Guessing & Testing a Feature's Popularity, A Bias Towards Action [Business] That Talking Thing | S2, E15 That Talking Thing

Business-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We'll talk about how to know whether a new feature is going to be popular. What are some ways to see whether many people really need this or just a few noisy users. We also discuss realizing our team has a bias towards action and some ways to help us interview and hire the people that naturally have this bias.







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Transcript: Season 2, Episode 15



Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim I'm Jason. This is episode 15, season two, and we were talking about our favorite thing, not our children, our business as stop X. And there's a good one coming up a phrase that I've been like reading recently. That's really motivated me in changing the way I think about business.



But first let's also talk about how do you know if a feature will be popular. Yeah. So I'm going to talk about a feature that's been brought up repeatedly historically for our product. People have mentioned it and then we'll decide maybe we'll make a plan for how would you evaluate whether the popularity of this?



So, one thing is. WordPress user accounts. We're a membership plugin for WordPress. So it tacks onto WordPress allows you to create members in your WordPress site that login can access private things. Um, you can do a paid membership or you can do a free membership. So for this feature, um, all WordPress user accounts require an email address.



People have long said, what if I don't have users with email address? Is there a certain, uh, age that they're not email users? Along with that. What do you do if somebody has an account with an email address and just wants to update their billing, doesn't want to have to authenticate. Doesn't want to have to log in.



So I guess the feature is kind of twofold, a user accounts without an email address or some kind of magic links that would come to you by email, and you could use to authenticate yourself without a password to manage your account. Whether it's to update a payment method on file access and invoice, you see like magic links, a lot of places, whether it's secure codes or, or secret code sent to you, all kinds of things.



So how would you even evaluate if we should do that? It's been. In our internal channels for awhile and it's tough. And I know why we have them because I think the notion is that this is easier. It's less, you don't even have an email, but not in this case. It's like the internet expects you to have an email address and kind of accounting for those cases where you don't have one, or you already have an account on the site is complicated.



And that's why we keep kicking the can down the road. But it, um, we need like, There's other stuff they'll say, I want to be able to check out without an email address, but there's probably like something else. We could get more specific about what they really need. Um, But it is, uh, yeah. So both of those things w cause people are asking for them, is it still a good idea to do this also came up again because we're talking with a crypto protocol, which part of the unlock protocol and part of, uh, you know, crypto in general is kind of privacy.



And, uh, you know, you could sign in with a Ethereum wallet and we don't know your email address, and that's kind of one of the problems that has to be handled. And they're kind of diving in head on. Um, like how about WordPress user count without an email? Um, and just try to fake it. Um, Hm. So how would we evaluate if it's, I don't, I don't even, it's funny.



Like, I, I believe people would use this and like I would, on my own side, I realized, yeah, that one where like, w uh, on the alumni association site, we imported a bunch of users and then the