Laziness, Experience Design, I Don't Want 25k Followers

Good Sunday 🌞!

This past week I made a big decision.

So big that will keep me busy in the upcoming weeks for sure. I’m excited to share more below!

2 things I want to share today and they're both about laziness 😂:

• Everything is experience design
• Don’t be lazy

😍 "Everything is experience design"

This thought hit me one afternoon this past week.

• If you host a birthday party, you’re designing a night for people to have fun.
• If you build a website, you’re designing how they get the right information to find you useful.
• If you run a course, you’re designing a journey to help your students transform.

If you think about it, everything we do is to offer a delightful experience.

Honestly, I didn’t quite get it at first. I thought I could just build the right product to solve the right problem, and people would come and enjoy.

But now, I’m thinking about in addition to finding the right solution, how I could offer an experience that blows people’s mind.

I’ll give you an easy example.

My Public Lab homepage used to look like this, it worked okay.

But since this thought hit me, I saw this as a result of my laziness and lack of attention to experience design. I was expecting visitors to surf around to find out what they want. Bad!

So I designed a new homepage for Public Lab.

My goal is to make it super easy for any visitor to figure out where they’re at in their journey and find the most relevant content to help. I believe if I do this step well, the rest will come.

What about another example?

I’m revamping the experience of my course #30DaysInPublic.

So far it has been a passive course powered by email prompts and video lessons. But as I gather feedback from the students, I think it is time for a big change.

On top of helping entrepreneurs open themselves up online, I’d love to also help them find their topics and grow audiences. That’s the transformation they’re looking for and I have so much I want to share.

So I approached this revamp by putting myself in shoes of someone who is new on Twitter. In his mind, he is likely thinking “I really want to have some followers here. I know audience building is important in today’s world, but … how do I do it”?

Then I think about the steps he needs to get there: live sessions, weekly goals, weekly action items, review & feedback session …

I created this new curriculum and here is a sneak peek - you can take a look here. It is not public yet because I’m going to pilot this with the cohort starting on August 1st. I want to keep it under 12 people this time and I now have a few seats left.

Check it out if you're still struggling with persona brand building & audience building.

😪 Don’t be lazy

I still remember at my last startup, I was very much driven by results.

It was the early days and I wanted the impact and numbers to tell me that I was doing the right things. This meant every time when we had ideas to test out, we would blast an email to our subscribers.

Guess what - no one replied.

Then we wanted to do more marketing and we posted LinkedIn posts and Instagram pictures. Still, nothing was happening. At this point, most people would blame the marketing messages or visuals.

Now thinking back, I call this laziness.

We often want to blast a message into the wild and expect someone would hear it and take the initiative to come forward.

That’s naive thinking. Especially in the early days, we have to get in front of each person to interact with them.

Have you ever tried putting together a dinner party with friends? When you blast a message out to a group of 20 people, usually you don’t hear too many responses. But if you talk to Dave, Jenn, and William individually and get them to join, now you can say “4 of us are going to dinner, who wants to join?”

And …. over 15 people sign up.

And this is why if you’re trying to push your Twitter growth, the tactics from most effective to least effective are: Twitter direct message (DM) > Tag someone in a tweet > Post a tweet

If you want results, don’t be lazy.

💡 Inspirations

Marc built a dashboard to see real-time #BuildInPublic tweets

Do you want 25k followers? I’m not sure if I want it