<ol><li>Tell the audience what you’re going to say</li><li>Say it to your audience</li><li>Then tell them what you’ve said</li></ol>

3 Parts For Telling Something To An Audience

This popular advice allows speakers to hammer their points with repetition, but I wonder how many members of the audience will remain awake. Do you know who originated this tripartite template? I have seen it credited to the ancient philosopher Aristotle and the self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie.

At the end you have to review what you have already said. Here you may properly do what some wrongly recommend doing in the introduction-repeat your points frequently so as to make them easily understood. What you should do in your introduction is to state your subject, in order that the point to be judged may be quite plain; in the epilogue you should summarize the arguments by which your case has been proved.

At The End 

Radio expert John Horn says the continuing popularity of several stale and long-familiar comedy programs reminds him of the political spell-binder who gave this frank explanation for his success: “First I tells ’em what I’m gonna tell ’em. Then I tells ’em. Then I tells ’em what I told ’em.”

A friend presented me the concept and it made me curious

Tell ’Em What You’re Going To Tell ’Em

What does that look like in the context of the user journey? For a ride-sharing app with a simple user journey, it might look like this:Aha moments are emotional and impactful, creating a powerful impression that keeps users coming back for more. Ideally, your aha moment should happen the first time users try your product—usually during onboarding .The aha moment is a moment of sudden insight or discovery. In software, it’s the pivotal moment when a new user first realizes the value of your product and why they need it.

What is an Aha moment

That moment things click—when a user realizes that they can truly benefit from your app—is their aha moment. Sometimes users actively realize this moment, while others experience it more subconsciously. Either way, the aha moment is the switch that turns an evaluating user into an activated user. It also often separates the users who stick around from those who churn.

Why Aha moment is important

<ol><li>Start with data you already have—in particular, your user analytics and user feedback</li><li>Supplement with user feedback</li><li>Learn from churned users</li></ol>

How to find your product's aha moment

Knowing which actions or events in your product trigger aha moments allows you to create more tailored onboarding experiences for different types of users.For example, Duolingo asks the user to choose if he's new to the language or if he knows some.

Personalize your user's journey to “aha!“

Signup forms, multiple tabs, installs, tutorial videos—the more work you make a user put in before they hit their “aha,” the less likely it is that they’ll stick around for it. If you can get users to their aha moment before requiring them to enter credit card info, agree to Terms of Service, or even log in—do it! That moment of activation will work in your favor—don’t gate your aha moment if you don’t have to.Take a look at how Airbnb gives you access to all their listings before asking you for any information.

How to get users to aha faster

Use tooltips to point users where you want them to go, leading them directly to your aha moment with a step-by-step breakdown of what to do. Instead of telling users what to do via a boring guide or video, tooltips show users exactly how to get to their goals. When new users don’t have to figure things out on their own, they’re more likely to reach “aha.”

Tooltips

Great ideas on how to start with the aha moment. Spoiler alert: Add it in onboarding

In this comprehensive guide, we'll cover how to define, design, personalize, and optimize your own product's aha moment.

Product

The aha moment guide: How to find, optimize, and design for your product

An expert’s job is often to simplify complicated concepts so that other people, with less knowledge, can understand. So for Statisticians, Scientists, and all kinds of professionals, the value to the audience when you speak is defined by your ability to simplify, sometimes hugely complex things, so that your audience can use your knowledge in their lives.Expertise is of neutral value unless you are able to communicate what you know to decision-makers, colleagues and senior technical leaders in a way that they can use.

Understand your audience

It’s these definitions that set the baseline for understanding the application of your expertise. Don’t ever assume that everyone knows what ‘mortality assumptions’ means in actuarial accounting; or that ‘visual storytelling’ is anything other than marketing nonsense. If you don’t explain what it is, they can’t tell why it’s important.

Define your terms

Describe how your concept fits into a particular category or how it can be broken down into parts that can be described more easily; this is useful in showing your reader how your concept fits into a big picture, how it can be divided, and how it’s a key tool that will help you in explaining complex issues, and the audience to understand.

Classify and divide your concept into ‘chunks’

An analogy involves explaining an unfamiliar concept in terms of a familiar one.For example analogy between a computer firewall and a bank, you could say that (honest and unarmed) people don’t just go directly into a bank and remove cash. They might go to the counter clerk and identify themselves; the clerk then will make sure they have money in their account and give them the money they require. Similarly, a firewall ensures that people who want information and access to an IT network are trusted to have that access.

Illustrate with examples

Working on a system that will help describe complex concepts

🏃‍♂️ Adding ideas about complex concepts

How to explain complex concepts

Most people (especially engineers) underestimate the importance of sales because it's hard to accept that customers will not come just because they build cool stuff.Engineers are biased to think that way. But it's only a delusion to think that distribution will flow magically without considering a proper distribution system.

People underrate the importance of sales

In engineering disciplines, a solution either works or fails. They add value by becoming experts at a technical skill that can be evaluated relatively easily.Sales are the opposite: a campaign could be to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality. Engineers see this as dishonest.People overestimate the relative difficulty of engineering and science because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What engineers miss out on is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

Engineers' view on sales

All salesman are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity.Sales work best when hidden. People in sales, marketing, or advertising have a job title that has nothing to do with those things.And there is a reason for all of this: none of us wants to be reminded when we're being sold; the world is secretly driven by sales.

Sales are hidden in plain sight

The engineer's grail is a product great enough that it sells by itself. But anyone who says this either is delusional or is selling something (and thereby contradicting himself).Think about distribution as something essential to the design of the product.Good product + Bad distribution of the product = Bad business

Distribution is part of the product

If you've invented something new but you haven't invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business--no matter how good the product

Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly. No matter how strong the product (even if it is the next best product in the world), it must be supported with a strong distribution plan.

Does distribution matter more than the product?

It can vary based on the product's target customers.To have a viable business, the total net profit that the company earns from a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, CLV) should be bigger than the amount spent to acquire the customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, CAC).It starts from consumer products (eg. Snapchat) where CAC is low, CLV is also low, but a big number of possible customers. And it ends with big and complex products (eg. SpaceX, Palantir) where the product is sold to big businesses or the government, CAC is high in order to offer as much credibility as possible.

Distribution methods

Work for low-priced products that have mass appeal but lack any method of viral marketing.A laundry detergent company can't afford to pay salespeople to go door-to-door, but instead pays salespeople to talk to grocery chains since one deal might mean 100.000 bottles sold.To reach its end user, this kind of company has to produce television commercials, print coupons and design its product boxes to attract attention.

Marketing and advertising

A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too. If every new user leads to more than one additional user, it will grow exponentially.This ideal viral loop should be as quick and frictionless as possible.

Viral marketing

At Paypal, they wanted to get the most valuable users first, which were the emigrants who wire money back home, but the transactions were infrequent - didn't work.They needed a segment with a higher velocity of money - they found eBay 'PowerSellers' (the professional vendors who sold goods online through eBay's auction marketplace). Almost 20.000 users. Most had multiple auctions each day, they also bought as much as they sold.Because eBay's solution to the payment was terrible, these merchants were extremely enthusiastic early adopters.

Find the perfect users (market segment)

As an engineer, it was hard to not underestimate the importance of distribution. Most of the time when I was thinking about sales, my brain(thoughts) just decides to skip it.

📚 Reading the chapter "If you build it, will they come?"

Startups

Zero to one: If you build it, will they come?

Companies spend countless hours improving their product, tweaking their positioning, and acquiring new customers. Yet most subscription companies spend precious little time thinking about their pricing. Data from 512 companies shows that monetization has nearly 2x the impact of acquisition efforts, and a massive 4x the improvement from time spent acquiring more customers.

Overlooking a core revenue driver

Fixed pricing stays simple: a single product, a fixed set of features, and a fixed price per month.Flat-rate pricing is easier to communicate and easier to sell. Adding valuable features? Raise your rate. Additional products? The fixed price goes on top of your base fixed rate.But while flat-rate subscription pricing might be easy for potential customers to understand, it often means leaving money on the table. Keeping prices low means missing out on additional revenue from larger companies; and vice-versa, smaller companies might be priced out of higher-cost tools.

Fixed / flat-rate pricing model

Allows companies to offer multiple packages with different features and product combinations available at different price points. The number of packages can vary, but most subscription companies offer two or three pricing tiers.Beyond two or three options, however, things start to go downhill—offering <a href="https://www.coglode.com/gem/choice-paradox">too many choices</a> leads to indecision and lower sales. It's easy to try appealing to many customer types with varying budgets by adding more and more tiers, leading to a lack of decision and lost sales.

Tiered pricing model

Per-user pricing is the go-to model for <a href="https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/2018-private-saas-company-survey-part-2/">the majority</a> of subscription companies. Pricing scales evenly along with the number of users — the more users, the more you can charge.Charging for each new user does have downsides, though. It doesn't reflect the true value your product provides — more seats don't necessarily make the product more valuable for users. Charging per seat can also lead to users sharing logins across teams, cutting into your potential revenue.

Per unit/user model

Usage-based pricing is somewhat less common among SaaS businesses— it's mainly used by telecommunications companies and IT services.It makes it easier for small companies to get started with your product while avoiding the high upfront fees charged by some subscription companies. On the other end of the scale, it also accounts for additional costs incurred by heavy users, charging them fairly based on the extra time and resources they're consuming.Charging based on usage does, however, make it much harder to predict revenue, since billing can vary dramatically each month.

Usage model

I came across these ideas while reading growth.design case study for Zapier Upgrade: https://growth.design/case-studies/zapier-upgrade

How do you set your subscription pricing? These are the top four subscription pricing models for 2019.

Pricing models

Subscription Pricing Models

Inflation generally benefits the wealthy who can store their wealth in assets like stocks and bonds which appreciate with inflation.Inflation generally hurts those living paycheck to paycheck who are less able to invest into such assets.

Who does inflation help vs hurt

A thread on Inflation by Ryan Breslow https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1516507981071982599?s=21&t=5heiRnUYP7XV0K3XxUqHlA

Economy

Ryan Breslow - Inflation 101 Thread

To get ideas for gamification you could play some games, be curious how games retain people and what game mechanics were used.At Duolingo, PMs regulary play games just to come up with ideas

Ideas For Gamification

<ol><li>Leaderboards</li><li>Progress bars</li></ol>We have in our nature to complete progress bars or to wish to be ahead of our friends in a game leaderboard.These game dynamics help people stay motivated if the task is too hard (eg. learning).

Best Game Dynamics

There are 3 leagues: (like in football)<ol><li>Bronze League</li><li>Silver League</li><li>Gold League</li></ol>Users are promoting from lower leagues, this games improved average time spent by ~20%.Some people likes this feature so much that they are trying to cheat.

Game Idea: Leagues

At Duolingo, Gamification was the most important engine for growth. People don’t want to learn a language, instead they just want to know it. So Duolingo figured out that with game mechanics on top of basic functionality people are more likely to stay motivated

Crowdsourcing is more than a group of people interested in the same cause, it’s a way to tap skills – and scale – that you don’t have. And when it works, it can be the rocket fuel that launches you to scale further than you could have ever imagined. No one knows this better than Luis von Ahn, founder and CEO of Duolingo. Duolingo is a language app with over 300 million users worldwide, who complete over 7 billion exercises a month. It’s their passion for learning that drives them to create even more content for the app – igniting the rocket fuel that Duolingo needs. Cameo appearance by Elizabeth Sampat (game designer and author). Read a transcript of this interview at: https://mastersofscale.com/luis-von-ahn/Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter at http://eepurl.com/dlirtXSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Workgroup

62. A masterclass in crowdsourcing, w/Duolingo's Luis von Ahn

Thread. You can think of a thread as a set of instructions to be executed by the CPU. A thread is a component of a process.Process. A process is a program that is running. For example, the browser (perhaps Google Chrome, Safari, or Firefox) you are using to view this article is a process.

Intro

Every process has one or more threads. And a program can actually be made up of many processes. In the example above, you’ll notice that it says Google Chrome (44). This means that Google Chrome is actually running 44 different processes. Processes in a single program are referred to as child processes. A program that uses multiple processes is referred to as multi-processed.

One Application - Multiple Processes

Single-threaded means that a process is designed to have only one thread of execution. This means only one set of instructions executes at once.Multi-threaded means that a process has two or more threads. So it can execute multiple instructions simultaneously.As a multi-threaded program, several instructions can run at a time. Let’s pretend this program has two threads. So, the program can run two instructions at a time.

Single-Threaded vs Multi-Threaded

Because React Native is single-threaded, if you have a process that has many responsibilities, you can have performance problems. Imagine you have a process responsible for rendering a video on the screen and a live feed of comments on the video. The video rendering could block the live feed from updating correctly, or the live feed could cause stuttering in the video.

React Native is Single-Threaded

Instead of running multiple threads, React Native runs multiple processes. 3 main processes run in React Native. (Even if they are called threads)<ol><li>UI Thread</li><li>JS Thread</li><li>Render Thread / Shadow Tree</li></ol>

React Native is Multi-Processed

If animation run on JS Thread then for each frame the JS Thread will send serialized data on Bridge to the UI Thread. This will result in something similar with real life traffic jam where we have the bridge and the cars(code for each frame). In addition of this imagine also doing a network request and a dispatch for global state, the JS Thread would be more busy resulting in even more lag.A very good solution for running animations on UI Thread is <a href="http://www.reanimated2.com">react-native-reanimated</a> which also give the opportunity to run any piece of JS code, not only animations.

Problem With Animations

Imagine having a like animation and a counter. When the like is pressed the counter should increment.A person using the interface doesn’t know about how data flux is designed, what is a network request. The person just expects the heart to be colored immediately.As React Native is single-threaded, the best approach is to run animation on UI Thread(color the icon + update the counter) and only when the animation is finished run on JS Thread the rest of the work as updating state and sending a network request. In this way the counter is not waiting for request, the whole interaction is on UI.

Solution Animation + Data Flow

TL;DR how threading is working in React Native and the solution of handling data flux for a like button and its counter

Handling threads in React Native and Data Flux

They started with iOS and when Android release was ready, took them only 2 days to build.However, they immediately stopped after identifying various issues such as poor performance of touch events and <a href="https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/2814">lack of 64-bit support </a>.Though they thought React Native was ideally for iOS.

Start with iOS, Try Android Later

Used <a href="https://github.com/storybooks/storybook/">storybook </a>to quickly render "dumb" components that don't manage any state internally with mock props. By leveraging the same tooling, they could quickly follow the web team who originally adopted storybook. Along with hot reloading, storybook dramatically accelerates their UI development cycle.Designers can even easily tweak styling directly in storybook.

Faster Iteration of UI components

A few days ago, we were able to quickly deploy a post-release fix for cameras and skip the approval process. We can’t even begin to count how many OTAs we’ve shipped. Being allowed more room for mistakes, engineers can ship often with confidence and avoid coordination, which unblocks everyone.

Over The Air Patches (OTA)

Immature long lists have been a well known issue since day one, using for chat view. Alternatively, they use <code>UITableView </code>for smooth scrolling performance and dynamic cell heights.This is the only view which was implemented on native, which means the hundreds of other of React Native components are provided at 60 fps.

1. Immature Long Lists

Facebook is solving this problem by <a href="http://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2018/06/14/state-of-react-native-2018">re-architecting the threading model </a>: It will be possible to call synchronously into JavaScript on any thread for high-priority updates. After various attempts at solutions like <code>InputAccessoryView </code>, we eventually figured out a way to "portal" the React Native component into native iOS views hierarchy and therefore manage high-priority keyboard updates synchronously in native. We will detail this more in a later blog post.

2. High-Priority Updates

Time to Interaction (TTI) is a key aspect of how a user perceives the performance of an app. The TTI of our iOS app is noticeably longer than other competing messaging apps written in native code. Since React Native loads and parses all the Javascript code before execution, you get startup delay based on bundle size. In our case, it’s roughly 1.5s startup delay to load a 15mb bundle on an iPhone X.Fortunately, Facebook documented <a href="https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/performance#unbundling-inline-requires">unbundling </a>to only load necessary portions of the bundle for startup and progressively load more as needed via their packager.

4. Startup Delay

React Native is a great framework that bridges the gap between web and mobile. At Discord it has brought us incredibly efficiency. It allows us to write reusable code, learn from each other, and move fast with a two person team. Although there are real pain points and challenges, the overall gains significantly outweigh the costs which motivates us to keep investing in the platform.

Sticking with React Native

Being one of the first apps built with React Native, we were excited to share our first year journey using React Native back in 2016. Looking back at the past three years, React Native has proven to…

Mobile

Why Discord is Sticking with React Native

If scalling your product is ultimately dependent on having a large group of users, then you have a chicken or egg dilemma. You fell like the magic feature just can’t come to fruition until you have a large userbase.This is a cold start problem, on network effect consumer products (eg. LinkedIn)

Problem Scale - Chicken Or Egg Dilemma

Work on batches. Find a small group of users who got a lot of value and use it as bootstrap to create value for others, even if they are not what you want to target. They will fill the gap until the product gets to the critical mass.Then find another small group of users and repeat. Use different growth hacks.

Solution For Chicken Or Egg Dilemma

On the early days, when the userbase of LinkedIn was small, the goal was for a recruiter to say: “I’m looking for an accountant, based on Mississippi, who has an engineering history, has 10 years of experience and capabilities to lead team” (smthing very picky for a job, impossible before LinkedIn)

When LinkedIn Encountered Chicken Or Egg Dilemma

Better to have 100 users who love you than 1 million who kinda like you. The true seed of scale is love, and you can't buy it, hack it or game it. Ask Sam Altman, the head of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's legendary startup accelerator. He knows that a product that's deeply loved — even by a tiny base of users — is one that can scale. We also hear an epic story of customer love from chef Dominique Ansel, the inventor of the Cronut. Plus cameos from Sara Blakely of Spanx and Aubrie Pagano of fashion line Bow & Drape.Read a transcript of this interview at: hhttps://mastersofscale.com/sam-altman-why-customer-love-is-all-you-need/Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter at http://eepurl.com/dlirtXSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tell ’Em What You’re Going To Tell ’Em

The aha moment guide: How to find, optimize, and design for your product

How to explain complex concepts

Zero to one: If you build it, will they come?

Subscription Pricing Models

Sabin Hantu