we always find things that in linear. The other thing is that you always find things in linear that are surprising and delightful. For example, linear has three side panels. It has a left side panel, it has the main thing, and then they have a right side panel sometimes. How do you hide or show the side panels? You just tap the.

the square bracket key on your keyboards and the right square bracket key like toggles the right side panel and the left square bracket key toggles the left side panel. And that just makes so much sense, right? So you always find these small things that... And another one we found recently is you have labels, right? But you can have nested labels. All you have to do is like type. If you're like, you have a class of labels that is like...

complexity maybe, you, right? And you can type, you can name your label complexity colon something, and it will transform your label into a dropdown. It'll give it a class. So they recognize the patterns of your naming in text, and then they infer your intent, and they give you UI for it. And so it's stuff like that. It's all these little bits and pieces which are like, someone's thought about, the engineer working on that thought, what if we just go do this as well, right?

Jim Zarkadas (1:04:03)
Mm.

Mitchell Tan (1:04:04)
I think

that's inspirational, It's like a combination of all the small things add up. If all these things for people to find, they're like, ⁓ I didn't know you could do that, right? ⁓ Yeah, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to add these things, so yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (1:04:17)
Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, 100%. Beautiful. Thanks for the answer. And yeah, yeah, it's also like, honestly, one of my favorite products, Linear. There's so much deep thinking and yeah, they're really, I mean, these products, I really love them as well because what they sell is pretty much amazing UX, right? So as it always gets me excited that their whole UVP is like, our UX is 10 times better. It's gonna be more delightful, efficient and fast and nice to use our product. ⁓ Yeah, cool.

Mitchell Tan (1:04:43)
Mm-hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (1:04:48)
Thanks a lot for joining me today. Really, really cool