We're four people now and would like to grow to seven total. I think the underlying numbers justify it, otherwise we'd be staying put.
Obviously, the app reflects a lot of our own tastes about how we think social software should be done (start simple) and what we think is fun (positive, simple). But we also run a lot of Lean Startup techniques, which means we are testing, measuring, surveying, interviewing, etc like crazy just to validate our ideas and create a constant feedback loop for what our intuition is telling us (constantly informed intuition).
The first time I read The Lean Startup book I thought the metrics could really drive a lot of your decisions. They don't usually. They mostly reflect a lot of noise. But every now and then they highlight some signal that you're missing.
The big surprise signal for us is that we hadn't realized how prominent and effective casual self-tracking is across all levels of society. This isn't just something new invented by quantified self. Consider the cultural impact of fifty years of Weight Watchers. So we ended up seeing crazy high retention and qualitative feedback way before we expected (like at the point where you could track but not see your history).
And we spent a couple of months validating that with different cohorts. For example we were suspicious that our friends & family were skewing the results high so we went looking for more mainstream people. Turns out our friends are total slackers and were the worst performing cohort we looked at.
We had been thinking that we would have to pull off some real magic (like making willpower obsolete) in order for this to work. But now we're finding a lot of people who are psyched for a simple utility that also happens to have a bit of built in support and works for practically any goal you could ever think of. It's been amazing to walk into work every day and get new success stories. Really fun.
There's still a ton of challenges ahead and things we need to prove are possible. But everyone on the current hiring roadmap is about either proving something new or moving faster toward things we're already trying to prove.
FWIW, I don't think anyone in the company is acqui-hire inclined. We've been mostly backed by Obvious, which is three ex-Twitter founders/execs. It would be hard to get them excited about that sort of payday. My last company was a great lifestyle business (profitable, supported a bicoastal life, only required 1/day of work/week), so I know what leisure is and I know it was boring. My co-founder is the same way. We just want to work on something meaningful--which is exactly what we feel like we're doing right now.
Obviously, the app reflects a lot of our own tastes about how we think social software should be done (start simple) and what we think is fun (positive, simple). But we also run a lot of Lean Startup techniques, which means we are testing, measuring, surveying, interviewing, etc like crazy just to validate our ideas and create a constant feedback loop for what our intuition is telling us (constantly informed intuition).
The first time I read The Lean Startup book I thought the metrics could really drive a lot of your decisions. They don't usually. They mostly reflect a lot of noise. But every now and then they highlight some signal that you're missing.
The big surprise signal for us is that we hadn't realized how prominent and effective casual self-tracking is across all levels of society. This isn't just something new invented by quantified self. Consider the cultural impact of fifty years of Weight Watchers. So we ended up seeing crazy high retention and qualitative feedback way before we expected (like at the point where you could track but not see your history).
And we spent a couple of months validating that with different cohorts. For example we were suspicious that our friends & family were skewing the results high so we went looking for more mainstream people. Turns out our friends are total slackers and were the worst performing cohort we looked at.
We had been thinking that we would have to pull off some real magic (like making willpower obsolete) in order for this to work. But now we're finding a lot of people who are psyched for a simple utility that also happens to have a bit of built in support and works for practically any goal you could ever think of. It's been amazing to walk into work every day and get new success stories. Really fun.
There's still a ton of challenges ahead and things we need to prove are possible. But everyone on the current hiring roadmap is about either proving something new or moving faster toward things we're already trying to prove.
FWIW, I don't think anyone in the company is acqui-hire inclined. We've been mostly backed by Obvious, which is three ex-Twitter founders/execs. It would be hard to get them excited about that sort of payday. My last company was a great lifestyle business (profitable, supported a bicoastal life, only required 1/day of work/week), so I know what leisure is and I know it was boring. My co-founder is the same way. We just want to work on something meaningful--which is exactly what we feel like we're doing right now.