dropped french fry grease on my piano and the keys are so smooth now but my hands smell like old french fries
Zip
We’re just shipping so much stuff every week lol. It’s kinda ridiculous in an awesome way.
We’re doing a good job at just focusing on delivering value to our users and building on what they’re telling us. Everything from the classes we choose to create to the features we build. I think Zip has very little randomness. Nearly everything is connected to a user conversation or a #.
Not everything we do leads to massive positive changes in the data, though — lol.
Sometimes you ship something and it doesn’t move the needle, and it feels bad. But, I think the optimistic way of looking at this is: “Hey, we thought X, we shipped Y, it changed the metric by Z %”. That “Z %” is super important because it’s the thing we can keep building on. Without the Z %, Zip is lost.
For example, we shipped this no-auth flow last week where users can now explore classes on Zip without making an account (before, we forced you to make an account before you saw anything). We felt this would be good because 1) Tons of our competitors do it 2) We had a large % of users who would drop off between landing -> creating an account -> creating a booking. So, we thought “Okay, let’s remove the account creation step and reduce the pain it takes to make a booking with the goal of increasing landing -> booking %”.
We thought this would create a big increase in the % of people who go from the landing page -> booking a class. But, it actually negatively changed that % and actually brought it down 50%.
I think the wrong way to look at this is saying, “Wow we spent 3+ days making this page and it didn’t even help — in fact, it messed things up! UGH!”.
But, I think the right way to look at it is, “We tried a big new thing because of X metric, shipped it, got the data for how it performed, and now have a ton of #’s we can look at as we brainstorm the next version/iteration of this next flow”.
It not doing well is actually exciting because it shows we still have a lot to learn and have clear #’s that we can chase to win. What would feel horrible is if we’re doing worse and we have no idea why.
In the case of this new no auth flow, we know exactly where the drop-off is happening in the funnel (it’s between a user hitting the classes page -> actually tapping a class), and can do a better job of understanding that core action. Why are users not tapping the class? Is the card not loading fast enough? Do they get overwhelmed by the # of classes? Do they want a more hand-holdy of helping them pick classes? Is it clear that they can scroll on this page on smaller devices?
Anyways, here’s a dope pic a user shared with us:
Personal
Been a good last two weeks for me, personally.
ZipSchool is more than just me now. We’re a team of 4 and have 1000s of families depending on us every week. Soon we’ll have tens of thousands. Gotta keep the ole’ brain in tip-top shape.
Been doing super basic stuff: wake up at 6AM, read for an hour, run 2-4 miles per day after work, in bed by ~9:30PM.
Just going to keep it up! Working well.