Discord: Building the Third Place
💡JC's Newsletter #75
Dear friends,
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In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, including a must-read.
Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Enjoy!
💡Must-read
👉Jason Citron (CEO of Discord): Building the Third Place (Join Colossus)
What I learned really quickly from that is it's really hard to make something that people want. I went through probably four projects, basically four different startup ideas that all basically went nowhere.
What I really learned from that was distribution is really important. And you have to think about how you're going to cut through the noise and not only just build something that people want, but also get the word out.
With hindsight bias, people think building companies is easy. Finding the rare combination of great product and differentiated distribution is very hard.
We didn't actually have enough money to fund, really, taking the technology out of the game and turning it into a standalone project. So this is another really interesting lesson I learned about validating hypotheses. We put together a landing page for OpenFeint.com and it basically said, Xbox Live for iPhone, add leaderboards, chat, multiplayer game, no servers required. Sign up here to get access to the data. I made fake screenshots in Photoshop of what the system would look like. And we convinced TechCrunch to cover it.
We got a couple 100 developers to sign up
How to be very scrappy at the beginning. As a company grow, we should never forget that.
You express art through the framework of the scientific process, which is like, you have a hypothesis, you come up with the minimum amount of things you can do to actually get a real signal back on that hypothesis. You take the learnings from that and then you apply it to the next one and you just run that flywheel. The biggest mistakes that I've made building this company has been where we went too long before getting signal back.
I love that combination of intuition (art) and science (validation of assumptions) through real testing.
Word of mouth starts slowly when there’s no mouths to have words. You need people to be excited to share it, to generate momentum
It normals that word of mouth start slowly on new product/features
You didn't want to download all the other apps.
So we could make the whole application run inside of a web browser so that you could join it by just sending someone a link, you don't have to install anything.
And so, having it work in the web browser was a fundamental part of the experience of getting people to even try it.
How to make the first experience incredibly simple so people can try it out without downloading anything?
To actually get the word out and grow at scale, we basically went to where people who play games hung out and congregated. And the initial growth hack, if you want to call it, was Reddit, where we got one of our friends to post in the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit.
We knew that blatantly advertising to people was probably not going to work. So we thought, "Why don't we just ask people what they think about this? Maybe they'll tell us that they like it, maybe they'll give us feedback, we'll make it better." But that's the approach we took.
And so, we asked our friends to just make a post, just sort of asking people what they think about it. So he posted, "Hey, everyone, has anyone tried this new voice-over IP app called Discord?" And in the Reddit posts, actually, we went in and responded like, "Hey, where are the devs, here's a link, here's a URL to a server that we set up, come and talk to us if you want to learn more."
clicking the link because you didn't have to install anything, they'd open the website, come into the app, see us in those voice channels, click jumped in, and then be talking on voice chat to us, to the devs.
We ended up getting a couple 100 people to register that day.
I think there are really interesting learnings here on how to go to the right forum where there are communities and ask genuinely what they think about the product (not trying to sell it), to start the flywheel. The install and the test should be really easy.
And when people really care about the purpose of your mission, they just naturally care more about everything, about the details, if they worked a little bit harder. They pay attention to the details.
Having a 10, 20-year view on what we're doing, allows us to make decisions that can result in incredible yields in the future. That may not seem necessarily the best in the short term, but it causes you to do things like invest in management training.
On the importance of thinking long-term.
🏯 Building a company
In addition to selected articles, I share one of Alan's leadership principles every week - the same one that I share internally every Wednesday.
👉Alaners shoot for the moon, then work backwards
We generate bold ideas, and set uncomfortably exciting objectives. We make sure that the Alaners think big. But not to achieve their goals 100% all the time. We encourage specific and challenging goals because they push for higher performance.
👉 Jeff Bezos’ 2020 Letter to Shareholders (AboutAmazon)
Differentiation is Survival and the Universe Wants You to be Typical:
It’s relevant to all companies and all institutions and to each of our individual lives too.
In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness?
Things would often be easier – take less energy – if we were a little more normal.
We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself.” What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.
You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. [...] You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.
The world will always try to make Amazon more typical – to bring us into equilibrium with our environment. It will take continuous effort, but we can and must be better than that.
Very important take on how hard it is to be differentiated, to be ourselves and how many people (externally, and internally) are going to try to push us towards the norm because being different is scary.
👉Why You Should Practice Failure (FS)
How many of us make deliberate mistakes? How often do we try to fail in order to learn from it?
the solution to many problems can be worked out on paper, “but only experience counts when there is no time to think a process through. The pilot who hasn’t stalled a plane is less likely to be able to judge correctly the time and space necessary for recovery than one who has.”
🗞In the news
📱Technology
👉The FTC's Google Documents, The Staff Memo, The Economists Memo (Stratechery)
The 4 wireless carriers all state that they would sell their Android devices only with Google, and Apple would see all of its devices only with Google, even in the absence of the current exclusive contracts. All five companies state that Google Search monetizes extremely well, and generates more revenue than Bing or Yahoo! even when those search competitors offer a higher percentage of revenue.
It's also a customer service issue: Users generally do not change pre-installed search providers or download an additional search provider. When a user does change, it appears that it is to Google, not away from Google.
Deals don’t matter if you have the best product
For example, Verizon sold Samsung’s Fascinate device in 2010, which had Bing as the sole, and unchangeable, pre-installed search provider. Internal Samsung documents show that users were unhappy, and Samsung scrambled to find ways to respond to the Bing “backlash” and to make Google search available for download by the user.
👉Google will certify insurance companies for ads (Platformer)
Google will now certify insurers who want to advertise on the platform in an effort to crack down on health misinformation and scams. “In order for an advertiser to be certified to run ads, it will need to provide documentation showing it is permitted under state law to sell health insurance, per the new policy.”
🏥 Healthcare
👉 Patients and providers actually enjoy tele-mental health ("Acute Condition" on Substack)
The article shares the data from a survey done by a doctor at a clinic in the US: "Most patients were very positive about using tele-mental health. [...] Providers apparently love telehealth"
What patients like about tele-mental health:
No time wasted on commutes.
The ability to seek care more frequently without worrying about blocking large chunks of time, which appeared especially helpful for parents.
What could be improved for patients:
Patients noted that it could be harder to gauge their therapists’ reactions, or similarly, that they worried the therapist wasn’t seeing the patient’s whole range of emotions.
Zoom fatigue.
Easier to forget appointments if they are online.
Providers:
Their attitude towards tele-mental health has either stayed the same or improved
Tele-mental health sessions are going the same or better than in-person sessions had
Providers would like to spend ~70% of their time doing tele-mental health, post-pandemic
What it means for the future:
In-person therapy becomes a luxury good for lower acuity patients.
In-person therapy remains an essential service for those with severe mental illness.
A hybrid tele- and in-person model becomes standard for those with moderate to severe mental illness, those who need frequent medication adjustments, or those who require adjunct therapies like esketamine.
Tele-mental health becomes a mass-produced product, widely available for white collar workers (particularly those with employers who compete on benefits). The quality dips, but the increase in access balances out the lower quality.
💚 Alan
👉 🇫🇷 Companies can now grant dashboard access to ALL admins (including accountants). They define their appropriate roles and scope which really empowers them for more granular accesses.
👉 🇫🇷 "Mieux consommer, mieux vivre et mieux travailler" (LSA Commerce et Conso). Very happy to do this opinion column about the future of healthcare.
🔨 A Useful tool
👉 Want to become a master of your Mac? Use Alfred! (Alfred App)
Do you know Spotlight on Mac? Alfred 4 does even better! It allows you to use keyboard shortcuts, create workflows, you can have it search in many 3rd party apps, and more. There is a free version that is already very powerful.
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Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!