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Intermezzo

Feelings i relate to:

- the same camp feeling with another person you’ve just met

- hitting your peak in something

- wasting your life to get better but not getting much better; maybe you could do other things

- red words vs grey words

- why does one thing have to follow meaningfully after another in life?

- life just happening to you

- what ifs in life of other lives you could have lived

- it means something but the meaning is unfamiliar

- no longer feels contained or directed by the forces of ordinary life

- living for the intense happy moments in life

- lording over her siblings her filial piety

- something not being wise but doing it any way. Any price

- pretending life makes sense

- “well there just wasn’t anyone good enough to beat us.” “I wanted my life to be like that.”

- where the love for his father went after he passed. It has to get out somehow, kind of like a rebound love

- being depressed made Ivan worse, so there’s a jealousy with his friend surpassing him in chess

- the pure feeling that motivated him to take the dog back irrationally; it’s love, or inspiration

- love is what motivates Ivan to study and work harder; to use his time well to get in more time for Margaret and chess. Love for life can motivate productivity

- God is in looking for meaning. It is in morality and it is in beauty, the beauty of nature and art.

————

• what did you think of what they said about God?

• do you think Margaret and Ivan dating is wrong? Why or why not, compared to Naomi?

- he’s exchanging a feeling for a feeling as well. What makes one wrong and the other ok? Sexism? Money? Cheating?

————-

• parallels in the book of:

- the mistreated dog and Christine vs her children and Christine

- Darren as a brother vs Peter as a brother, both lawyers, but Peter loves Ivan

- Peter and Sylvia as intellectual equals vs Peter and Naomi completely not

- Sylvia as sick with her husband and Margaret seeing herself in Peter since she also had a sick husband; maybe Peter saw himself in Margaret, which is why he said Margaret can’t be normal, and he judged so much

- Margaret cuts off her husband while Peter holds onto Sylvia. They’re foils for each other. Margaret is healthier. Margaret sticks it out with her husband until she can’t. Meanwhile Sylvia and Peter keep trying to do what they’re supposed to do. Margaret tells her mother about Ivan. Peter keeps Naomi a secret.

- Peter is not vulnerable and plays protector while Ivan is honest with himself. Ivan is healthier. Ivan honest about his dad, about not being normal, with his foreign accent

• motifs

- Peter and Ivan wanting to be protective of their women

- Peter wants to blend in, with trying to be cultured, calling Ivan not normal, while also secretly hating the culture he is trying to blend into. Maybe he feels not normal and wants to be so badly.

• themes

- we all desire for love. Love gives life meaning

- polygamy is complex, as in Peter

- love is more than sex, as in Sylvia

- life are our relationships

- we want to be free to do what we want and feel, but life is more complex than that. There are rules when we see the bigger picture - Margaret and Peter in their love lives

- god

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Recommendation engines

Recommendations struggle with:

• trust

• privacy

• sparsity of data

• scalability

Origin of recommendations:

• divination and Delphi’s oracle

• astrology

• Cardano: probability

• wisdom literature like Aesop’s fables and John Dunton’s magazine (like ask Abby), Poor Richard

History of recommendations:

• Collaborative filtering is grouping similar users to recommend new items

• early application was in music recommendations. Personalized recommendation is much better than user rated averages.

• Amazon also used it but struggled with data sparsity. Very few users overlap in any given item. They switched to item-based similarity recommendations, which was a game changer.

• too popular items like Harry Potter is not helpful. Saying “users who bought this item also bought Harry Potter” is not helpful.

• Amazon’s passion for personalization is emulated by Netflix Reed Hastings, Facebook Zuck, and LinkedIn Reid Hoffman, Airbnb Brian Chesky, Stitch Fix Katrina Lake etc

• Netflix Cinematch unlocked inventory usage on older or less popular films thru personalized recommendation

• The Netflix Prize was awarded to someone who could improve Cinematch recommendations by 10%. Awarded in 2009 to BellKor researchers with $1M award, it leveraged model ensembles

• Kaggle launched a year after the Netflix Prize was awarded. It showed outsourcing modeling was effective.

• learnings from the Netflix prize are super valuable:

- user actions like clicks and views are more reliable than explicit ratings

- predicting user ranking is more effective than user ratings of items

- diversity and novelty are as important as relevance

- contextual recommendation based on location, time of day or week impact recommendations. It’s not just two dimensional

- users decide to select items based on social networks

- UX is key too

- reasons for recommendations should be explained, leading to more user forgiveness

• YouTube videos are shorter, less room for interactions. YouTube recommendation system optimized for clicks or views but led to click baiting videos ranked high. They switched to optimizing for video watch time. It led to a decrease in viewership metrics at first but eventually increased time spent

• match.com requires mutual liking prediction

• Google brain helped YouTube improve, making YouTube a place for discovery in 2016-2017. YouTube algorithm drives 70% of watch time

How recommenders work

• Types of recommendation systems

- collaborative filtering is user similarity based clustering

- content based that rely on item characteristics

- hybrid of collaborative and content

• Other recommendation types

- popularity like cold start problem

- association or market basket to group similarly bought items

• There’s a utility matrix of users and items representing preference. Then there’s features about items and users to measure similarity. Similarity is measured as distance, cosine similarity or Euclidean distance

• item-based collaborative filtering is still based on user similarity. Looks at users who bought this item, what other items might they buy…LOOK INTO IT MORE

• hybrid approach is the best. Netflix model was 100 different models

• predictions are memory or model based…LOOK INTO IT MORE

• the curse of dimensionality needs to be fixed with singular matrix decomposition or SVD to improve recommendations

Recommendation UI

• nudges that use social proof or herd behavior, self justification reasoning, an obvious best option

• nudges should be transparent

• movie art personalization on Netflix — what you recommend can be personalized

• frustration detection from Alexa can help improve

Recommendation innovators

Spotify

• collaborative filtering in similar users

• word2vec to map a song and a vector for tastes

• CNN to find patterns in songs users like

• anomaly detection to figure out if a song is a fluke

ByteDance

• ML creates content and uses seq2seq summarization

• leverages time and location of user in ML algorithms

• no gesture goes wasted

Stitch Fix

• human + algorithm is better than one only

• uses CNN or AlexNet to match pinned interest to inventory based on similarity

• can’t used collaborative filtering because fashion changes and feedback is sparse

• now designs clothes

Recommendation is prediction, discovery, and production.

Future of recommendation

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The Book you wish your parents read

Parental legacy

We don’t want to pass down generational mistakes in raising our children.

1. recognize your triggers.

2. identify where the emotions are coming from, often something from your own childhood. Is it truly only from the present situation, or are you projecting emotions from other situations onto this one?

3. Repair the relationship when ruptures happen by apologizing to your children so they don’t misunderstand or even blame themselves for something you’ve done wrong.

Examples

- Wanting a break every second of the day from your child means they may be triggering emotions you felt when you were that age. Your child needs love, warmth, and respect when they’re awake not just asleep

- Inner voice critiques and tells you you’re not good enough

- Don’t label your children or yourself. Your child won’t be able to escape the label. Call out positive behaviors and efforts.

Child’s environment

Arguing creates an insecure environment for children.

To argue well, use I statements and focus on solutions instead of winning. Embrace your vulnerability. Reflect don’t react. Don’t assume intent of other.

Be honest with yourself about your emotions so you can process them and not project elsewhere.

Respond to your spouses’ bids for connection and affection. Make sure old disagreements don’t build resentment.

Feelings

Validate your children’s feelings and help them learn to deal with them or even just identify the feeling. Bad coping includes:

- overreacting, by making a sad parent another problem

- dismissing / repressing

Be a calm container for their feelings

Parental guilt is not productive unless it changes the situation.

Do not distract from their emotions. It’s manipulative. Leave for work without being overdramatic and sneaking out. Just say “you’re sad that mom is leaving for work. I’ll be back by dinner time.”

Foundation

Believe the positive things in your baby as early as pregnancy. Believing in your child even early on lays the foundation for their security and confidence

Facilitators (go with baby schedule) vs regulator (create a schedule) parenting: regulators feel more threatened by becoming parents than facilitators

How you respond to baby cries affects their attachment style. They need to feel related to and not a task to be delegated, to be a priority in your life even early on. You may feel lonely if parent friends are on a different spectrum than you

Post-natal depression requires us to find social connection to feel not alone in the struggle (and avoid feeling superior or inferior to others), and seek professional help no matter how little or too much your symptoms are. 10-15% of women and 10% of men experience it. It can tie back to an experience from when you were a baby.

Mental Health

Everything is about dialogue, respecting your child and listening / observing to them. Allow them to change you

Kids are clingy and seek negative attention when we don’t make them feel cared for. We should sleep nudge not train

Nudging means helping them when they’re helpless or allowing them self agency when they can do it.

Never interrupt their play! It’s their brain growing. Allow play with all ages and help them get into it before letting them play alone. Boredom sparks creativity.

Behavior is communication

We shouldn’t define inconvenient behavior as bad behavior.

Kids mimic your behavior. If you’re trying to manipulate others always then they will too.

Invest upfront to avoid negative behavior by:

- understanding and validating how they might be feeling in words

- ask them to ask for attention instead

- be collaborative. “I want you to tidy the room and you don’t want to. How might we get it tidy?”

- don’t retaliate or give into what the child wants in a tantrum but be sympathetic to it. Say things calmly like “I have to leave now since you’re disturbing other people.”

Not understanding the feelings children trigger in us or our children can lead us to get stuck in our relationship with them.

Don’t lie to your kids.

Kids lie to avoid punishment, because they see you do it, to create privacy for themselves, to speak emotional truth. Instead find out what’s behind the lie, talk through it, and don’t overreact.

Set boundaries calmly, keep them, make them about you, even if it’s a selfish reason. Kids can’t argue with how you feel. They can argue with facts.

For teens, define the problem, the feelings behind the problem, and brainstorm solutions. In addition, see things from their POV to repair ruptures.

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When Helping Hurts

• Jesus came for a new kingdom — to save souls. We are called to help the needy.

• we should address the root of the poverty problem, the sin that has broken relationship with self, God, creation, others

• bad help doesn’t address where the brokenness is and also makes you more prideful too

• relief (gifts), rehab (getting people to participate in helping themselves), development are the steps for helping. Relief is temporary, seldom, and immediate. Never do things for someone that they can do themselves.

• asking people what they’re good at encourages development

• Short term missions should have the receiving org welcome the help over doing it themselves. It should be most about relationship building. It should be about learning and not helping the needy, as well as small teams who put some money into it and are invested in missions locally

• American poor are coming to suburbs. We can help them developmentally and not with relief thru job preparedness, financial education, and wealth accumulation programs

• options for helping sustainably:

- MFI: microfinance

- SCA: savings and investment association

- partnership: church + MFI

- complementary: church + SCA + training

- business as missions: hiring people for a for profit missions (many say less efficient and risky for sustainability long term)

• change how you do things:

- start with people receptive to change

- find supportive people willing to foster long-term relationships

- look to celebrate early success to encourage

• don’t be Donald trump making suggestions with partners and leaving. Instead:

- make locals front and center

- have locals put their own time and resources too, so they have skin in the game

- be careful to make suggestions without listening fully

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The Case for Heaven

• The mind and brain are not the same. Many people with no brain activity report still being conscious. Neurons are not conscious

• NDEs prove that material physical world isn’t all there is. Brain activity != consciousness given corroborative stories describing things they should have been unconscious for

• world views are livable and logical/reasonable. Not all religious claims are true since they contradict each other

- atheism disbelieves in God, and the cosmos is all that ever is, was, and will be. We are limited to empirical knowledge. Morality isn’t objectively true. Humans are complex animals. CONTRADICTION: “morality as a survival mechanism” is not livable. Chaos would ensue

- theism believes in a good, personal God who created everything. Humans have souls.

- pantheism believes in an impersonal God that is one with the universe. Distinctions are illusions, and knowledge is acquired thru meditation. Objective evil is an illusion. Humans are gods one with the universe. CONTRADICTION: right and wrong have no distinction if we are all one. We can’t be changeless and then change thru meditation. It’s illogical that the impersonal universe can deceive and spit up personal people, who should be changeless

• for reincarnation, who decides what is good and bad? How can you improve if you don’t even remember your past lives?

• doubts are different from questions. Doubts question who God is. Questions are about the what. Hebrews 7 reminds us that Christ is once and for all our savior.

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The Case for Christ

Jesus claims to be God so he’s either crazy, a liar, or God

Non-biblical historians support the outline of Jesus’ life and the early church.

The biographies of Jesus are written within 30 years of his life.

• Manuscripts of NT are so close to Jesus’ death, and historians talk about Jesus

• NT written like history and eye witnesses

Hundreds of OT prophecy are fulfilled in Jesus

NT is historically accurate with what archeological findings, unlike Book of Mormon where none of the US cities existed

There was an early creed within 2 years of resurrection with 500 eye witnesses claimed. They couldn’t hallucinate this. Groupthink is not something you go to the grave for. Legend couldn’t occur this quickly.

There is circumstantial evidence that can’t be denied by anyone Christian or secular.

-Willingness to die for eyewitnessed claims where people had a chance to recant it, nothing to gain

-Revolutionized lives of skeptics James and Paul

-Emergence and growth of church

-Breaking of Jewish tradition

-Emergence of communion and baptism

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Expository apologetics

Be kind and polite

Remember men suppress their belief in God

Always get to the gospel

Concepts for apologetics

- know what you believe and why thru ancient creeds

- show people how they already believe and use many of the 10 commandments. Even the sabbath is about rest and labor rights

- how can we pick and choose OT law? there are three kinds of OT laws: moral law in the 10 commandments, civil law in context of culture to make society better like helping the poor with agriculture, and ceremonial law to be holy and separate from other nations like not having tattoos or beards cut like Egyptians / other pagan worshippers. If we say homosexuality is ok, then we don’t have as clear as an argument for why incest is ok if we can prevent negative consequences of incest through birth control

Use active listening to show how people have an underlying worldview as well and its inconsistency. Repeat and summarize what they have said

Your job isn’t to convince them but just to show that you have logical reasons for believing what you do as well, to just share

When reading scripture it’s good to always think about how a skeptic might respond so you are strengthening your beliefs

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Three theories of everything

The problem -> solution according to worldviews

1) monoism - diversity -> unity (Buddhism, Hinduism)

2) dualism - imbalanced -> harmony (Ying Yang)

3) trinitarianism - self centered -> other centered love (Christianity)

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If only I could believe

Belief built on intellectual, emotional, and will. Will and intellectual doubt are dealt with more severely in the Bible than emotional doubt

Drivers of emotional doubt:

1. Disappointment

2. Anxiety

3. Guilt and shame

4. Critically thinking culture leading to doubt

- not remembering what God has done

- a wrong image of God that needs to be corrected with listening to God thru the word

- lack of knowledge and meaningful personal content

- lack of commitment

- lack of nourishment of the relationship

- result of stress or strain

- result of trauma, heart growing cold and needing to go back to where trust first derailed

5. Suffering and loss

- monist (seeing God as good and evil) vs dualism (good and evil as two forces constantly against each other with no winner) are both wrong

- God has desired will and sovereign will to bring about his desired will in spite of evil

- Evil exists for human free will

6. Learning and living with suffering

Like Paul who had a thorn in his flesh, we can learn the stages of suffering:

- protest aggressively and ask God to take it away. God does not delight in our suffering but uses it for producing fruit

- attentive faith to understand what God is doing, patiently waiting

- quiet submission in recognizing our need for God and what he has to teach us

7. Life is a journey themed around common human experiences. We experience God thru each one. Failing maturity in one way leads us to regress. See Erik Erickson stages of development.

8. People are afraid of losing their unique identity in God but in reality God wants us to become more the person he intended us to by:

- self acceptance

- don’t measure against others but seek God’s praise only

- build on past and learn

- keep God’s rule despite worldly pressure

- choose good role models

- discipline time

- choose good and honest friends

- be filled with the spirit

- don’t forget to fight the devil

- remember the image of Jesus

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Reason for God

• if all belief systems are coping mechanisms, then belief in that statement itself might be a coping mechanism for eg disappointment etc. to see thru everything is to see nothing

• the world is unfair and evil, and thus a good God does not exist. If he exists he is not good. Yet why do we even have a sense of unfairness or goodness? Survival of the fittest would promote unfairness and suffering for the weak.

• boundaries are necessary for inclusivity. Inclusivity isn’t a belief but a belief that accepts everyone even those who are inclusive

• love requires loss of freedom and sacrifice. Any love relationship incl God

• Clues for God that point overwhelmingly to God:

- big bang’s cause

- cannot explain natural regularity

- fine tuning of many physics constants

- source of beauty in art

- desire for meaning in life that seems to not be satisfied by anything here

• gospel is the only world religion that recognizes that our pride in doing good to earn good things is not good at all

• if we accept that miracles can happen, then evidence pointing to the resurrection is overwhelming

• the trinity explains how God is love, as love happens in relationship only, sacrificing for what the other wants over your own desires. If God was uni-personal he wouldn’t be able to love until he loved humans after creating them. John 17 talks about this glorification of self-sacrifice, and therefore unity with others. God is joy due to his other-centeredness.

• it’s not the strength of your faith and trust but the object of your faith. Don’t wait until you have no doubts

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Living the Miracle

Good counseling starts with understanding

His power is made perfect in my weakness

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Making Sense of God

Discovered is better than constructed meaning

• constructed meaning leads to us feeling hopeless the more we think about it

• any constructed meaning relying on something in the material world leads to unhappiness (described in Ecclesiastes) and also observed during the Holocaust in Man’s Search for Meaning

• Ancient philosophers felt that detachment was the key to happiness, but this seems dissatisfying because loving relationships do serve to make us happy

Freedom as ultimate good? No

• Freedom is not real. There are trade-offs so you need to sacrifice for different freedoms. Eg freedom for wealth requires sacrifice of education.

• Real freedom is a strategic loss of something for another that you care about

• there are social restraints based on how humans work that guide us to true freedom

• avoid harming others as a moral law is not self evident. People disagree on what will harm others. eg does porn harm others?

Self identity as ultimate value? No

• self identity is hard to determine; saying anger issues isn’t you and you’ll work to change it but homosexual feelings are is an arbitrary determination

• anything we build identity in will cripple us eventually

• anything we build identity in will lead to a disdain of the other. Humility is needed to recognize no disdain for or view themselves as better than the other, but confidence to not demonize the other out of insecurity. This comes from humility in our sin but confidence in God’s grace for us

Hope is a belief in the future that affects our attitude today.

Morality and justice is difficult to explain without God.

Part 3: Christianity makes sense

God argument

inferred God like light particles and atoms are inferred. However isn’t God less consistent in testing?

• original matter either:

- sprung from nothing

- always existed

- infinite number of causes

All of these are outside of the realm of science. So even those who deny God have to admit that

• all the values of physical constants for life-permitting settings are so low likelihood — point to God than not. Some like to argue the multiverse thesis even though there is no shred of evidence of this either.

• moral obligations are illusions of evolution and culture if there is no personal God.

• human consciousness is remarkable. All human experience has a subjective experience to it, ability to draw abstractions, relate past and future, and do complex mathematical equations and philosophy. It’s hard to prove why these capacities were developed in evolution. No one can explain consciousness yet with science. It’s hard to swallow that love / our ideals are just chemicals and illusions

• beauty in art and nature point to God. Sure it might help for reproductive fitness but a lot of art like music is not related to reproduction. Beauty is often not utility

Jesus argument

• Mark gospel was written 30 years after Jesus death so eye witnesses were still alive and consulted.

• it’s not likely fabricated to fit the cultural needs at the time since many culturally embarrassing things like women being the first to see Jesus, the crowds Jesus hung out with, would be embarrassing

• early Christians believed Jesus was God, and Jesus claimed it himself

• the way the NT Bible was written is like a historical narrative with all these unnecessary details that make it sound real. Back then, fictional stories were not written the way the NT was

• people mentioned witnesses by name even, which could back up what was being said; apostles frequently said they were eyewitnesses too and not fabricating a lie

• no other religion has a real historical figure claim he was God and lived a life with character that made it believable to many. Either Jesus was God or an arrogant lunatic

• early disciples and believers died for their beliefs, within the same generation or claiming to be eye witnesses of the event

• it was very unlikely that Jews would believe God could be man. This was very anti their religion

• all other zealots of the time who died did not then have followers claim resurrection

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The upside of irrationality

1. Too high of incentives / bonuses in cognitive tasks, along with social pressure, reduces performance. Incentives help in mechanical tasks only.

2. Meaning, knowing your work is important, is important for productivity.

3.

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Parent Nation

The three Ts to help young babies learn:

- talking to them

- tuning into them

- take turns

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Lean Analytics

Steps

1. Problem

2. Customer segments

3. unique value prop

4. Solution

5. Channels to customers

6. Revenue potential

7. Cost structure

8. Key metric

9. Do you have an unfair advantage to achieve this?

Should you build this?

• do we do it well?

• do we want to do it?

• can we get paid to do it? Or rewarded for doing it?

Stages of startup

Empathy: identifies real problem thru listening

- this stage is about de-risking. Is the problem you’re solving worthwhile? Is the solution helpful?

- delete features if needed

- test hypotheses with the least amount of build work possible

Stickiness: improve the product with a small group

- this is all about retention and engagement by cohorts of users joining

- retention of later cohorts should be increasing

- it’s better to solve one problem well and completely than addressing too many problems

- too much complexity is not good

- don’t listen to what users say always unless it matches also what they do

- use customer feedback you don’t like to

- some focus too much on virality because 1/ high bar and 2/ network effects. It’s dangerous to do this

Virality: focus on growth

- focus on virality before spending money on ads

- virality can be inherent, artificial, word of mouth

- find your good leading indicator metric for D0 to growth hack

- ways to spread virality are inherent, artificial, word of mouth

- virality coefficient > 1 is holy grail. It’s how many customers your user base brings in without $ invested to acquire / existing customer base

Revenue: focus on making money

- provide slightly more detail in answers than asked to show you’re prepared

- increase in quarterly revenue / past quarterly cost should be > 0.75

- CLV > CAC to spend less to acquire than their lifetime value (CLV = profit / (1-churn rate)

- focus on improving on your strengths to make money — more people more stuff more money more often

- pivot to a new market for market / product fit

- focus on breakeven

Scale: become a big company thru scaling

- differentiate on niche market (segmentation strategy) efficient (cost strategy) or unique (differentiation strategy on brand)

- either you increase margins or decrease costs in this stage of your strategy

- you have 3 assumptions and then the 3 tactics for each assumption to be driven

Thresholds

1:3 CAC:CLV

17 minutes per day on social media platforms

5% CTR on ads is amazing and 0.08% for a blank ad baseline

Lose 5% of your traffic due to latency

23% are passive, 16% react, 44% produce and 17% contribute intensely and find new functionality, eg Reddit

If you don’t have a baseline, see when you’ve hit an asymptote and hit diminishing returns. This means you need to change your strategy or try something else

B2B products

Startups in this space often start as a consulting firm but this is not scalable/sustainable

Identify problems and build a product to solve it so you can scale

B2B companies have 3 customers - top customers with discounts, mid tier partners, and customers that cost you money. Get rid of those third type

APIs help you copy innovation or buy it

Intrapraneurship inside companies

Don’t have naysayers on the team

Make reporting and meetings minimal

Have high performers who are action oriented

Analyze after and pitch first

Get executive buy in

Build in virality to your product

You’re testing problems and solutions. Users won’t tell you what they want but they’ll tell you why they want it. Talk not just to your own users but competitors’ users for what’s missing in the market

Today’s leaders knows what questions to ask, so ask good questions

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Expecting Better

• underweight is better than overweight for pregnancy. It is important to maintain exercise

• research shows a few alcoholic drinks is ok, just not excessive, and a cup of coffee a day is okay. Personally I wouldn’t risk it

• kegel exercises make pushing easier

• sleep on your left side in 2nd trimester and beyond

• bedrest has not proven to help with pre-term birth, but has negative consequences

• tests for Down syndrome are not likely to cause miscarriage, very low rate

• birth by induction is painful so is to be avoided. Cervix dilation is not a good indication of birth, but % enfacement is.

• after getting the baby out during birthing, you also need to get out the placenta :O

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Lean Product Playbook

1. Determine your target customer.

2. Identify under-served customer needs.

Create a customer benefit ladder to identify levels of needs, using “why is that important to you?” as the question

Evaluate your solution along the satisfaction with current solutions vs. importance of user need framework. If they are satisfied with current solutions, and it’s of high importance, then it will be a competitive space

Sometimes, but not always, lack of dominance by one competitor is an indicator of low satisfaction with current needs

Some features decrease dissatisfaction while others increase satisfaction, e.g. ease of use increases while performance issues decrease.

A simple user story is: As a [type of user]I want to [do something]so that I can [desired benefit].

Customer value = importance x satisfaction

Product Market Fit 

3. Define your value proposition.

Strategy is saying no to all the other good ideas that are out there and focusing on something

When Cuil tried to launch a Google search competitor, it focused on a value prop that wasn’t important to users

You should fill out a value prop compared to your competitors:

Must-haves

Performance benefits

Delighter

Your company should have a differentiation on a need that is of high importance but low satisfaction.

4. Create your MVP. (Feature set definition + UX)

You can break out each benefit into a feature chunk grid

During the design artifacts testing phase, show your designs to customers, run smoke tests on your app leading users to a “coming soon” page, or manually brute force a MVP features to gauge demand.

Tips for user interviews:

Test features with users one at a time, as focus groups often lead to group think

Focus on validating hypotheses on needs, not mentioning the product right away. Try to understand their needs, current solutions, what they like and don’t like about it, and how satisfied they are

Ask open ended questions

Don’t help them if they’re struggling to understand the test

Group findings by issues with the feature set, the UX design, or the messaging.

Avoid analysis paralysis and improvement, as eventually you’ll just need to get your MVP in front of people.

5. Test your MVP on customers and iterate.

If you’ve iterated a few times and couldn’t get it work, then you need to go back up the funnel in steps to see where you went wrong, e.g. wrong customer need, wrong MVP design, etc.

If you change a major hypothesis, this is called a pivot.

Use Agile development principles (chunking small parts) to develop

Analytics

“How disappointed would you feel if you could no longer use product X”? Choices: very, somewhat, not, I no longer use. 40% or more users who reply “very disappointed” has product market fit (PMF)

Customer framework:

Acquisition

Activation or conversion

Retention

Referral

Revenue

Select a metric of most important to focus on before pivoting to a different one after diminishing ROI. The order of priority:

Optimize retention first for product market fit 

Then activation

Lastly, acquisition or revenue, with revenue first if acquisition is costly

J curve of retention measures PMF - the initial drop, decay rate, and terminal value

Lifetime = 1 / churn rate

LTV = ARPU x gross margin / churn rate

CAC (customer acq. cost) = cost per acquisition / conversation rate