The Exchanges

Q We've covered quite a few different products from, you know, your WeTransfers to Evernotes to HQ Trivia Clones to your Play Ons. How is the team structured? I think people have this conceptual idea That basically Bending Spoons acquires companies, fires the team, and centralizes engineering and product.

A You can think of Bending Spoons as a horizontal platform to which we plug individual products. The platform is basically everything that you don't need to have at the product level. For instance, let's make an example, talent and recruiting, or accounting, finance, legal. But not only that, also Deep technological teams that power like library data pipelines, monetization libraries, stuff that can be adopted by each product. This way you don't need an Evernote recruiting team. You don't need a common monetization technology team. You just need to have these pieces at the platform level, and then to this platform that where we invest a lot, you can plug new products all the time. And so this means that the individual product team Can be much, much leaner than it could be as a standalone company. And often we, we see the difference that it makes. Like we can acquire companies that are very large and run them with very few people in comparison.

AI assessment note: “You can think of Bending Spoons as a horizontal platform to which we plug individual products.”

Q Totally get you. Can I ask you, you mentioned monetization there. And you've mastered across different products, paywalls, and moving from freemium to premium. What have been your biggest lessons in scaling from freemium to premium in product? Mm-hmm.

A Again, that it's very case specific. You don't have a playbook that you then apply to each product. Let's take Evernote as an example. On Evernote, we inherited a monetization structure that was based on basically unlocking advanced features. As a user, you would pay to unlock business card scanning, for instance, or PDF annotation. This creates a mismatch between the experience of a free user An advanced user, right? Because you literally have access to a different feature set. The way we approached it instead was let's try to make it so that every user sees the power, the full power of Evernote. And so we literally made many features that were previously paid free. Offline is a big one, like offline availability of notes and notebooks used to be a premium feature and now it's free. Instead we monetize based on Content. So based on how much you have on the product. And so if you want to create a lot, then you pay more. If you don't create much, then you can use it for free. So this, this basically aligns the incentives of an advanced user. I use it hours a day. I create tons of notes. I pay more and I'm perfectly fine with it. I'm a very casual user. I don't use it much. I have a few notes and just trying it out. Uh, you can try the full product. Without any constraint, and you just, like, reflect the number of notes that you actually have.

AI assessment note: “Instead we monetize based on Content. So based on how much you have on the product.”

Q Why did you decide that was a good idea? Just out of interest, like fitness products, there's so many kind of freemium where you then hit a hard paywall, Such a saturated market. Why, why did you decide that was a good idea? Yeah.

A A few years ago, one of our biggest apps was called 30 Day Fitness. It, it's still there, it still works, it's still a very good business, but at the time it was one of our biggest apps. And one of the things that we noticed is that 30 Day Fitness is a good product because people want it, but it's not, it's not great at retaining people, meaning that after a while people lose the motivation that they need To show up every day, you know, when you're training, it's, it's hard to every day remake the decision of I'll, I'll work out today. And so we wanted to solve this and we were like, can we find a way to get people to be motivated? And the best way to do it is if you have a personal trainer, right? But a personal trainer is expensive. And so we thought, can we make having a personal trainer inexpensive? And since during COVID people were used to doing things on zoom or on video calls, we were like, yeah, let's put A few people in a WhatsApp group and have a personal trainer that is paid by all of them, so they, they just need to pay one 20th of a personal trainer, but the personal trainer is in charge of keeping each of them accountable. The idea is good, but it turns out that it's not enough. You, you, you need somebody who calls you out directly, like, Harry, you're not working out today. Why, why are you not here today?

AI assessment note: “we thought, can we make having a personal trainer inexpensive?”

Q Do you have any lessons on what works, what doesn't work, and how you'd advise product owners?

A Yeah, we're not big on push notifications. We have used them in some products differently. So on Evernote, I think we don't use them at all. I mean, we use them for reminders for people who set a reminder for a note or for calendar events, but we don't like use them as a marketing strategy just because we think it would decrease the user experience. People will be pissed about it and they would turn them off. And so that would reduce the usefulness of the product. So we don't do it. On the other hand, when working on live quiz, the, the HQ trivia clone, push notifications were literally the trigger to use the product, because of course, it's happening a couple of times a day, always at the same time, but if you don't receive the notification, there are fewer chances that you actually remember to play, and so in that case, it was, it was a core part of the experience.

AI assessment note: “we don't like use them as a marketing strategy just because we think it would decrease”

Q phenomenal. My biggest takeaway from that episode actually was the fact that they run 26 experiments within the company and then allocate accordingly to who's winning and who's not winning. Thought it was incredible. Now, I want to start a little bit on you. Dentist games for kids. How did that lead to Bending Spoons and, you know, a core role in one of the most coveted companies in Europe?

A Yeah, so, When I was at university, I knew that I wanted to start a startup, and so I just jumped at the first opportunity I got. I met a friend who was thinking about starting a startup. We were in Rome for a startup event, and he had this idea. He used to be the administrator for his parents' dentistry study, and he just saw that if you have to cure a child instead of an adult, you need twice the time. And so he was like, if we can reduce that, it's, Probably better, right? And so he thought, can we just gamify the experience a little bit? And the insight was good, but the way we implemented the result, I don't think is what it was great. And so I learned that you should care about what you're thinking of building. And, and yeah, and so that failed, uh, or I mean, it's still alive, but it didn't scale in a hyper growth way. And then I just like, I wanted this hyper growth feeling. And the way I discovered Bending Spoons was on the internet. And I just, Read the things that were written on their website, and they were so ambitious, so clear, so, like, we know what we are. We are having great results, but we are not satisfied. Uh, we are at the scale of downloads of, like, Twitter or Spotify or stuff like that, and, and they are unknown, right? And I was like, who are these people who are getting these results while being unsatisfied by the scale they're at? And so I started st…

AI assessment note: “I wanted this hyper growth feeling. And the way I discovered Bending Spoons was on the internet.”

Q Seven and a half years at Bending Spoons. You can call up Fede the night before your first day, ok, and say, ah, I've done this before and you should know this. What would you tell yourself on that night before?

A Be bolder. I think sometimes I waited for somebody to give me permission to do stuff. As if I was in school, and instead, when you, when you start doing stuff autonomously, and it looks like it's something smart and it can work, people will just cheer for you. It's not, it's not like anybody's gonna stop you, at least not a Bentley Spoons. If you have an idea for something that works, we're just gonna be enthusiastic about you trying it. So I tend to be high agency, but, but I didn't have the confidence to just start doing stuff, and, and I'm glad that they, they pushed me to do it, but I would just tell myself, be bolder, start more things.

AI assessment note: “Be bolder. I think sometimes I waited for somebody to give me permission to do stuff.”

Q We've covered quite a few different products from, you know, your WeTransfers to Evernotes to HQ Trivia Clones to your Play Ons. How is the team structured? I think people have this conceptual idea That basically Bending Spoons acquires companies, fires the team, and centralizes engineering and product.

A You can think of Bending Spoons as a horizontal platform to which we plug individual products. The platform is basically everything that you don't need to have at the product level. For instance, let's make an example, talent and recruiting, or accounting, finance, legal. But not only that, also Deep technological teams that power like library data pipelines, monetization libraries, stuff that can be adopted by each product. This way you don't need an Evernote recruiting team. You don't need a common monetization technology team. You just need to have these pieces at the platform level, and then to this platform that where we invest a lot, you can plug new products all the time. And so this means that the individual product team Can be much, much leaner than it could be as a standalone company. And often we, we see the difference that it makes. Like we can acquire companies that are very large and run them with very few people in comparison.

AI assessment note: “You can think of Bending Spoons as a horizontal platform to which we plug individual products.”

Q Why did you decide that was a good idea? Just out of interest, like fitness products, there's so many kind of freemium where you then hit a hard paywall, Such a saturated market. Why, why did you decide that was a good idea? Yeah.

A A few years ago, one of our biggest apps was called 30 Day Fitness. It, it's still there, it still works, it's still a very good business, but at the time it was one of our biggest apps. And one of the things that we noticed is that 30 Day Fitness is a good product because people want it, but it's not, it's not great at retaining people, meaning that after a while people lose the motivation that they need To show up every day, you know, when you're training, it's, it's hard to every day remake the decision of I'll, I'll work out today. And so we wanted to solve this and we were like, can we find a way to get people to be motivated? And the best way to do it is if you have a personal trainer, right? But a personal trainer is expensive. And so we thought, can we make having a personal trainer inexpensive? And since during COVID people were used to doing things on zoom or on video calls, we were like, yeah, let's put A few people in a WhatsApp group and have a personal trainer that is paid by all of them, so they, they just need to pay one 20th of a personal trainer, but the personal trainer is in charge of keeping each of them accountable. The idea is good, but it turns out that it's not enough. You, you, you need somebody who calls you out directly, like, Harry, you're not working out today. Why, why are you not here today?

AI assessment note: “can we make having a personal trainer inexpensive?”

Q You said, hey, we, we get Figma mockups, and then we'll show them to customers. Is the way that you're doing design, testing, changing in a world of AI? And if so, how?

A When I was working on Evernote, I still am a lot, but, but when I was focusing only on Evernote, we didn't have lovable cursor and these tools. And so we were building designs and we were showing them to people. Uh, and we were asking questions like, by looking at this, how would you use it? Now we can build prototypes and even if they are rough, we can put them in the hands of people and we can just like ask and use it and we'll observe. It's kind of different. Like people tell you that they would do something and then in reality, when they have a prototype on their computer, they would do something different. So it's, it's closer to the truth.

AI assessment note: “Now we can build prototypes and even if they are rough, we can put them”

Q I love that in terms of, like, the commitment attached to periods of your life. What product decision has led to the greatest churn, and what did you learn from that?

A The thing we did on Evernote that produced the biggest churn was when we raised prices in 23, which is something that we thoroughly analyzed, and we ultimately made the decision to do it nonetheless. The reason being, we believed, and we still believe it, that Evernote provides a great deal of value to people that use it, and that we could optimize pricing. At the time, we thought we could increase prices and people would still consider it a great deal. Not all of them, of course. There is a small amount of people who thought Evernote was either already too expensive or kind of at their threshold. It's, it's like when you are subscribed to Netflix, and you see that every year or two, they increase your subscription. And when you receive that email, you're like, is it still a good deal for me? It's either yes or no, and then you make a decision based on, am I getting enough out of this product and subscription that I'm accepting to stay subscribed to it? And similarly on Evernote, we thought let's increase prices in a way that still it's a no brainer for the vast, vast majority of people accepting that some people will, this will be over their threshold and we'll have to, to let them go. Uh, the most like unmotivated people, the, the least advanced ones, maybe the ones that were, maybe we're already thinking about, uh, unsubscribing.

AI assessment note: “The thing we did on Evernote that produced the biggest churn was when we raised prices”

Q Do you think you make it easy enough for people to unsubscribe from your products? Yeah.

A Yeah. We, we invest a lot. I mean, at the end of the day, being here for the long run, it's not just about Evernote, right? It's about bending spoons, all of our products. We are acquiring bigger and bigger products. Instead of making a two percent more revenue on Evernote, it's much more important to build a reputation of a company that you can trust. And so instead of like some newspaper, I think famously asked you to call a phone number to unsubscribe. And that was the only way to unsubscribe. Then you had to wait Half an hour to unsubscribe. Instead, we, we, we review the unsubscription process regularly so that it's not too, too cumbersome, too frictionful.

AI assessment note: “we review the unsubscription process regularly so that it's not too, too cumbersome”

Q Was it immediately apparent that it wasn't working? And do you think when you have a product that isn't working, you can tell very quickly?

A It depends on how much you're lying to yourself. If you're very truthful and you have a plan for how do I validate that it's working with metrics, then it's easy. If you're like, let's put it out there and see what people do. It's a bit harder because then you, you will be hopeful you invested a lot in it and you'll try to find signals of usefulness. And signals of retention. And so yeah, you should be very ruthless with yourself before you start and say, these are the metrics that we'll look at when we launch to determine if it's a good product. And like, I'm the first one who's guilty. I, I often lay too much hope behind the product launch.

AI assessment note: “It depends on how much you're lying to yourself.”

Q phenomenal. My biggest takeaway from that episode actually was the fact that they run 26 experiments within the company and then allocate accordingly to who's winning and who's not winning. Thought it was incredible. Now, I want to start a little bit on you. Dentist games for kids. How did that lead to Bending Spoons and, you know, a core role in one of the most coveted companies in Europe?

A Yeah, so, When I was at university, I knew that I wanted to start a startup, and so I just jumped at the first opportunity I got. I met a friend who was thinking about starting a startup. We were in Rome for a startup event, and he had this idea. He used to be the administrator for his parents' dentistry study, and he just saw that if you have to cure a child instead of an adult, you need twice the time. And so he was like, if we can reduce that, it's, Probably better, right? And so he thought, can we just gamify the experience a little bit? And the insight was good, but the way we implemented the result, I don't think is what it was great. And so I learned that you should care about what you're thinking of building. And, and yeah, and so that failed, uh, or I mean, it's still alive, but it didn't scale in a hyper growth way. And then I just like, I wanted this hyper growth feeling. And the way I discovered Bending Spoons was on the internet. And I just, Read the things that were written on their website, and they were so ambitious, so clear, so, like, we know what we are. We are having great results, but we are not satisfied. Uh, we are at the scale of downloads of, like, Twitter or Spotify or stuff like that, and, and they are unknown, right? And I was like, who are these people who are getting these results while being unsatisfied by the scale they're at? And so I started st…

AI assessment note: “I wanted this hyper growth feeling. And the way I discovered Bending Spoons”

Q kind of paid and how we think about that. I do just want to go back to, we were talking about ideas, testing new ideas internally. When we think about like, okay, impact on top line, can you take me to a product decision where the impact on top line has not been significant, but it was still important for you to do? And how did you think about that?

A I think Evernote is the best example of this. Many of the things that we do on Evernote are not because we want to increase revenue, but it's because we want to make the product more useful. And in a very unquantifiable way, we just trust that by making the product more useful, people will keep choosing to stay on Evernote. Evernote is an archetype, is a kind of a product that has great inherent retention, because people pour their working hours into it, and so they build their content, they get familiar with the, with the product. But really what we do is we try to make Evernote more useful every day, even though we cannot, for each individual feature that we build, Analyze its financial performance. But it's still something that I would still choose to do every day because it's just so important to people. Even though we can't demonstrate that the ability to collapse sections on a note, for instance, leads to higher retention, the bulk of it, the long tail of features that you build that make the product more useful have to matter in your choice to keep using Evernote every day.

AI assessment note: “Even though we can't demonstrate that the ability to collapse sections on a note”

Q How do you know when to ingest advice and change versus discard it with customer feedback?

A It's especially important to realize when people are telling you, I don't need this. And people never tell you, I don't need this. They generally tell you, yeah, it looks fine. It looks okay. And so you have to be, there's a great book. It's called the mom test that you can read. And it tells you, if you ask your mother, did I do okay? She's always going to tell you that you did okay, right? It's, she's never going to tell you, yeah, you did poorly, or this is not good. You should ask questions in a way that forces people to tell you, Yeah, I would actually not use this. So for instance, instead of asking you, how often do you work out? You will come up with an ideal version of you that, that says like, yeah, I work out three times a week. But then I ask you, how many times have you worked out last week? You're like, only one, but actually it's because I had the meeting and it was away. Okay, well, how many times did you work out the previous week? Still one because of this other thing? The previous week, still one. And so after a while you notice that The things that people actually do are different from the things that they say, and so you should ask people, instead of do you like this feature or would you use it, you should ask them, what's a use case that you had in the last month for which this would have been useful? And if they can't come up with any, it's a, it's a red …

AI assessment note: “if they can't come up with any, it's a, it's a red flag”

Q It's very difficult when you have A broad set of customers. Ones which are incredibly advanced power users, and ones which are much more casual. How do you advise people on building products for both without alienating either?

A It's not easy. It's, it's not, there's no like silver bullet that you can pull that makes both happy. Sometimes you can find things that are useful to both groups. You should think about your product very specifically, like Evernote. Should we build EverNote for casual users? What would casual users do? They wouldn't pay because they are casual, and so they wouldn't invest much on a, on a product that just gives them, like, basic functionality. They have loads of competing products that they can choose from. Apple Notes, Google Keep, and stuff like that, and so it doesn't look like it's a great arena to fight. You have great competition that's free, and that's pre-installed on your device. How can you win that battle? Instead, advanced users, you cannot use Apple Notes if you're very advanced. If you cannot use Google Keep if you're very advanced. So that's a battle that we can win. So it's very important to realize what arena you choose before you start.

AI assessment note: “it's very important to realize what arena you choose before you start.”

Q kind of paid and how we think about that. I do just want to go back to, we were talking about ideas, testing new ideas internally. When we think about like, okay, impact on top line, can you take me to a product decision where the impact on top line has not been significant, but it was still important for you to do? And how did you think about that?

A I think Evernote is the best example of this. Many of the things that we do on Evernote are not because we want to increase revenue, but it's because we want to make the product more useful. And in a very unquantifiable way, we just trust that by making the product more useful, people will keep choosing to stay on Evernote. Evernote is an archetype, is a kind of a product that has great inherent retention, because people pour their working hours into it, and so they build their content, they get familiar with the, with the product. But really what we do is we try to make Evernote more useful every day, even though we cannot, for each individual feature that we build, Analyze its financial performance. But it's still something that I would still choose to do every day because it's just so important to people. Even though we can't demonstrate that the ability to collapse sections on a note, for instance, leads to higher retention, the bulk of it, the long tail of features that you build that make the product more useful have to matter in your choice to keep using Evernote every day.

AI assessment note: “ability to collapse sections on a note, for instance, leads to higher retention”

Q What did you learn from doing the HQ trivia clone?

A How intoxicating working on a successful product can be. It's just the experience of a lifetime to work on something that goes hyper viral. We literally launched as a beta test with friends and family. I remember literally telling people don't tell others because we can only support, I don't know, 50 users simultaneously, a hundred users. I don't remember, I don't remember the number, but I literally remember asking people not to tell others. And we never, never, never did anything else to, to make it grow. It just, from that moment, when I, when I told my family, my friends, don't tell others, it just went viral from there. We, we even set aside some money, I think a few tens of thousands of viewers to do marketing. We never touched them. It's, it's just, it just took off. Sometimes you can see when a product works immediately.

AI assessment note: “How intoxicating working on a successful product can be.”

Q Going back to the structure, when you acquire a new business, a Vimeo, an AOL, What happens then? I know it sounds stupid, but like, does Luca say, hey everyone, we're acquiring this, who wants to work on it? Is that how it works?

A We take into account people's preferences. Like, if somebody comes to me and tells me, I like to work on Vimeo, I'm like, that's great. It's great to know that some people are passionate about one or the other product. I mean, at the end of the day, I think people are, perform better when they are working on something they are passionate about. To the extent that it is possible, We always try to make it so people are working on stuff that they care about and they're passionate about. So, so we definitely encourage people to tell us, but it's not like we find volunteers to, to work on a, on a product. It's more about functional leads. So our CTO, Matteo, our co-founder, myself, other people, we have in mind the structure of, of the product teams, and we try to see where we can find people that are best suited to work on new acquisitions.

AI assessment note: “it's not like we find volunteers to, to work on a, on a product.”

Q I had this wonderful schedule and I'm just kind of blowing it up. Sorry, as I said to you, I like real conversations. I do want to go through that, but kind of start at the beginning before that testing element, which starts with an idea. How do you determine which ideas to take and run with versus which to discard within Bending Spoons?

A Two ways. We try to find the best ideas by one, analyzing the top line. So how valuable is this idea? How much revenue is it going to bring? How many more customers is it going to bring? And we try to be very qualitative about it. Is it a step change compared to the previous way you do things? And these things are generally alternative because you cannot analyze how much of a step change it is if you don't have a prototype. So for instance, on Evernote, I think building things that are useful is the most important thing, but you can never quantify useful. It's very hard to say this feature is more useful than the other, so generally the way we try to do it is we see how many people might need it.

AI assessment note: “We try to find the best ideas by one, analyzing the top line.”

Q How do you know when to ingest advice and change versus discard it with customer feedback?

A It's especially important to realize when people are telling you, I don't need this. And people never tell you, I don't need this. They generally tell you, yeah, it looks fine. It looks okay. And so you have to be, there's a great book. It's called the mom test that you can read. And it tells you, if you ask your mother, did I do okay? She's always going to tell you that you did okay, right? It's, she's never going to tell you, yeah, you did poorly, or this is not good. You should ask questions in a way that forces people to tell you, Yeah, I would actually not use this. So for instance, instead of asking you, how often do you work out? You will come up with an ideal version of you that, that says like, yeah, I work out three times a week. But then I ask you, how many times have you worked out last week? You're like, only one, but actually it's because I had the meeting and it was away. Okay, well, how many times did you work out the previous week? Still one because of this other thing? The previous week, still one. And so after a while you notice that The things that people actually do are different from the things that they say, and so you should ask people, instead of do you like this feature or would you use it, you should ask them, what's a use case that you had in the last month for which this would have been useful? And if they can't come up with any, it's a, it's a red …

AI assessment note: “if they can't come up with any, it's a, it's a red flag”

Q I love that in terms of, like, the commitment attached to periods of your life. What product decision has led to the greatest churn, and what did you learn from that?

A The thing we did on Evernote that produced the biggest churn was when we raised prices in 23, which is something that we thoroughly analyzed, and we ultimately made the decision to do it nonetheless. The reason being, we believed, and we still believe it, that Evernote provides a great deal of value to people that use it, and that we could optimize pricing. At the time, we thought we could increase prices and people would still consider it a great deal. Not all of them, of course. There is a small amount of people who thought Evernote was either already too expensive or kind of at their threshold. It's, it's like when you are subscribed to Netflix, and you see that every year or two, they increase your subscription. And when you receive that email, you're like, is it still a good deal for me? It's either yes or no, and then you make a decision based on, am I getting enough out of this product and subscription that I'm accepting to stay subscribed to it? And similarly on Evernote, we thought let's increase prices in a way that still it's a no brainer for the vast, vast majority of people accepting that some people will, this will be over their threshold and we'll have to, to let them go. Uh, the most like unmotivated people, the, the least advanced ones, maybe the ones that were, maybe we're already thinking about, uh, unsubscribing.

AI assessment note: “produced the biggest churn was when we raised prices in 23”

Q That's fascinating. So we have the idea process, and then we have the, ooh, we've got something that could be a good idea. How do we go from idea to early testing and MVP? What does that look like?

A Yeah, it depends a lot, product by product. So on Evernote, it's more about Sitting down with customers, having conversations with them, showing them prototypes on Figma, for instance. Does this look like something that you think is useful for you, for your use case? And then over time, we've started knowing our customers better. We have a panel of Evernote experts that we know well, and we know their use cases, and so we know that we can always count on them on providing feedback on advanced features. When it's a more casual feature, maybe we will want to talk to a more like average customer. So the way we Identify the feature that works on Evernote is we just sit down with people and we show it to them. We show the prototype to them. We show the Figma to them. And based on their feedback, we just tweak it or maybe even discard it.

AI assessment note: “showing them prototypes on Figma, for instance.”

Q What have you learned from doing those monthly updates and how would you advise other product owners or CEOs on doing monthly updates to customers?

A I learned that user feedback matches reality and substance very directly. So when you issue a monthly update full of content that nobody needs, they'll just tell you, this is irrelevant. I don't need this. Why are you working on this? They're very direct in a way that I find motivating, meaning that they're not trying to be kind. They're trying to be truthful. And so they just tell you if you're doing, if you're working on stuff that doesn't matter to them, you can do something very easy. You can, you can look at our YouTube videos. And look at the comments under the videos, and see that when we started, we were learning, and so we didn't get every update right all the time, and people would just tell us, I'm pissed, you raised prices, and now you're being this stuff that I don't need.

AI assessment note: “I learned that user feedback matches reality and substance very directly.”

Q Nah, this is true, but you're gonna get some churn in between, dude. Yeah, yeah. What is the most non-obvious skill that a PM needs to be successful?

A I think great PMs are entrepreneurs, at heart, at least. Like, people who can come up with valuable ideas, find a way to implement those ideas well, focus on what matters, meaning that the idea needs to be relevant for a goal. Being successful financially is one, but also, like, doing stuff that gets, that goes viral and gets a lot of coverage. I mean, it depends on, on the goal, but you need to be very focused on what matters. The best entrepreneurs are great. Creative people are coming up with ideas. Designers are thinking what the UX should look like. Project managers that get the team to ship fast and, and they ship fast with the team. So I think, I think being an entrepreneurial is, is a hell of a skill for a PM.

AI assessment note: “I think great PMs are entrepreneurs, at heart, at least.”

Q I had this wonderful schedule and I'm just kind of blowing it up. Sorry, as I said to you, I like real conversations. I do want to go through that, but kind of start at the beginning before that testing element, which starts with an idea. How do you determine which ideas to take and run with versus which to discard within Bending Spoons?

A Two ways. We try to find the best ideas by one, analyzing the top line. So how valuable is this idea? How much revenue is it going to bring? How many more customers is it going to bring? And we try to be very qualitative about it. Is it a step change compared to the previous way you do things? And these things are generally alternative because you cannot analyze how much of a step change it is if you don't have a prototype. So for instance, on Evernote, I think building things that are useful is the most important thing, but you can never quantify useful. It's very hard to say this feature is more useful than the other, so generally the way we try to do it is we see how many people might need it.

AI assessment note: “Two ways. We try to find the best ideas by one, analyzing the top line.”

Q That's fascinating to hear actually how you use different tools across different teams. If we progress that along one stage, we have the idea, we have the prototyping and the putting in the hands of customers, we then have the, I'm actually going to build it. How does the build process look for you internally?

A Usually is, let's try to close the gap between the prototype and something that is production ready, because the prototype, if you did it well, it's inexpensive, and so it means that it lacks a lot of the things that make it production ready. It's basically a probe to some extent. We call it a probe. It's a piece of software that is built to demonstrate that one metric is X or Y, and that's its only job, and so when people interact with it, They give you the answer, but it's not ready to be plugged into the broader product. And so this way you can get your answer, but then in order to be able to plug it to the, to the broader product, you need to do some work.

AI assessment note: “let's try to close the gap between the prototype and something that is production ready”

Q Totally agree with you there, and I love that you say that, hey, it's better to do small weekly improvements communicated well than like, don't hear from us, and then a big splash every, you know, six months. You do Evernote monthly updates. Can you just talk to me about that, the process of that, what you learn, and how you'd advise other product people from doing that?

A This was born out of necessity, meaning that when we acquired Evernote, there were a few months in which we made the decision to work very deeply on the technological foundations of Evernote. Evernote was launched in 2007, I think, so it's almost 20 years old, and so it's not full of bad code necessarily, but it's full of old code, and it's very important that we innovate that and, and we make it modern if we want to work on Evernote for the next 10 or 20 years, right? We made the conscious decision of working on tech foundations, but as we were doing that, we were also communicating the acquisition, and we were raising prices, as we were, we discussed earlier. These three things combined, for a customer, are...

AI assessment note: “This was born out of necessity, meaning that when we acquired Evernote”

Q Totally agree with you there, and I love that you say that, hey, it's better to do small weekly improvements communicated well than like, don't hear from us, and then a big splash every, you know, six months. You do Evernote monthly updates. Can you just talk to me about that, the process of that, what you learn, and how you'd advise other product people from doing that?

A This was born out of necessity, meaning that when we acquired Evernote, there were a few months in which we made the decision to work very deeply on the technological foundations of Evernote. Evernote was launched in 2007, I think, so it's almost 20 years old, and so it's not full of bad code necessarily, but it's full of old code, and it's very important that we innovate that and, and we make it modern if we want to work on Evernote for the next 10 or 20 years, right? We made the conscious decision of working on tech foundations, but as we were doing that, we were also communicating the acquisition, and we were raising prices, as we were, we discussed earlier. These three things combined, for a customer, are...

AI assessment note: “This was born out of necessity, meaning that when we acquired Evernote”

Q What have you learned from doing those monthly updates and how would you advise other product owners or CEOs on doing monthly updates to customers?

A I learned that user feedback matches reality and substance very directly. So when you issue a monthly update full of content that nobody needs, they'll just tell you, this is irrelevant. I don't need this. Why are you working on this? They're very direct in a way that I find motivating, meaning that they're not trying to be kind. They're trying to be truthful. And so they just tell you if you're doing, if you're working on stuff that doesn't matter to them, you can do something very easy. You can, you can look at our YouTube videos. And look at the comments under the videos, and see that when we started, we were learning, and so we didn't get every update right all the time, and people would just tell us, I'm pissed, you raised prices, and now you're being this stuff that I don't need.

AI assessment note: “I learned that user feedback matches reality and substance very directly.”