just saw a pigeon rollerblading on the streets wow didn't know they made rollerblades for pigeons

Hey-o.

Chilling in Central Park right now on a bench. It’s a pretty cloudy day. There’s this group of like 25 people in front of me right now with fake samurai swords doing some sort of sword fighting class it’s pretty lit. They be dueling right now in groups of two. Poggers.

Iterating on a v1

I think one thing that’s been working for us at Zip is the concept of shipping a v1 and then iterating on it.

Also as you read this by no means do I want to give you the impression that the way we’re doing things is “right”. Or, that Zip is some fast-growing rocketship. Because at the moment we’re really not. But, this concept of “iterating on a v1” is helping us rapidly figure out our users and getting closer to building something millions of them will love. So, I felt like it’d be good to write about.

I think y’all have already heard the concept of “build an MVP/v1, keep it simple, ship it fast, iterate on what’s working, keep going from there”.

But, I used to always look at this concept from the lens of product. Like you know, “build the v1 product, ship it, etc”.

But, in the two years, I’ve been experimenting with applying the concept to all aspects of a startup. How you build features, how you design swag, how you try different growth channels, how you build landing pages, how you create an onboarding flow, etc.

For example, we build a lot of content at Zip. Three months ago we didn’t know the first thing about building good educational content. Content can get crazy complex. You can go insane with stuff like production, special effects, scripts, etc.

So with Zip we’re always thinking about new things at the company in terms of a v1 and the goal of the v1 is basically to learn. With v1 of content, we wanted to learn what good content looked like (which would be based on user surveys — “Rate this class from 1-10”) and learn how it would lead to growth for us (does new content = growth in WAUs? what types of content lead to growth? do some topics create more growth than others? science? math? art?). So, armed with what we wanted to learn we went out and shipped some early content within a few days to help us get some answers. After 3 months of these really quick cycles where we kept shipping more v1s (ex. v1 of art content, v1 of math content, v1 of the email announcing new content) we’re now wayyyyy better at building educational content and better understand how new content leads to growth.

It’s really easy to ship when you know what you want to learn or what #’s you want to optimize. You can kinda see how this concept can now be applied to tons of other problems within startups on a daily basis.

For example, let’s say you want to build an email drip campaign for users that sign up on your landing page. Which is something I worked on a few weeks ago!

This can take a month or it can take 3 hours. Depends on what you want to get out of it. For a v1 of this, I was just trying to learn: “what is the open % on these emails, what is the click % on these emails, how do these emails lead to a change in my KPI”. To answer these questions I didn’t need anything crazy like a fancy email design or amazing copy. I just needed a couple of snappy subject lines and clear CTAs in the email. From here, I can ship the v1, get the #’s, and iterate on it from there. For all I had known, emails would be freaking useless for us because our users may have hated them/ignored them! But, if it worked well we would have kept making the emails better.

That’s kinda the magic of thinking about everything new in terms of a v1, no time wasted thinking about stuff that doesn’t really matter (ex. the border radius of the button on the landing page or how many steps the onboarding flow has). At the end of the day, it’s all about: “with this v1 what new thing am I trying to learn from my user and how can that lead to the KPI growing?”. If the v1 shows you results you like, can keep on improving the thing :)!!