This week, I’ve been thinking about product management, taking time off, and making new friends as an adult.

Questions

Business

How do we prioritize which features to add to the product next?

This is a classic product management question, and I’m lucky to have my cofounder Jean Templin on board when questions like this come up because she’s an experienced product manager.

There are a few frameworks to help think about questions like this, but in general, it comes down to effort vs reward. You come up with a list of possible features and look at the effort vs reward for each.

Effort: How much development time will the proposed features take? How much will it cost?

Reward: How much will the new feature improve the user’s experience of the product?

There are, of course, complications in each of these dimensions. Sometimes it’s impossible to know how long a proposed feature will take and it takes some development time just to answer that question. When you have limited users, you don’t want to constantly bombard them with questions and surveys, so you need to be strategic about which features to even bring to them.

Better yet, sit with your users as they’re using it. Have them share their screen. Notice what they get stuck on, if they try to click on different things that don’t do what they expect them to do.

Watching a user interact with Nayak last week gave us a few ideas. For background, Nayak solves the sales coaching gap with AI tooling that continuously upskills reps. Nayak’s solution empowers sales leaders to continuously improve teams with real-time coaching prompts, personalized messaging, and buying committee mapping.

Nayak works using a system of template talk tracks — sales teams can experiment with different talk tracks and see how buyers react to them in real-time.

A user was making their first template, and after entering the first few items into the template, they needed to change the order. We currently don’t have an easy way to do this, so they had to manually cut and paste their items to move them around. I realized then we need an easier way to change the order of talk track template items — ideally a drag and drop system users are familiar with from other tools.

This isn’t so much a new feature as an improvement/bug fix to an existing one.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a few potential buyers come inbound with their own feature requests, the biggest being support for other languages. Right now, Nayak only supports English. We had requests for Dutch and Chinese. When we get requests like this, we add them to a backlog on our project management board and keep track of repeat requests. If a request comes in multiple times, we know it’s likely a high priority to our users.

The same buyer who requested Dutch also requested customer service support, not just support for sales. They run an AI agency and had a client looking for a voice support tool for their customer service agents to answer questions their customers have about maintenance and how long particular service requests take. This use case is fairly similar to what’s already on the roadmap for sales support — drawing information and context from a company’s database to show in real-time calls.

Long story short, we’ve narrowed our next feature releases to a few potential candidates and will prioritize in the new year.

Candidates:

• Calendar integration (this is already being worked on as the next feature we plan to release)

• Support for showing relevant info from a company’s data stores in real-time calls

• CRM integration

• Admin views with analytics on their team’s calls

• A/B testing to compare talk tracks for buyer personas with how the buyers react to those talk tracks

Exciting things planned for 2024.

Personal

How can I make the best use of my time off around the holidays?

In work and life, I tend to be a sprinter. I work hard for periods and then need time to rest.

Luckily, the holidays give me a chance to take some time off. And I’m house-sitting for a friend in Berkeley, which gives me the peace and quiet to make my schedule and work on my recovery.

I’m giving myself goals for each day. Every day, I want to do the following:

• 8 hours sleep

• Physical therapy exercises

• Walking outside

• Bodyweight strength training

I also have a reading list:

• Franny and Zooey, and for Esme with Love and Squalor, both by JD Salinger

• A collection of Elizabeth Bishop poems

And plan to journal every day.

The goal is to build a routine for myself that will last outside of my time off that emphasizes healthy habits.

One thing that’s been disheartening for me recently has been how long it takes to see results from good behavior, and how quickly you can see the negative effects of bad behavior. You’d think that there’d be some immediate rewards for exercising, good sleep hygiene, or healthy eating. But it almost feels like the opposite. I’d been going to the gym 3-4x a week for several weeks and strained my hip flexors running and my shoulder lifting weights (see - physical therapy listed above).

There is no immediate reward. Sometimes you get a runner’s high or notice a positive impact on your sleep. But to see any real benefits, you need to do it regularly enough knowing that you might not see any real changes to your quality of life for months, with the hope that one day you wake up and feel the difference, almost all of a sudden.

There’s a consistent reward for building good habits and routines. There’s no reward for one-off efforts.

Misc.

While I’m back home living with my parents, how can I have a social life even though I don’t live very close to my friends?

I didn’t plan to move back in with my parents at 27, and I don’t plan to stay there longer than ~4-5 more months maximum.

Finding a Temporary Community

So how can I find a community in that time where I can be social, even though I don’t plan on staying for long?

The hardest part is motivation. I’m sure I could find meetups or events that I would enjoy, like poetry open mic nights, an amateur improv group, or even a bowling league. But why would I put the effort in to make friends or show up regularly to meetups if I know I won’t be staying for long?

There’s no way around it; I’ll need to just go and do it. Show up to one or two events, and I know I’ll like it and go back. And here’s an attempt to convince the logical part of my brain it’s worth it: Even though you might not stay at your parents’ for very long, you will likely return semi-regularly and it’d be good to have friends in the area. And even if that’s not true, it’s possible to have something good and valuable and important even if it doesn’t last very long.

Dating

One way I have been trying to be social lately has been to go on dates. There’s an odd similarity between going on dates and going to the gym. First dates can feel repetitive, boring, or even straight-up bad. But I go on first dates with the hope that one day, on some arbitrary first date in the future, something good happens and everything changes.

Just like exercise, there’s not an immediate reward for going on first dates. And like exercising, to see any real benefits, you need to go on enough first dates knowing that you might not see any real changes to your quality of life for months (or even years), with the hope that one day you wake up and feel the difference, almost all of a sudden.

As an aside: I notice a weird dynamic now on how to split the bill on the first date. Some women expect me to pay and get upset if I try to split the bill. Some women get offended if I offer to split the bill. One woman I met on a (pretty good) first date said if she offers to split it, that means the date went poorly.

As someone with a messed up debt-income-savings ratio, I’d obviously prefer to split the bill. But more than anything, I’d like some clear guidelines here. It’s all messy! And confusing!

Networking

One benefit to living in the Bay Area is I get to go to a lot of networking events for my startup.

Over the past 3 weeks, I’ve been to 4 networking events, including one by an Angel Syndicate and one by Hubspot for Startups. I also participated in a pitch competition.

San Francisco and the Bay Area are ground zero for AI and investment in AI, so it’s important to go out and ‘put my mayor on’ as Jean calls it. It can take 6 months to a year from meeting an investor to them investing in you.

It’s a game of relationships. This early in the startup journey, investors are, more than anything, betting on you as a founder. And for that to make sense, they have to know you. They need to have seen you working the room at a several networking events. They need to see how your product progresses over time. They need to know you can execute.

Quote

Reflection

This week I’ve thought a lot about the importance of habits. If something’s important to you, you should try to take one actionable step forward on it every day.

I took a class on the neurobiology of pain in college, at the same time I was taking a class on David Foster Wallace. My professor noticed my copy of Infinite Jest in my backpack and asked if it was good. I said it was, and he said he would read it. I must have laughed a little when I said, “Infinite Jest isn’t really a book you can just sit down and read.”

He asked why not, and I fumbled a little. It’s complex; it’s long; it’s hard.

He said he reads 20 minutes a night, every night, so if he read Infinite Jest only during that time, he’d be done in two months. And that blew my mind. Here I was struggling with this Big Important book, and I needed to spend more than 20 minutes a day with it — I had about two weeks to finish it for class, but a casual reader could read 6 Big Important books a year in just 20 minutes a day.

The important thing is doing it every day. You won’t feel like it some days, or even maybe most days, but doing something Big and Important is easy if you take it one chunk at a time, in regular intervals.

This might not be mind-blowing to you.

But so much of success comes down to consistency and discipline.

Jean and I were talking to an investor yesterday, and he said, “Businesses fail because they don’t outlast. Perseverance is the number one most important characteristic founders need. You will succeed because you’re perseverant.”

For most of my life, perseverance was the first word I would use to describe myself. If something is important to me, I will chip away at it until I win in a war of attrition.

Qs for Next Week's Newsletter

Business

Earlier this week, an angel investor syndicated a Special Purpose Vehical (SPV) to make it easier to collect investments from a large group of people. How can we market the SPV to investors?

Personal

What worked and what didn’t during my time off? How can I continue to build habits and routines into my daily life after I return to work?

Misc.

What have I been reading lately and what have I learned from those books?