As you all know I love Coffee. Especially good ones. Yesterday, Jacob Jaber (Co-Founder & CEO of Philz) and I had good chat about coffee, mobile apps, and the future of Coffee.
He is super passionate about Customer Experience and happiness.
As I always said, Coffee is a great addiction. When you drink, you should feel good:)
I have waited until tonight to write this post. Last couple of months my wife and I keep asking the same question each other. “What should we eat for dinner”?
Breakfast is easy for us. I skipped it, she does quick breakfast.
Lunch is either grabbing salad or I can prep some sort of breakfast sandwiches.
Dinner. That is our new nightmare. What did we use to eat? We either cook at home or go out. Now, we are tired of home-cooking also take out. Going out is not the same anymore. So much hustle and bustle.
We miss San Francisco’s different variety of food options. Suburbs are suburb. Very limited section or mediocre restaurants. But, I think it is going to change. New York already changed outdoor dining is now permanent. Technically, American cities turning European cities.
What are you guys eating for dinner?
As you guys know, Israel is a Startup Nation. 87 Israeli Companies are listed in NASDAQ currently. (Source Robinhood)
They are going global day one (actually day zero(idea stage) because the size of the country is never interesting for them “go local first then global”).
The great majority of Israeli founders surveyed (69%) believe that founders need to relocate to the US office for the expansion to be successful. And for just over half the respondents, the first US-based team member was a founder. For the startups we surveyed, most of the GTM team was based in the US: 63% of CEOs, 60% of CMOs, and 86% of CROs. By contrast, most of these companies kept engineering, product, and finance back in Israel. 91% of CTO’s were based in Israel, together with 66% of CPOs, and 57% of CFOs. (You should definitely check IndexVentures’s Expanding to the US book. Especially Israeli Playbook.
Are you creating intentionally tension to make the situation worse?
Or serving tension as a function to solve the problem?
Today, We visited San Francisco after a long time for brunch. Somehow, we felt we never lived there after 6 months with this “new normal” routine.
I felt people are so adaptive mentally and physically. If we can’t, we will not survive. I am very optimist we will figure out a lot of today’s problem in the long run. All we should have the right attitude and willingness. Our destiny relays on our belief system.
When I was 20 years old, I was saying myself “ I want to get retire in my 30s”
Now, I’m saying “You just started baby. Whatever you have done or accomplished it is just the end of the beginning”.
Every year, month, or day, I’m getting a better version of myself. Yes, I have bad days also boring or not exciting ones. But, overall it is going where I want to go.
My age is on my side. Not the opposite side. Because I control it.
We all love stories. Especially good ones with happy endings.
There are no bad or good ideas. There are ideas who are missing stories.
The biggest difference to me with ideas vs stories: Ideas are ingredients of food. You can put those ingredients to a plate and eat one by one or mix it some sort of cooking to feed your audience. Because you and they are hungry. I get that.
However, stories are explaining elaborately:
– why did you start to cook? -where those ingredients come from? -what will be food look like? – how are you going to feel when you eat?
Technically you are eating the same ingredients or food but having different experiences.
Serendipity means good or happy moments happen by accident without any expectations.
It will be great to schedule every 2 weeks, I want to have serendipity in my life. Especially these days. It is hard to keep your mental sanity solid while you are watching big fires going on all over the world, COVID-19 numbers are peaking and we are less than 41 days to US Election. Unfortunately, you can’t schedule serendipity.
That is why live the moments that will drive you to find serendipity at any moment.
Don’t build the feature sets or product in order to convince users to use it. Here are 5 steps you should follow:
a) Show them an early design of what are you building for, get feedback then change the design if it is necessary.
b) Next step launch a landing page or offer wall that includes the value proposition of what you are building
c) Get them interest and collect their email.
d) Don’t give up if you don’t get enough email. Change the messaging and re-run those campaigns.
e) Still wait to build until you are satisfied with the results.
I like the Robinhood App example. Let’s take a look at their timeline.
December 2013: Angel Investment- $3M
Feb 2014: They shared TV Commercial look Video publicly.
May 2014: 300k+ users on waitlist
Sept 2014: Series A- $13M
December 2014: RobinHood iOS App Release Date (MobileAction Data)
May 2015: Series B-$50M
August 2015: RobinHood Android App Release Date
It looks a year minimum (first angel round to iOS App, I’m sure Founders started to think Robinhood idea way earlier) for RobinHood to release the iOS version which was the first market they wanted to capture. After 9 months they released the Android version. Do you still want to invest first your entire engineering and product force to an idea you might end up with zero users? Or, let’s test it with a small budget and see how it works?
What are our responsibilities?
Depends on what are you doing.
Minimum level, You are responsible for yourself. You need to take care of your mental and phsycial health. Then, you might wanna grow or settle or something else.
Whatever you are doing it is adding or reducing your responsibilities.
Think about next time when you start something “Am I adding more responsibilities on my plate or eliminating?”
