Samuel Hulick: User Onboarding

Samuel Hulick, a renowned UX consultant and leading authority in user onboarding, operates the well-known website useronboard.com. Through this platform, he expertly deconstructs the initial experiences of popular apps and services, showcasing his insights into effective user onboarding processes.

Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/YFFw5u_Aq-s

Transcript

AMY: [00:00:21] Samuel Hulick is a UX designer and onboarding expert.

His popular website, useronboard.com, features delightfully honest teardowns of real software products. 

As an expert, Samuel knows that great onboarding helps users do what they naturally want to accomplish and avoids making them jump through artificial hoops. 

Samuel: Nobody's coming to your product to upload five photos specifically or to create three projects like those don't have a motive baked into them. And so, I consider those to be in-app milestones that users reach.

But all of the in-app milestones and behaviors are always in service to out of app milestones in people's [00:01:00] lives. And that's ultimately what I recommend coordinating around.

AMY:  Join us as we take a deep dive into what makes a great onboarding flow. 

AMY: Thank you so much, Samuel, for joining us here. I'm so excited to catch up with you.

Samuel: The feeling is very mutual as always. 

AMY: So, Samuel visited a early version of this program long ago. We were just reminiscing about it. He was one of my first VIP supporters who came in and wowed everybody. And it's years later and a lot has changed. So, we're gonna go over that.

We're gonna go deep into onboarding and SAS retention techniques and all kinds of great stuff. So I wanna start Samuel with winding it way back. How did you get into design and tech? What drew you into the field? 

Samuel: My tech career started as a developer first, and[00:02:00] back in those days, I would get like a, a Photoshop file that had a bunch of different layers that would show like different click and interaction states. And it was my job to code it up and make it clickable. And there were a lot of times where I would feel conflicted about coding up different features or presenting screens in particular ways cuz I just felt like they were gonna be kind of dead-on arrival by when they were actually supposed to be performing for real users.

And, for that reason, I wanted to come in earlier in the strategic process, instead of just (ha) inheriting these clickable PSDs to, to code. And so, then I switched tracks to focus on a UX career. I was about a little over 10 years ago probably. And then within the world of UX, one thing that has really driven me is being able to tell whether what we're doing is working or not.

And I got frustrated with a lot of, what I consider to be kind of an ambivalent attitude toward data that, the user [00:03:00] experience world can, can have sometimes. From there, it was something where I realized that if I focused, if you really care about finding out what is working and what the success rates of your improved user experience is, the user onboarding flow is, is one place where you can, you can very quickly tell whether things are starting to work better or not, and gives you a, a lever to be able to figure out what is really driving change for your business and improving your conversion rates and, ultimately your bottom line when it comes to revenue.

I think I started user onboard nine years ago, and since then I've grown more and more focused on connecting design changes to revenue and identifying how to serve customer segments at scale and all the kind of things that are, uh, what I consider user onboarding in a sense, but are far beyond just a, like a product tour. So, that's where I'm at these days. Wow. I tried to keep it short. I don't know if that was too rambling, but

AMY: No, that was great [00:04:00] actually. What's so cool is that people come into this field from lots of different ways.

Some people come in through art, some people come in through coding. Some people come in through project management or support. There's so many different ways, you know, and that's what's exciting about the kind of work we do is that, you know, those cross-functional teams and really getting to work together.

So let's talk about onboarding teardowns, that your onboarding teardowns put you on the map. I remember the first time I saw one of your onboarding teardowns, I thought, okay, so this is not just educational. This is very entertaining and you really, have a great voice. In the way that you communicate.

So where did that come from? How did you develop that? Did you ever like study copywriting? Do you just put your own personality into it and you thought, screw it. I'm just gonna have some fun with it. Like it really, it stood out because a lot of other things were much more damped down, [00:05:00] right? 

Samuel: I feel very flattered that you, that you feel that way.

I mean, I also feel very fortunate that they, that they were, were as popular, you know, when, when I was doing them and things like that. The, the origin of, of where they came from was I decided I wanted to write a book about my, my philosophy on UX and customer success. And I put up a landing page for the book to see if I could at least get people to sign up to join the email list.

And if not, maybe it didn't, wasn't gonna be a great sign for the sales of the book after writing it. And, uh, I realized I needed to drive traffic to the landing page to get people to sign up with their email addresses. And I didn't really have an audience at the time, and I, I thought that maybe I could start blogging, but I was already trying to like, write a book, and so that seemed like just a lot more writing, which I'm, it takes me a long time to do.

And, I just had a, a client deliverable sitting around that I had just finished where I went [00:06:00] screen by screen through their onboarding flow and had just done some like fat marker notes, on just different, aspects that I would change or, or risks that they might be facing because of their design decisions and things like that.

And I was like, man, if I could just, if I just did one of these for free for some random company and put it out there, that might be like the equivalent of a good blog post or something like that. And, yeah, I just gave it a shot and the very first one that I did was LES Accounting CEO, Alan Branch at the time.

And, I remember, putting it out there and, I got an email from him the next morning and I was like, oh no. I was really worried and in, and I, I thought he was gonna be upset and send me some sort of like, take down notice or something. And instead, he couldn't have been more supportive and, you know, asked if he could share it around and promote it on his website.

And from there I was like, man, I should just keep doing these. And that's how it evolved. And, and, and I guess specifically regarding your question about tone and voice, I think part of it [00:07:00] came from the fact that it was originally like, a client deliverable format where I'm just trying to cut through the BS and, and talk about the lack of thoughtfulness that can, can oftentimes be embodied in an onboarding flow and the consequences of that and the opportunities to improve it. And so I think, I think something that people liked was just that I was talking about it straight in a kind of a straightforward way. And I, I guess there's, I don't know, I think I'm just kind of a weird person.

I'm not exactly sure why people think it's so entertaining, or I'm not trying to make it humorous, I guess I just try to make it fun for myself while I, while I was making 'em and I guess that translated to other, to other people's, reading experience too. 

AMY: That's actually a really interesting perspective, making it fun for yourself that that can go a long way.

So a few things. What we could talk about onboarding all day, and people can go to your site and learn more. What are the most important things for [00:08:00] product creators and product leaders to get? Right about onboarding. 

Samuel: My biggest recommendation, uh, regarding what to get right with onboarding is to identify the value that people are seeking when they come to your offering and to be really, really good at systematically delivering those outcomes that people are looking for.

So for example, I might sign up for TurboTax, and if the onboarding is focused on pointing out the different things that TurboTax can do, then that's fine as a product tour. But what I'm really looking for is getting my taxes filed and having a, you know, saving money in the process or getting a better return or things along those lines.

Instead of thinking of your onboarding as an opportunity to point people to different cool parts of your app, as tempting as that might be, to instead think of it as an opportunity to get to know what your [00:09:00] new signups are trying to do and create reliable systems that deliver them to, to those particular outcomes.

AMY: So move them towards their journey, move them along, move them towards making progress on what they care about. 

Samuel: 100%. I like it when people take a metrics driven approach to user onboarding, but a lot of times the metrics can be kind of, I guess, a reductive.

Create three projects or upload five photos or particular behavioral thresholds where like, you know, that nobody's coming to your product to upload five photos specifically or to create three projects like those, those don't have like a, like a motive and it, it baked into them. I consider those to be in-app milestones that users reach.

But all of the in-app milestones and behaviors are always in service to out of app milestones in people's lives. And that's ultimately what I recommend coordinating around and being, and being selective about which milestones [00:10:00] are really strongly correlated with revenue and really worth your time serving and, and which ones aren't.

And, and when you do find the ones that are worth it to really go in hard on it. 

AMY: Let's talk about that because deciding what not to do is huge and hard and often separates success from failure. 

Samuel: Yeah, I, I completely agree. I, my, my current theory is, I mean I'm, I'm most specifically focused on self-serve SaaS right now.

There are lots of ways to scale revenue in software and, you know, there's a whole enterprise playbook out there, but there isn't really a self-serve SaaS playbook, that I'm aware of. I've looked pretty hard, if there is, I I would be very interested in seeing it. But that's, that's the area that my mind is most focused on, especially coming from the, user onboarding background and.

My, my personal theory, especially in a self-serve as context, If you're getting a thousand new customers a month or a thousand new customers a week, there are [00:11:00] going to be some of those customers that go on to be highly profitable for you that you can scale your business around. And there are gonna be a lot of other customers that are not profitable and that are basically being subsidized by your profitable customers.

And to be able to identify which segments are really driving revenue and what levers you have to really scale those segments, to me is the name of the game. And so when, when you ask about saying yes to some things means saying no to other things, to me it's really a question of how do you hone in on the segments of customers that are driving the most business success for you?

And just keep doubling down on that rather than chasing a bunch of possibilities. 

AMY: Yep. Yep. Well there's so many stories about how painful that is, but how relevant to success. There's a famous story about Twitch doing that. You know, really when they turned from Justin TV into Twitch, they went after gaming, and it was [00:12:00] not the biggest by far, yeah ,of their segments, but it was the one they could most monetize. Yeah. And my clients struggle with this all the time. You know, I help a lot of clients try to figure out and fix a leaky bucket, you know, after they've shipped, they've been out six months, a year, something like that. There's a leaky bucket.

And almost always, always, it's exactly what you're talking about is if we do that cohort analysis by, you know, behavior and psychographics and all those good things, what we almost always see is there's one that's really sticky and potentially profitable and a lot of, oh, this is nice to have. 

Samuel: Yeah. Yeah. I completely agree. There are a lot of factors that go into whether a segment is scalable or not. You have to be thinking about your cost of acquisition and the ratio of that versus the lifetime value. You want to be buying $3 for a dollar.

You don't want to be buying a dollar, 50 for a dollar and doing that a thousand times a week. For [00:13:00] example, you also wanna be thinking about expansion revenue and when that kicks in and how likely it is that different segments are going to expand and, and drive net revenue retention above a hundred, so on and so forth.

There are another big consideration too, and like, this is why I was talking about like, milestones like create three projects or upload five photos or things like that. Those, those are milestones that I don't, I personally don't believe are likely to scale well. So if you say, huh, there's a correlation between creating three projects and a higher LTV or better conversion from trial to paid or something like that, maybe we should get more people to create three projects.

If you're just artificially doing that and it doesn't actually correlate with customers getting value, it's probably not gonna correlate in a way where those additional people are suddenly significantly more likely to convert and give you money that they otherwise wouldn't be. One of the biggest questions of scaling is not just cost of acquisition and the ultimate [00:14:00] revenue that you're getting, but also how repeatable is your process?

If you can make it work at 500 people, can you make it work at 5,000 people or 50,000 people? And a lot of times that's the, those are the areas where I see companies hitting a plateau and not really being sure how to grow, but being so invested in what they're doing that they have to continue anyway.

So how do you deal with that? Well, to me it's really a question of those out of app milestones that we were talking about. What are those bigger goals that are driving people to. Integrate your offering into their life and into their process. And how can you create your offering in a way that serves that process and timeline as much as possible.

And again, being very selective about which timelines you want your offering to integrate into to begin with. And so, I don't know how nerdy you want to get here, but in a morning, 

AMY: Extremely nerdy. I'm just like utterly fascinated. So go there.

Samuel: Okay. So, so like in a, in like a [00:15:00] mathematical sense, again, my mind is, it comes from a self-serve SaaS standpoint.

So it's, it's different for different business models, but like, let's say for example that you get a like a thousand signup, trial signups per week, and you, you're converting like 20% of those to becoming customers. There are probably different customer value based milestones, like something like creating three projects maybe is not super scalable, but saying, hey we're TurboTax. Like, let's see how many people are even making progress on getting their taxes filed, or what the likelihood of them completing their taxes even is looking at, at, at, in-app behaviors that are really strongly correlated with user value to begin with.

And seeing where the drop-offs are from one step to the next, to the next, where you go from signing up and then you have to create your account and then you have to validate your email address, and then you have to answer the sales, how many employees at your company question. And then you have to do X, Y, and [00:16:00] Z.

And then finally you can get to a point where you start, you begin, you're filing your taxes and just looking at where the drop-offs are along the way can be extremely informative, especially when you start segmenting the, the users that you're looking at. So you could ask for example, if an average, let's say an average, sign up of like the 1000 that we're getting per week is, let's say that half of the signups, begin their tax filing process. that means you're losing the other, like half of the signups right at the very beginning before they have any possibility of, of getting value.

And so you really want to be focusing on who are the people who are getting somewhere and what are those again, those out of bat milestones that the goals that are driving them to, to, in this case, file their taxes in a way that strongly correlates with not only converting to customers, but ultimately producing an, an outsized L [00:17:00] TV and being very expansion friendly if your business model includes expansion and things along those lines.

The basic idea is to think of your new signups or your new customers as a series of overlapping segments, and you can pick apart your, those segments by their device type, the day, time of day that they signed up, what kind of, country they live in.

And when we get into the more psychographic things like what are your goals and what can we help you with, those are things that you can flag customer users by as well. And you can see over time how well those people go on to convert and if they're more likely to convert into customers and more likely to retain and be sticky customers than the average signup, for example.

And when you see a difference in performance along those lines, then it's this question of can we put a better support system in place and get more people to this point of success? And does the correlation between that and better [00:18:00] customer (ha) behavior continue when that happens? 

AMY: Everything you're talking about is completely consistent with finding your superfans, which is a big theme in what we do.

And it, it has different, it plays out differently, like before you ship, after you ship. But this comes up a lot with our clients and students who run SaaS. They're like, who should we focus on? They start doing cohort analysis. one of the things that I see a lot, and I'd love for you to dig deeper on is, demographics versus psychographics.

So, how to slice and dice with demographics. Most people are familiar with, you know, it's the objective information about people in some way, education, have they been married, et cetera, et cetera. A little bit of that is have they like moved or gone through a big change, which is often a time of increased buying, and in trying new things.

But then the psychographics [00:19:00] are where we really get the juice when we do, when we nail the psychographics. So what, techniques have you evolved to, as you, you said the psychographics, those can be targeted as well. Tell us. 

Samuel: Yeah. Well, so I see it working in both directions. On the one hand, the, the more intimately you can understand the goals that are driving people to sign up and become customers and stay customers and so on and so forth, , there are approaches that you can take. Like I recommend strongly and nobody ever wants to do it, but like talk to 50 of your good customers or even 50 people who recently signed up, and just get a general sense of what is happening in their life that's driving your offering to be relevant to them. 

You're not trying to get to understand them as a person. My business partner's name is Johann, and he and I talk about these kind of things quite often. We, we have a metaphor called, selling umbrellas in the rain, where we're not saying that we want to be the best loved [00:20:00] brand of umbrellas and talking to people about how the quality of our umbrellas when it's not raining, so that hopefully they proactively get one.

We want to be in the situation that's driving people to need an umbrella to begin with, and we want to think about how can we have our offering beyond their radar and available to them. On demand when the need arises and segment around need not kind of person. 

Mm-hmm, this is jobs to be done 10 years ago, you know, Clayton Christensen saying that, you know, just because I'm 50 doesn't cause me to buy the New York Times.

Or things along those lines where, yeah, if you're thinking in terms of buying a Super Bowl ad or something, you might want to be thinking about demographics because you're creating a giant, a, a, a one to many, many, many kind of, communication dynamic. But when you're creating software, you can and should be adapting to whatever the user needs at any given moment.

Because to me, if we're looking in [00:21:00] at this in terms of causality, it's not that the person owns a minivan that's causing them to use Google Maps, it's because they're trying to figure out how to get somewhere. 

AMY: I love it. Yeah. Your perspective is very aligned with jobs to be done, and we, as you know, completely embrace that, and I think it's, it really is transformative.

So a couple more things about onboarding, and then I wanna talk about value paths. So we talked about the most important things for people to get right about onboarding. What are the common things people get wrong about onboarding? Things that make you crazy? 

Samuel: Hmm. I would say, focusing, ironically, focusing on, how do I best put it?

I see people who get onboarding feature I where they add an intro video and that doesn't really seem to move the needle on conversion. So they think, okay, maybe we should add a tool tip tour and then maybe that does or doesn't help anything. And so then they think, okay, [00:22:00] well really what we should have are these hotspots pointing to these different areas?

Or a lot of times you can see within a company, different departments and silos with different agendas, kind of fighting over who gets the, the user's attention first and who gets to, you know, be the shiniest part of the shin object. And my strong recommendation in contrast to that is to be thinking, more about how to get out of the user's way. 

They are sufficiently motivated to the point where they already are going out of their way to create an account with your offering, which like nobody wants to do voluntarily or there's no real inherent motivational benefit to doing that. There's always an instrumental outcome that people are investing their time in signing up to, to hopefully arrive at.

I think that people can look at onboarding and activation as under considered, which I think is fair. I think a lot of companies realize that, [00:23:00] that they are not putting as much design and, and customer love toward their activation flow as they are to new features or things like that.

And I understand where they're coming from there, but I think where if I could save those companies’ time, it would be to encourage them not to think about how do we troubleshoot all of the areas where things might be going wrong in our activation process. And just keep seeing if those maybe move the needle or don't.

And instead to get really clear on what good is already happening. And intimately familiarize yourself with the good things, the successes that are already taking place, and think about how to nurture those. 

And again, double down on what is working rather than obsessing about all the things that possibly could not be working.

Samuel: Love it. Because you're just gonna be offloading a bunch of cognitive junk onto the user. 

AMY: Love it. That's such good advice. So is [00:24:00] SaaS onboarding, self-serve SaaS onboarding different in some fundamental way from other kinds of onboarding? Are there special challenges or special opportunities there?

Samuel: That's a great question. I would say, boy, I, I mean, I think in some way it depends on, on how you define onboarding. I, I think that a lot of companies think of onboarding as basically their product or, or their product intro. 

And that from a user experience design standpoint, that, that, that's a relevant consideration of how do we introduce ourselves and how do we walk people through our, our functionality and so on and so forth. But that in my mind is a pretty limited way of thinking about at least what the point of onboarding ultimately really is, which is to make it more likely that people become healthy, sustainable, long-term customers in, in a way that you can scale. 

And so, If you're looking at onboarding in a self-serve context versus an enterprise context versus a B2C context versus an ad [00:25:00] driven kind of business model, I do think that that's gonna inform the design of your product or, and the different choices that you make, along that process.

Because if you are making money from directly from your users, a B2C business model is pretty different than if you're selling to SMBs like they wanna buy in different ways and have different patterns and approaches. And then SMBs have wanna buy in in a way that's very different from a, a larger enterprise.

And so it's really to me a question of understanding what your full customer lifecycle sales approach is, whether it's automated. Person driven, whatever, or some combination of the two and having a really clear idea, almost like a, a conveyor belt or assembly line of how to get people reliably to the points of value that they care about, that are driving them to wanna pay you and, and sustain your business model.

And if you are in an enterprise [00:26:00] context, maybe you are not looking to immediately solve someone's problems in the way That really represents a core value. If you have an enterprise onboarding experience, you might want to cater it more toward having like an interactive demo where people can see all the fancy charts with real data in them.

Instead of just having a bunch of no data empty chart, go do stuff. Have you integrated yet? Kind of, kind of messaging. alternatively, if you are looking at selling to smaller businesses or even B2C. To me, the, the real name of the game there is understanding the, the immediate goals that people are trying to accomplish.

They're, they're, the one thing that I have is that people don't go to your product, they go through your product. They, they are where they are right now and they're trying to get somewhere else. And they're hoping that incorporating your app into that process will make it more likely that they get to where they, they're trying to go.

And to me, the enterprise's goals can [00:27:00] be very big and nebulous. And I don't think that you're going to accomplish that in your very first sitting. But if you are looking at serving individual people who have a sense of autonomy and discretion over their own ability to pay for the product to begin with, then the more immediately you can be helping them and actually getting them to a point of actual value. It, to me is really the name of the game. 

And, and I do think that that opens up opportunities for different (bu) business models that we're still really just scratching the surface of to me, when, when I look at the software landscape, if you're trying to figure out how to scale your SaaS company from 1 million to 5 million to a hundred million ARR, it's pretty much go hire a Salesforce and, and go up market and, and figure out how to sell to Tide and Ferrari and things like that.

And to me, I, I, I, I love it when companies succeed by serving a broader market of smaller companies or smaller entities.

AMY: Interesting. So tell me about value [00:28:00] paths. 

Samuel: Sure. So, value paths came out of kind of what I've been touching on already regarding, how I've, I've gained recognition for, user experience design and, and user onboarding and, encountering how limited that can be, in terms of, of actual impact to a company's bottom line.

I see onboarding as a coordinated system for producing value. And, I think a, a lot of times if, if I get matched up with a client that, is just looking to kind of, rearrange their tooltip tour or something along those lines, then they're just gonna be leaving a lot of potential on the table.

And so I wanted to try to get out of that sort of cognitive crossed wire, I guess you could say. And so I, I wanted to communicate to people even the things that I'm still struggling to, to articulate here in this call, like the out of app outcomes and the segments that drive the most value and the psychographic side of things.

And I, I just felt that [00:29:00] there was a lot to be explored there. even, even with something like Jobs to Be Done, as much inspiration as I took from that and things like Lean Startup, they were, helpful from like a paradigm standpoint, but I didn't know how to do them and how to apply it to my work, in any kind of methodological sense.

And so that was what, the inspiration for creating Value Paths was and, and continues to be.

AMY: And what form does value paths take? 

Samuel: Right now, it takes a very nebulous form. to be completely transparent here, I have been surprised at how difficult it has been to sell the concept of delivering user value. I, I think that our industry likes to speak in platitudes about how, how important it is to serve customers and how customer centricity is the name of the game.

But when you ask people, you know, what kind of value are your customers seeking that drives them to become customers and stay customers? And how can you tell when you're delivering that value and when you're not? Kind of just get [00:30:00] ambivalent, shrugs. And so I thought that if I were able to put together a coherent and and self-consistent framework to help people do these things that I was so inspired.

I mean, one other major name to talk about here is, is Kathy Sierra. And her work, huge inspiration to me. And so thinking about something like her badass principles and putting them into a, a framework that people could apply on the job, has been really motivational to me. And, I reached a point, maybe a year or two ago after putting a couple years toward it where I realized that.

Just the, the value proposition, it was just not super motivational to people that, it spoke to people who were maybe a designer at a company and they were so far down the corporate hierarchy that there was no chance that they were going to be able to influence. Whatever was happening behind the curtain in executive meetings and things along those lines.

In the UX world, I remember when I first was, getting involved, years and years ago, there was a, the [00:31:00] whole concept of earning a seat at the table. I remember that being like a very common thing that was discussed.

And, and I thought, you know, like in order for a, a UX mindset or a jobs to be done mindset or user value, customer centricity, so on and so forth, in order for that to really deserve a seat at the table, it needs to be able to speak revenue in, in order for it to really be convincing to executives and, people who are being pressured by their board to be making, you know, outsized growth rates year over year and so on and so forth.

And so for me, I thought, okay. I'm at a point right now where when I say self-serve SaaS, people understand what I mean. And if that happens to leverage the value paths framework that I created to provide those changes, I would rather do that in a way that clicks to people rather than being preachy and saying, oh no, you need to like, buy into my enlightened philosophy that I'm calling Value Paths.

And so I'm looking to, meet people more where they are and, and try to use [00:32:00] my own framework to help people, with specific self-serve revenue goals rather than trying to get them to buy into my paradigm. 

AMY: There's a life lesson. 

Samuel: Yeah, right. It took me, it took me about a half decade to figure it out, but yeah. If I can save anybody else some time. 

AMY: So looking back at all of this and looking forward at what lights you up, what's your superpower?

What kind of projects do you just really love? 

Samuel: I think that there are a lot of people who don't like finding out that they're wrong. And I, I'm the kind of person where I like it when somebody tells me that I have spinach in my teeth cuz then I'm not walking around like an idiot with spinach in my teeth anymore.

And when it comes to, growth, when it comes to scaling a business model, you really can't hang onto your pet ideas and be driven too much by your ego because it's not going to show you the most productive path forward, every single time. And I, I think that there [00:33:00] is a lot to be said for inspiration and intuition, but at the same time operating in a way where you're leaning into reality checks wherever possible.

And, working with, with an, with the existing reality and seeing what truly um, performs as advertised and what is otherwise just a cool thought that people say on Twitter in Silicon Valley, 

AMY: So being wrong on the way to being right. 

Samuel: Yeah, I mean, there's a, I think I've been watching a documentary about Shaquille O' Neal and, and he says a couple times in it that in order to succeed, you must first learn to fail.

And I, I think that's a, a good way of putting it. Like, somebody who I really admire is, Brian Balfour, who I'm sure name that is very familiar to you and probably your, your, your group here. and you know, I, I, I remember years ago being really inspired by a talk that he gave where he said that at HubSpot with all of the experts that they had assembled on their growth team, nine out of their 10 of their projects didn't work [00:34:00] out as expected.

And they were operating with a lot of really good data and sophisticated approaches. And humans just don't, you know, like coming from a development background to me it's like, if I just like guessed 800 lines of CSS and then just like walked away and was like, I'm sure that's all fine. I, I like, and not even looking to see how it renders, it would just be totally irresponsible.

And, and in a similar way, if our job is to come in and impact growth or impact user experience or ultimately impact a company's bottom line, let's care about seeing whether that happened or not and build our industry's practices around what truly works, rather than what sounds cool. 

It really makes me concerned how hype driven our industry can be. I'm not trying to end it on a downer. 

AMY: When you say our industry, what do you mean? 

Samuel: It's the, the world of tech in general. I mean, I think that especially when you look at companies, that are VC backed, it's their job to build buzz and build hype so that their valuation becomes [00:35:00] bigger and more desirable and more people wanna invest and so on and so forth.

And ultimately, as we're seeing now in, in the economic climate that we're currently in, whether you can scalably produce revenue or not, and what your unit economics are, tells a very different story a lot of times than, than what a company's internal leadership is, is projecting to the external world and to their own employees.

I can't tell you how many times I've gone to conferences and heard companies say these big, bold claims and, and then work with those companies and realize that the, the reality is totally different. And, I, I feel duped and in some ways, honestly, like I, I bought into a lot of things earlier in my career that I just took on.

And, I, I just assumed that the experts were taking a rigorous approach to, to figuring out what was working and what wasn't. And

AMY: Like, what, what was something you bought into? And then you're like, oh, nah. 

Samuel: I've been pretty anti persona for a long time, so I think that comes to mind, where, you know, like even things like, I mean, [00:36:00] certainly NPS like that, that's, that's an example that I would, I would very quickly point to 

AMY: Oh yeah. 

That's a hot potato. You know? Yeah. Some people are like, don't take away my NPS pride outta my hands, right. Well, but I mean, yeah. Yeah. I see what you mean. It's like, there's these things and I went, I went through that same journey too. It's good to know you did where it's like, I can't believe I used to believe that, because then you actually see stuff.

Totally. I used to, to think. Simple gamification was like magic. I remember when I was in pigeon lab as an undergraduate doing behavior mod experiments on pigeons going, oh, it's the secret of the universe. And then you find out it's more complicated than that, which I think is your message. It's like these overly simplified things are bullshit.

Samuel: Yeah. Yeah. And I would really love to see our, our industry, take a more rigorous approach to separating the, the wheat from the chaff there.

AMY: One of the blessings of a [00:37:00] downturn is it tends to do that. 

Samuel: Yeah. I'm not rooting for, for anybody to approach hardship, but I, I love the fact that, that people are having to focus more on, how they're converting their revenue assets into more revenue, in a sense, so, yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: It's very gratifying to provide real value. Absolutely. You know, it's just, it feels good. It's a very human thing too. 

It's been such a pleasure connecting. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective and wisdom and battles fought and all the stuff. Really appreciate it. It's been so much fun.

Samuel: That's awesome. I really appreciate being here and, um, I'm rooting for anybody who's, who's learning from your sage advice.

AMY: Thank you so much. You have a great evening. Bye everybody. See you soon.

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