pointed my tv remote at my microwave and then i met the Beatles, wild.

What’s going well: talking to users.

I used to think that talking to users meant, like, talking to them on the phone. And, well, it does! That’s one way to talk to users. But, when I started Zip I wanted “talking to users” to be literally built into every aspect of the company.

I think one thing we’re doing right at Zip that feels magical is this loop of ideate -> ship -> talk to users -> repeat. But, “talking to users” means more than just hitting them up on the phone.

• Everyone at Zip has at least 1-3 user calls scheduled per day. Talking on the phone w/ users is still usually the highest value activity at a startup.

• We survey users obsessively. We almost never have massive disagreements at Zip because we can just ask users on a survey and see what they say. Doesn’t matter what we think usually. Mobile app? New way to visualize classes? Just ask users and see the data. Ex. we surveyed users about what calendar they used before building a G-Cal integration so we could at least say what % of users used G-Cal and — it was 60% lol. So, it gave us a clear reason to build the feature. And, now it’s being used 1000s of times per week. Last week it was used 1435 times.

• We have 100s of people hit us up on support/intercom with requests, questions, recommendations, etc. This is freaking awesome because you can really talk to these people and better understand them + see patterns. For example, we had like 50+ people not know how to join a class on Zip. Well, that’s a problem lol. When we go to build the fix it’s easy to justify the “why”.

• Whenever we ship something, we make a post on the FB Group, no matter how big or how small. Showing users that we listen and execute has been awesome for us. It’s made them more vocal. We get a crazzzzzzy # of requests for features and classes now because we’ve shown people that we’re not the type of company to just be like, “Wow!! That’s an awesome request!!! Ty for the feedback haha <3”. We’re more the type to be like, “Good idea. It’ll be in the app next week”. And then it actually is.

One example of talking to a user on FB and then executing on it:

User says:

We ship the feature a week later:

What’s not going well: health.

lol.

Last 4 weeks I’ve felt like trash. Probs b/c I’ve been waking up every day at 5:30am, arriving at work at 7am-ish, leaving at 8pm, then sleeping at 9pm. Eating out every day. Not exercising at all.

looooool.

Zip’s been growing a ton and I’ve been prioritizing it over most other aspects of my life. But, not sustainable.

Slow brain = slow growing company.

Gonna go on a 4 mile run for the next 7 days starting Sunday morning. Also, looking to cook breakfast every day. That’s a good start. Easyyyy.

Wish me luck :).

Reviews

The Zip reviews are starting to come in :).

Cute.

Enjoy this picture of two ZipKids watching their ZipSchool class. It literally says ZipRocketship on the box.

My heart.

Feelings.

Been feeling pretty optimistic lately. I love working with the homies. Seems like there is finally a path to the pandemic ending. Good music and movies being released every month. Tons of people around me creating and making stuff they think is dope. It’s a beautiful world. Excited to be part of it and hopefully play a massive role in it :).