# He Shares The Science Behind Viral Products

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIOb2oUFZNk
Duration: 56 min
Language: English
Words: 10036
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/RIOb2oUFZNk

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[0:00] rather than starting with question of how can I make this thing better most of my work starts with why does this suck so bad and like how could I make it suck more I wasn't necessarily creating a product I was creating the medic content exacerbating the pain that people feel you'll often understand parts of the experience or patterns that lead to that pain and then you can reverse engineer and kind of do the opposite and make it better almost anything is it takes a lot of exper experimentation and a lot of throwing stuff against the wall to figure out what's going to react get a get a response if you're working on

[0:36] something and you don't want to put your name on it from the beginning you should probably reconsider whether or not you actually want to be working on it cuz you should be proud to put your name on stuff you work on saurin Iverson I've been looking forward to this call for a while you are the the idea machine of the internet admit it just admit it yeah the idea guy oh there he is there he is um excited to chat uh for people who don't know him he goes on Twitter he takes apps that people use and then he like kind of remixes it with new ideas

[1:10] and they get thousands of likes and laughs yeah we're uh we're optimizing for Chuckles as much as we are engagement I don't know I think some of the funniest ones are the ones that get the least like online traction but you know you can't always have bangers yeah you can't always have bangers we hope for bangers but today we are on the ideas podcast and of course you brought some Banger ideas and I just want to spend some time to jam with you on them yeah sounds good so let's start with what you're seeing in terms of Hardware because I don't have a lot of people

[1:50] come on this show and Pitch Hardware especially in 2024 yeah um when capital is is hard to come by and Hardware traditionally is an expensive thing to do so what's exciting you in hardware and why do you think there's startup ideas in the space so I think there are kind of orders of magnitude when you consider Hardware like I don't know if you would consider like books I.E what I've been doing I by bootstrapping an audience and then selling a a product which is really an entertainment product as Hardware but most people that get big on a social network they'll make like a knowledge product or an info product and

[2:29] then it's like 100% margin right I think I started making stuff for fun and then people started asking for a product and so they started asking for a book specifically so I made that and it I mean the more you order the cheaper it's going to be and I think people get really intimidated by the idea of like making a physical object but the internet is pretty amazing and Alibaba I messaged a bunch of different manufacturers I found a manufacturer that was able to meet my specification requirements which was like deboss foil printing hard cover like high quality like gloss pages and went through a couple rounds of sample testing with

[3:12] them and then got a product that I liked meanwhile I took pre-orders with a payment link and have a new product right so I was able to subsidize the initial order cost with the pre-orders that I got and then from there I was able to scale it up so I think even individual people that have an audience and want to do something like that you can bootstrap that way I think then you look at AI companies that are gr all in on Hardware I think Humane rewind tab rabbit like I don't have I mean I haven't really used any of these products in person I I I pre-ordered tab

[3:50] so I'm waiting on getting one of those I've talked with AI a couple times I think the thing that I respect and find exciting about all the players in the space is that that there's a general sentiment that the form factor that we interact with on a daily basis I.E phones is great but maybe it isn't the thing that will kind of be the container for the next step in software and so people are really experimenting like a pendant on a necklace something that like pins your clothing uh little almost like game boy looking thing I think and I mean rabbit I don't remember what the

[4:29] exact exact post was but it compared Apple's initial pre-order or initial order numbers with the order numbers that rabbit is seeing and Rabbit's seeing a huge number of orders for their first round and I know they're ramping up production to try to keep up with that so I think there's like Capital intensive ways like that where you're a funded startup with a lot of proprietary software and then you're building Hardware as a complimentary form factor but then there's the initial path that I mentioned which is like an individual Creator that's working on something maybe it's a book maybe it's something like um I can't remember the designer's

[5:06] name they make a lot of like office supplies and like productivity tools and planners and stuff like that like if you can make a render of it or if you can pay someone a small amount of want you to make a render for it there are people either overseas or in the United States that you can almost always find to make the thing in your head real which is really crazy to me and I I kind of wish more people were aware of that and kind of took the steps to make things in their head a reality because even if some of these AI tools or you know other

[5:41] projects people take on end up being if they don't like become massive successes there's still a lot of learnings and insight and even like joy and in the longterm like Nostalgia that comes along with those like I look at like Sega Dreamcast for example that was like the first the first like 3D gaming system that had like an op open world RPG Sonic Adventure which is like a game I grew up on and they ultimately didn't get the market share that Xbox or PS1 has but like you see that logo and you you like feel something deeply and a lot of that was because Sega was willing to take a

[6:21] huge swing on a new platform and a new you know new tech new form factor new hardware um and I think the Ripple of the effects of what that even uh inspires people to make long term um it's hard to understate that so A buddy of mine created something called tiny pod have you heard about it I had a conversation with someone last week about tiny pod yeah okay so we'll give him a little shout out so my buddy newr he he led the design engineering team at snap so obviously super smart guy and he was he's he's been always one of those guys like he was like a jailbreak Guru you

[7:03] know he was like always jailbreaking things like always into you know pushing the limits on devices and he uh he started something called tiny pod and basically what it does is it transforms the Apple watch into what almost looks like the original iPhone so you remember like the clicky you know circular wheel I guess for for the iPod like he basically picture an Apple Watch you remove the strap and he's got and he has this like case essentially that allows you to use it just like that and at the surface you're like Ah that's kind of cool it's a case for the it's a case for

[7:45] the um for the Apple watch but like I don't really get it but what he was saying to me was what people are really excited about is the fact that a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed with their phones and they want to leave their phones at home um some people are getting these like dumb phones or flip phones but for most people that's not realistic the beauty about the uh the Apple watch is you know you've got your music you get texts you get some like core things but you don't have everything so what he is saying like his bed is it's kind of this like perfect

[8:25] you know middle in the ground so I think you're going to start to so I agree with your premise with like I don't think newr would do tiny pod five years ago um I think he would have been like it's too complicated how am I going to get this made uh how am I going to sell this uh you know but now he uses Twitter to get hundreds of likes on his uh on his tweets to generate demand he's probably G to use some fulfillment partner overseas to actually create it he uses he's going to use probably Shopify to power it and all the apps that they have

[9:01] around email marketing and customer service and stuff like that he's probably going to have a team of customer service you know overseas like so I think like spinning up these ideas are are a lot quicker and so I think you're on to something on this Hardware bit um which no not no one's talking about yeah I think I think the interesting thing too is Tiny pod is it's really interesting to me because it's a call back to like the Nostalgia of the old iPod it does attempt to solve the like the dumb phone problem in unique way it's like I'm not going to buy a light phone they're really cool

[9:40] but like I have all this stuff that's within Apple's like Walt Garden right and so rather than trying to build something new you're trying to play ball with and subvert the systems that you have and I think the idea that you can take an existing device that's extremely popular and turn it into a completely different a device there was a another launch a couple weeks ago that was a case for your phone that has like a black berry keyboard on it yeah I don't know if you saw that which is I go ahead the interesting thing about that is in like so many CES articles like CES is

[10:17] supposed to be this like the only the most futuristic stuff is coming out of CES and every CES list of the top things you know from CES would be like this like quiry keyboard yeah I think I think it's just like with the first I mean so people like to especially younger like gen gen Z gen a there's a really strong demand for like hyper personalization of objects that you use a lot so like when widgets came out on iOS you saw a ton of people going absolutely crazy with like custom widget packs widget apps just ways to make your phone look like it's your phone and no

[11:00] one else's I think the idea of tiny pod and I don't remember the name of the keyboard kind of case but the idea that you can add an additional like layer of customization to a device that you use all the time in order to of make it work even better for you is is really interesting and then when you stack like skins on top of that so like I know tiny pod and that keyboard will be like one probably one one form factor and like a few color skews to start but with each experimentation of that there are ways you can make it look and feel like your

[11:38] own like I remember all the phone cases that had like they're modeled after anime characters or like whatever and they have like ears on them or you know like stickers I think just the idea of customizing ubiquitous Hardware to feel like your own there's a really high demand for that and um I think this guy is the limit in terms of like how you want to be creative and the strategy that you want to use to either change the way people interact with the device change the way the device looks um or kind of some kind of combination of the two there's a lot of interesting

[12:12] potential that people are just starting to tap into especially as you said as it gets easier to test ideas um and validate them before sinking in enormous amount of money into them so I just pulled up the keyboard company it's called clicks which by the way perfect name um for for this clicks for iPhone it's $139 which honestly for a case is pretty expensive like I I just bought a case for my iPhone I think it was $40 $40 or $50 so pretty expensive um and but it's not just a keyboard I'm looking right now so you have well first of all it says make your statement you know it's

[12:59] it's a state to your point it's like having a statement by by custom you know by having this um says gain up to 50% more display to immerse yourself in chats browsing live streaming real Keys make typing feel so natural scroll through website so it's really interesting I think you're you're on to something here with these devices have become so ubiquitous we're looking for ways to make it our own Nostalgia is coming back people are willing to pay for it it's cheaper than ever to you know create these things um and the truth is they can partner with creators like someone might be like well I don't have not like sorin

[13:37] I don't have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers well it's like okay well maybe you can connect with someone like saurin and maybe you can collabor collab with someone like him um and all you need is like a landing page a little bit of money to you know maybe not you in particular I don't know if you do those things but um a little bit money to work with a Creator and you can and you can launch and you have to come and you have to be original like clicks looks like it's it's really interesting looks cool tiny pod like you go to the website tiny pod.com like it gets you

[14:11] excited that's the other thing like if you're going to create something in Hardware it has to get someone excited it can't be just like a little bit better yeah I think also looking at the looking at the clicks because I pulled up the clicks website while you're talking about it I think they're actually like opposite ends of the Spectrum in a way where tiny PW just kind of solving the pain of like I want I want to use less of my phone and clicks is like I want to use more of my phone um and it's interesting right because both of those are genuine needs it's like okay you know what I am

[14:41] realizing that every time I go out to hang out with friends I'm on my phone 50% of the time so I'm going to get one of these tiny pods and that way like if people need to get a hold of me they can but it's pretty easy to get like lost in a device this size but if it's like this big you're not going to want to be like hunched over it right but then if you are like watching a lot of twitch live streams or you know you want to spend a bunch of time on Tik Tok or maybe you write a lot and you actually want a more

[15:09] physical form factor there is a real utility that both of them provide in different ways um and I think that also speaks to like the iPhone is an amazing multi-purpose tool that can do just about anything but it is suboptimal for certain things writing watching video in certain inst watching video while writing comments responding to it things like that and so click specifically identifies like the weak point in the hardware and then makes that a selling point of their extension of it right like apple isn't going to build a keyboard maybe they will now but they weren't going to like build a keyboard for their phone that had a

[15:54] keyboard but I mean the that phone is so popular and so many are sold every year that you can build a business on top of that ecosystem pretty easily and a pretty big business like I wouldn't be surprised if click sells 30,000 units this year like is there 30,000 people that are you know first of all are nostalgic for this and also want to you know be faster want want a want a physical form factor out in the world like probably you know yeah after the Cs coverage right like totally that's the other thing it's like how do you how do you reverse engineer your product ideas

[16:37] such that they do go viral and they do get covered you know a lot of people and you're the master at this but a lot of people create a product and then they're like okay let me like send it to a bunch of journalists and then they don't get any love and they don't get anyone writing articles and stuff like that how do you think about creating a physical product that is going to be shared shared by thousands yeah I think I mean I think mine is a unique case because I wasn't necessarily like creating a product I was creating like mimic content um I think one thing that

[17:15] I've seen a lot of people do when they're working on something is they'll throw the idea out there and if they don't get immediate validation they kind of just mark it as a loss and move on and the reality of almost anything is it takes a lot of exper experimentation and a lot of throwing stuff against the wall to figure out what's going to react get a get a response right um and I think there's there's ways you can do that without doing it in a public forum or you can do that by of creating a brand or a separate entity if you don't want to attribute your name to it I will say

[17:46] if you're working on something and you don't want to put your name on it from the beginning you should probably reconsider whether or not you actually want to be working on it because you should be proud to put your name on stuff you work on um so I think like pure like cycles and getting feedback and refining is something I think a lot of people don't spend enough time doing and then I think also rather than starting with the question of like how can I make this thing better most of my work starts with like why does this suck so bad and like how could I make it suck

[18:20] more um and it sounds like a pointless exercise but I actually think by exacerbating the pain that people feel you'll often understand parts of the experience or like patterns that lead to that pain and then you can reverse engineer and kind of do the opposite and make it better right um it's actually pretty fun and I've seen product teams I had a design manager reach out to me a couple months ago he said his product team had taken a couple hours and they all worked on like how can we take our product and make it like terrible like way way worse and through that they were

[18:57] able to to find like you know what this part is actually this part of our experience is pretty suboptimal um so I think iteration Cycles not giving up too early um going in the opposite direction to figure out and clarify the direction you want to go into um and then I think also more relevant for most people which are people that don't have a couple hundred thousand followers across social platforms is find people that are willing to go to bat with you sl4 you um um the great thing about how ubiquitous like Tik Tok and micro influencers has become is like even like five years ago

[19:37] to do a social campaign you'd need to probably work with like huge names it cost a lot of money but now some people will just like do it for a free product sample and then other people will do it for like a couple hundred bucks um but you can work with people that have Niche audiences right and that'll actually give you the ability to more analy ically test in different audience subtypes right so rather than placing all your chips on one Tik Tok Creator where it could flop you could try it with like five or six um and then I also think even if you don't have the

[20:15] resources to do that like there's nothing stopping you from creating like multiple social channels to test um I don't remember what the Ecom company was but someone was posting about they had created like dozens of different Tik toks accounts for their brand and they had just like ruthlessly Tex tested different brand in product creative until they figured out what hit and then they doubled down on that right so I I think even if people are running a lot of iterations and Cycles they're doing it like within the same like platform or Channel rather than really being comprehensive and kind of going to all ends of the internet to figure out there

[20:56] are a lot of people online and there are lot of people online in a lot of different places and even if you know that like a certain cohort is interested in a certain thing the kind of sub niches of that cohort and I realized this as my following was growing like it is easier often to like find a very small cohort within a large community and like go after them blow up there and then kind of parlay that influence into other spheres of influence that are either directly related or tangentially related right um but you don't learn that unless you have experiment with a lot of different things what's an

[21:35] example of that of that happening yeah so um I post these like interfaces every day right um if I post something that is a satirical concept for Instagram like pretty much anyone will understand it because everyone uses Instagram or know someone that's used Instagram but like I did a concept that was pager Duty and it was a pager Duty pag your duty feature where if you didn't respond to your on call ticket it would call your girlfriend and Pedro duty is a app that really only developers and Engineers primarily people that work at large technology companies would know right so in posting that I got a lot more

[22:22] comments likes responses follows and DMS from people that worked within that Community um I also saw I don't remember their name but there's a account that does something similar to what I do but they only do it for like rocket league and it blew up right um so I think I what what I learned from that is like if I want to go after a specific Niche or if I want to like tailor my content to people like go to where they are I you like find the apps that they would likely be using um and then you can kind of you're kind of like throwing them a

[22:53] bone comedically it's like okay I know this joke isn't going to hit with a lot of people but I know like it will really hit with this audience um but then there are other creators that realize like oh he can do this then I could really go after like this one this one Niche this like rocket League thing um yeah yeah that's great and I think uh you touched on an important point which is comedy and content and you know a lot of people listening to this are all like how do I get my first 10,000 followers how do I get my first 100,000 followers and you

[23:26] know I think what's interesting about your content is you infuse laughs in it um and you reverse engineer the laugh and you you can do that with the product um meaning like you can create clicks and maybe that's funny or maybe tiny pod is you know funny or or sharable and you can also do that with content so how do you how how do you recommend to people you know who are listening how do you recommend that they structure their well firstly should they structure their content with comedy and then two how do you do it yeah I think it depends on context right like read the room if

[24:02] you're building uh medical technology company that helps people understand their like blood oxygen sat levels you probably don't want to be making satirical Concepts that like you know like it just know the space and so if the if the space that you're working in is like really serious or very heavily regulated you probably want to stay out of being too funny um I think if you're doing something more consumer focused or something that is a bit more LAX which is a lot of things I think so there's the form factor of the comedy and then there's the type of Comedy so those are two kind of discreet things I think I

[24:43] think I still even today I'm still kind of like finding my comedic voice I like experiment with a lot of stuff I know generally like what's on brand and offbrand in terms of like I think of myself as like a comedy show that's like PG that SK used to PG-13 sometimes like people could take their kids to a comedy show that I did on the internet and it's fine right um I'm not going to be making anything that's like like rated R and I'm also not going to make stuff that's like Pixar level like accessible for anyone um so I almost think about when you're doing comedy thinking about like

[25:17] if you were a movie what would you be rated or like if you were a song Would you be explicit or not that's an interesting like framework because it immediately takes a lot of stuff off the table or puts a lot of stuff on the table um and then I think like generally most of my work starts with a real world circumstance or situation and then identifying if and how that interacts or intersects with the technology that we use and then constructing the like joke around that so for example last summer uh we were flying back from a trip and we were super late and we were running to catch

[25:56] our next flight and and this this person like shoved their way through us and like sprinted it was like very aggressive I was like okay I get it like we're going to make the flight though so like don't have to be like crazy about it so um and then in my head I'm like oh like what like I'd fight this person if I had to you know it's like a passing thought like an intrusive thought and I think most people like dismiss their intrusive thoughts but I'm like wait a minute there's like an idea in there somewhere right and it's like okay what if when United over books or flights you

[26:27] had to like physically fight the person for a seat right and then that became like an insane concept that people were like how like what is wrong with you how did you come up with this so I think part of it is just like living and observing life and then zooming in on like points of friction um it's been interesting because like philosophically that's like helps me just like deal with stuff more because I'm like anything that is weird or wild that happens it's like something you could potentially create a bit out of um but I think like once you start like looking through things with that lens it's kind of

[27:00] something that is like hard to turn off um so I think there's that piece and then I think there's the form factor so the there's people like Nick Huber or like Alex Cohen where most of their comedy is like text based right so um I think Alex Cohen and maybe someone else created it but there's the the meme of a company does layoffs or launches some crazy product feature and then he's like I just got laid off I was the PM in respons that was it responsible for and it's like whatever horrible feature um and so there's like like text bits that you can make um and I think anyone can

[27:41] like write right so um I think like the lowest not the lowest form of Comedy but like the easiest and most accessible way is like taking existing Frameworks and then iterating on them so like if you see a a format that is popular like you can jump on that bandwagon right another one is current events like anyone can see a current event then capitalize on it so like I did a campaign with dual lingo where I was just making Concepts and serendipitously like we had just approved for posting the Dual lingo option to serve and translate divorce papers and then like the day after that trau separated with his partner and so

[28:19] dual Linko posted it and uh it like blew up right so I think like reading the room in terms of just like the of all of social um and world events is another way um trying to think what else yeah I think those are the two like good entry points it's just like a good sense of like current events and then also like identifying Trends and then capitalizing and iterating on them um when you see a lot of people that will just yoink people's stuff and post it I think that's like a really low move but um and also it erodes your if you're doing that

[28:53] as a brand it's going to erode a lot of trust um and then I think one other thing and this is more with like brands that are established but I think it is an interesting thing to call out um so dualingo is like known for having an unhinged brand I think like all of us owe a great debt to Wendy's because Wendy's was the first company to be like self-aware on the internet and and like really kind of like go after people um shout out Wendy shout out shout out Wendy the OG and then recently um someone put me on to Ryan a their Instagram and Tik Tok feed is like the

[29:32] wildest thing I've ever seen because people know that they're like if anyone's ever flown R air it's the worst it's so cheap like the seats are uncomfortable like their flights are always like it's just the worst but instead of them trying to like apologize or compensate for that they like take the knife and like twist it so there's like a reel where it's like how to sit and then it's like it shows first it shows a person with like no leg room and then it shows like Benji a dog learn to sit and then it's like this other person a like whoever learn to sit and then

[30:06] it's like you can too and it's just it's just ruthlessly like mocking their customer base which you would think for a lot of a lot of Brands wouldn't be able to do that but I think Ryan a is like in a really unique position where they've identified like here's a sentiment that we have about our brand and rather than like shying away from it even though it's negative we're like doubling down on it because and the interesting thing is people in the comments were actually in certain instances defending Ryan a because flights used to be so expensive that they couldn't fly and even though ryer has like a crappy product it's a cheap

[30:43] product right so um in a way they're hyper aware of their like unique selling point and even though there's a lot of problems that come as a side effect of their unique selling point rather than trying to shy away from those or like protect themselves they're owning it um so yeah that was a bit of a all over the place answer but I think it's a pretty nuanced conversation about how to do comedy depending on what you're doing it's what I wanted honestly yeah it's exact this exactly what I wanted I wanted to crawl around your brain to see how how you how you think about uh you know creating content so

[31:19] that was helpful I want to move on to for Real Estate Pros because I didn't really expect you to have a real estate idea talk to me about that idea I think so I mean it's interesting right because people are going to like tune into this podcast they're be like what am I listening to so we don't need to spend too much time on this if we don't want to but um like every other person that had a little bit of money to invest in the 2010s uh people thought they were Real Estate Investors um I've done a little bit uh primarily in like single family

[31:53] rentals um but then last year and I haven't really posted about this but I dipped my toes into the Airbnb market with the first property and I think there Airbnb generally has a great platform for guests obviously they have a good General platform for hosts and then companies like local prop management companies and then companies like vassa are kind of going after the idea of like TurnKey management um and then you also have like a data Ator platform like air DNA which is trying to kind of pull higher level insights for people to make like Market level decisions on what's up and coming what's slowing down and like just general

[32:38] sentiment analysis um I do think something that going through the process has been painful for myself is like tax optimization and hyperlocal services that are um really comprehensive in helping you understand the financial picture and then walking you through that and digitizing a lot of it I think part of that is just the Nuance of working like loc local to local um but I do think like right now we're seeing this trend where I mean I think like Nick Huber is an example of this and there's other people like that where they they talk about like boring businesses which is more generally something super low level like anyone

[33:23] can grab a lawn mower and start mowing lawns um but I think if you start to digitize that or any other kind of manual business like that it it becomes a lot more appealing to kind of the next generation of people like if I needed to get Plumbing work done like we ended up working with the plumber that we work with because they primarily communicate via text and have a really good digital experience right like a lot of people just don't have that and so I think with some of the intricacies of prop management and specifically as it comes to Airbnb and navigating the the local

[33:57] stuff so everything from like Pest Control to um Landscaping to taxes all of those are like disparate pieces and often components of that are still very manual or physical um or if not they're actually not all like bundled into one full package so I think like people that really could roll up multiple kind of like boring businesses stacked on top of each other and then like brand it into one service with a really smooth digital experience I think just generally anything in the real estate space there are a lot of people competing in terms of providing like a good customer experience but the idea of a good user

[34:38] experience is still something that is pretty suboptimal um and so I think it's like a longer term play and you'd obviously need a little bit more Capital but even starting with like one component of that um process and then like perfecting it I think you could either go broad right like you could specialize in one component of that and then go across an entire Market or you could really go hyper local and try to dominate one specific Market by like stacking all the services on top of each other and providing a best-in-class experience I think there are these like larger air Airbnb prop management companies that

[35:14] are trying to go Nationwide and the reality is they don't understand the intricacies of the local market and from what I've seen in a lot of local markets is that they have like one or two very entrenched players that handle most people um if if they do it all um and so I think it's just an area that's like still rip for a lot of competition yeah so like we often forget real estate is like multi-trillion dollar asset class and the way it the way we interact with it is still so archaic and it's crazy because people have been actually like I've heard people say that exact same line like 10

[35:55] years ago 15 years ago 20 years ago now but it still kind of kind of sucks to to find a plumber or manage your Airbnb or what have you I have a someone who like manages my my vacation home in Quebec in like the mountains and the guy doesn't text A B he doesn't speak one word of English not one word I thankfully I speak some French but I prefer to just you know being you know waiting in line for a coffee and just texting in English versus like calling him up doesn't have a cell phone I have to call his hom line it's like crazy right so I think what

[36:40] you're saying is is the The Experience needs to be digitized but it also needs like the nuances of what like genz and Millennials expect from from a product because these are people who grew up on Instagram people who grew up on Tik Tok so the product that they're used to need you know need to have some of that um some of that jazz I think I think there's a couple components too I think part of it is also education so you can learn pretty much anything you need to but a lot of that knowledge is still like going onto a government website and then reading an FAQ or like downloading

[37:18] a giant PDF and reading that and there's a lot of people that go after the same content type so there's a million people making content content about how to make a cool like dashboard design in figma but the level of intent and production around more of the nuances of like oh okay if you are filing taxes for an Airbnb here's what they're taking away out of the app transaction and like breaking that down like you're a 5-year-old right like there I think part of it is like seasoned people are going to figure that out and they're going to go through like a couple of reps to

[37:59] learn all of those things but I still do think that just generally education curriculum around more historically complex areas is something that there's still opportunity for people to invest time and resources into and then I also think that even in the last couple years like Tech has progressed so much so fast that the example of the person that manages your um company or your sorry your house even if they're not so let's just imagine world where they do text or someone else that has someone that they do text but they're texting in a different language like realtime transcription of language from one to another is something that is basically

[38:41] doable now and so the idea of oh I used to have all these service people that didn't speak English and and coordinating efforts with them was really difficult and now it it really is one language you can you know pull whatever input you need to an English it'll be spat out in French um and vice versa so I think those changes have really only come about within the last couple years and so the taking all of those things and then packaging them into an experience I think it's like anything you're just going to need to kind of continue to run to Run cycles and improvements upon it and I think

[39:13] yeah 10 or 15 years ago manual businesses and doing anything real estate was really really rough and I think there has been a lot of progress but there's always progress to you need yeah and I think you know the way the way you figure out where the progress to be made is is you actually go and do the thing so you become a property owner and as you become a property owner and you rent it out you look at all the different products that you're using to F facilitate it and all the different pain points you have and just write out all the pain points like the big idea of

[39:46] becoming a property owner isn't necessarily the you know the real estate in my opinion it's it's figuring out all the different pain points in the real estate process the different products that need to be made and then figuring out how can I make this in a user experience so that it's so seamless and and it's going to make you know the existing product feel like so Antiquated and then you go and like spin something up yeah yeah I think I think part of it is by either feeling that pain yourself and then documenting or I mean likely a lot of people are like I can't just go

[40:24] start like buying up properties right right I think if you do want to get started in that space specifically like I think there's something to be said for working in the space like working for a product management company and even if that's even too like high lift or high commitment I think there are a million different like message boards and forums you can look at across the internet where where you'll see people um experiencing any number of frustrations or complications um I mean there's like the the idea of like Reddit unbundling right like the whole products have been spun up by like people picking up her Reddit

[41:01] threads or talking to people about the space and and like gaining a deep level of understanding about the space by surrounding yourself with people and and learning from those people so I think even if you don't want to kind of put yourself in the driver's seat of having all the responsibility of owning a thing and then managing that thing and then figuring out all of the pain points surrounding that thing and then going from there there are ways to move in that direction and expose yourself to that space without the the risk and upfront investment that that would typically require totally like the minimal viable product for building

[41:37] something in the space isn't going raising money or taking your own money to go buy a property it's teleport yourself onto places like Reddit onto Twitter onto Facebook groups learn as much as you can through through that through the problems but then suround yourself with a group of people who who have been in the driver's seat because you need someone in the driver seat to really understand the nuances so that you can incorporate it into the product so I totally agree with you most startups could launch you know for under $100 and are just a weit list and a landing page um to get to get some

[42:16] interest so I think in real estate too I I don't think that's the case um I don't want to leave this conversation without the third sort of set of business ideas which is business ideas startup ideas in the design space you know you spend a lot of time with design tools you have a deep you know a deep relationship uh with the design Community as in a lot of designers follow you and and interact with you so where do you see the opportunity in terms of uh you know building startups businesses for platforms design platforms but also uh for the design Community yeah so I think

[42:53] I'll tackle this in two things like first I'll start with like I'm a designer and I want to start a business what should I do and then I'll do like I'm a Founder wanting to serve the design space what do I do um individual designers I mean there are you can kind of go any route I think like as a freelancer you and I know this because I lived it like anyone that wants to start freelancing you start from nothing unless you were born into a like long line of respected designers which like isn't a thing with product design um but you start and you have no leverage um so

[43:29] I took on my first job it was like I probably worked like a couple days like literally like 48 Plus hours like learning After Effects and all that stuff and it was a project in high school that I did for a friend and I made like 25 bucks and got into a concert for free it was like a lyric video for a band um but at the end of that I had a project and I had social proof or like a testimonial from that person that I worked with and I was able to use that to command a slightly higher rate and then I did that over and over

[43:59] and over and over and over again for a decade and like throughout that I identified like I want to do this type of work I don't want to do this type of work um so for people that are like I want to start freelancing but I want to increase my rate like how do I do that the answer really is you do a lot of work you build trust with a lot of people and you get referrals like and then you put in the effort for a really long time I think if you want to build a business um was having this conversation with a friend yesterday like there's

[44:29] creative resourcing or creative resources and tools which I think is a really difficult uphill battle to fight but you can make icon packs you can make illustration packs you can make website templates you can make app templates I think the reality is people are looking for like custom bespoke stuff like yes a lot of people will pay for site templates like I know there's a guy on Twitter that he makes site templates on framer and is doing really well for himself and then there's like I think craft work or invado there's like these aggregators like I think trying to go at it as an individual is really tough

[45:01] because you're fighting against the distribution that these huge platforms have um that's where if you are really good at like icon illustration for example going out as like an independent designer in doing that like it's Bonnie Kate Wolf like she did dis icons for Discord for Netflix um really specializing there is a a small client base for that but if you want to be like oh I just make and they're kind of generic like you're going to be fighting against an aggregator and that's really tough um there's knowledge products so like Brett from design Joy has a course about making an agency I think the hard

[45:37] thing there is you usually have to do something that creates a lot of social proof before you can build and sell a course um same with educational products you have to have a lot of experience um so I think for a lot of designers a lot of designers like want to have have like a cash flowing business like right out the gate and I think realistically like I would encourage people to become really really strong designers before they do that um and then by doing a bunch of different design work you also figure out what you like and what you're good at and then you can lean into those

[46:12] things more and when you do decide that you want to make a business around those you'll often have more skill and you'll be able to execute faster at a higher level of quality um rather than like spinning your wheels on trying to create a business business when you haven't developed a high enough level of expertise um on the startup side I think like so there's like the tooling that people use every day right so it was Photoshop then it was sketch and then for a hot second it was Invision and then figma came up and like ate invision's lunch for lack of a better way of saying it um and then figma is

[46:51] really the dominant player in terms of collaborative product design and like web design tooling I think Adobe still has its place in the world like I still use Adobe products like I think especially with the AI advancements that they've made like I my wife was working on she designs stuff as well um she's more on the marketing side but she was designing something yesterday and I showed her the like quick select and then you can generate a prompt like change someone's jewelry and it's just I mean that used to take a compositor hours right and so I think figma and Adobe will have kind of both their

[47:30] respective places I think they're both enormous companies and they're both set to do really well um in the coming years I think in terms of like where things are going I don't have like a crystal ball where I know what's going to happen I think there's like interesting Trends so it used to be that designers became so designers in like agencies became ux designers or UI designers and then slowly over the 2010s that title converged into like product designer and now we're seeing this world where like front-end engineering or researchers or product managers one of those kind of components are fusing with product designer so like

[48:14] design technologist or design engineer is a popular term where it's a designer that can design things but they can also prototype them um so I think the disciplines are going to collapse more I mean economy capitalist Society things are efficient and so it's going to find the most efficient way to get things done which is often like a hybrid PM designer or a hybrid designer marketer or a hybrid designer engineer um so I think the question becomes who's building the tooling for a designer and a marketer arguably it's Cana um who's building the tool for a PM designer I think that's a really interesting question because there's a lot of like

[48:54] data and insights and research aggregation I actually have a friend so shout out TG he's working on a startup called divinate which is like an AI based um research tool for designers and product managers um and then things like Swift UI um for sell uh there's a lot of repet there's a lot of companies working on design engineer or design engineering tools um in terms of how to or what to build in that space I think there's also a lot of really interesting stuff happening in the Gen space like Photoshop has so much baggage from 20 years of being a photo editing and compositing tool that um don't remember

[49:35] what the tool was called but there was like a recent design tool that came out that was a really interesting like way to generate assets quickly edit and improve them and like cycle through iterations um and so I think that space is still very early and I think we're at the point similar to like what I talked about AI Hardware where a lot of people are like throwing a lot of stuff at the wall in terms of gen and I think we're still trying to figure out like how to correctly augment and connect to like the current designers workf flow right because like figma was a step like

[50:15] better than Envision and so it was a natural thing for like the whole industry to shift I think the needs of the industry now are there are more fragmented needs and so I'm I'm guessing like Niche products will pop up around the design marketing design engineering um design and product use cases um and then also just gen AI on top of that I think it's probably more helpful for me to give that summary of the space as someone that is in the space rather than me telling every person listening to this to build a gen startup and I think I think I have a better sense of like how the individual

[50:54] designer should do it rather than like Oh I'm a tech founder and I'm trying to figure out what's to build I also think that whenever there's a new role that's created like design engineer There's an opportunity to build content Community paid Community around it so for example Lenny ritky many people know him multi-million dollar year business servicing product managers but who's going to be the Lenny ritky for product Engineers yeah yeah I think that's right design Engineers sorry yeah yeah well there's like a lot of design content and there's like a lot of how to code content but it's like designers coding there's less there um so I think you're

[51:37] right like people starting to meld those and build community and content around those is a a huge opportunity yeah I also think digital assets you mentioned that in the beginning around templates and and stuff like that for platforms is one of those things that there's always opportunity to create those things um but you are right the platforms make it harder to you know unless you have a big audience to sell so there I but I still believe that there there's like a you know tremendous opportunity still uh in those spaces and I think the way to think about it is you know maybe don't create a WordPress theme because people

[52:18] have been creating Word WordPress themes for 20 years and it's probably saturated at this point like what's the you know what's something new uh so you've talked a lot about framer in the past you know that ecosystem is growing very quickly web flow that ecosystem is growing very quickly how you create stuff for them yeah yeah I think that's right and I even think like designx code is like one of the first people to really like package design and coding tutorials is like one thing but I still think there's a lot of space where it's like there's not really a place that I know like oh as a designer you

[52:50] should go to this place to get this like kind of custom component for xcode it's like oh you're building this app and you need like a custom nav bar like here start with this thing right like maybe you pay five bucks for like all this boilerplate Swift UI that looks really nice and is like a a level better than a lot of the outof the boox components um but I think like you said it's like people are just now there's just now a level of critical mass of interest there so I don't think people have like started to invest in like the content Community around that opportunity it's

[53:22] why people listen to this you know ding ding ding all right sain Iverson it's been real thanks for coming on the show you are the the Larry David of of design Twitter in a good way that is a great compliment so and where could folks find out about you and I think you have a a new book coming out too so maybe you can plug that as well yeah so I mean you can find me basically wherever you are on the internet X Twitter whatever you want to call it threads link in uh Instagram sometimes Tik Tok I'm still I still don't know how to use Tik Tok so bear

[54:02] with me um and then yeah I'm working on a book so as we speak I have the pre-orders for the second version up like if you go on any of my Social Links you'll be able to find that and pre-order it and then um those should start shipping either late February or early March amazing I love it I'll keep following I I I I'll grab the book I subscribe to you on Twitter and the email uh as well daily ideas it gets me going as someone who I mean I'm in the business of creating new Concepts through one of our one of our businesses which is called LCA and it's an

[54:43] innovation agency so we work with a lot of the companies that you you mock up stuff and that's originally how I how I actually I heard about you oh really yeah one of the one of the big companies that we we do Innovation product design work so we like invent the future some of the biggest companies in the world and one of them um I was in their slack they invited us into our slack and they sent sent something that you did and I was like who is this guy and uh I've been hooked ever since wild yeah so thank you very much I'll catch you later

[55:20] man thanks for having me

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