Why I listened: Into Lenny's podcast and into anything Anthropic-related right... moreWhy I listened: Into Lenny's podcast and into anything Anthropic-related right now
Takeaways: Continue to not quite understand the value of growth/marketing as I feel like if a product is good enough, it'll sell itself. Amol acknowledged this in the episode, but it still isn't clear to me why marketing is needed for Anthropic. Some other things that came to mind are:
- He mentioned that often friction is a good thing in onboarding because it improves the quality of onboarding but maybe it's just the way he said it. I think friction implies it's a bad thing and I think that's true. Friction implies something that the user didn't enjoy and I do feel like that's generally fundamentally a bad thing. I think maybe what he's getting at is that sometimes a longer onboarding flow is a better thing, which I agree with if the user wants a longer onboarding flow. For example in your onboarding flow, rather than forcing people to answer a bunch of questions about their preferences, you can give them the option of saying, "Do you want to share some of your preferences with us so that we can better personalize your experience?" but then also give users the option to say, "I'm comfortable with my understanding of the product; let me jump straight to using it." I think that's probably the ideal model because then you satisfy different user preferences, in that some users will actually want the longer onboarding flow and some will want the shorter one.
- Another thing that came to mind as I was listening is that he talked about how Anthropic is very focused on the exponential and I think sometimes we assume that exponential is always good but obviously it depends on what it is. For example, COVID cases followed an exponential trend at the beginning and there was an exponential increase in deaths from COVID and obviously that's a bad thing. I'm just, I guess, a bit wary of I understand why a company that's incentivized to make money wants to see exponential growth but is it actually a good thing no matter what the product is? Imagine a product that goes from zero users to 8 billion users in the course of a month, for example, that sees exponential growth like we've never seen before. I think there's a strong case to be made that no matter how good we think the product is, you probably want to roll it out more slowly than that just in case there are negative consequences that you didn't foresee. less