Business-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We'll talk about how to know whether a new feature is going to be popular. What are some ways to see whether many people really need this or just a few noisy users. We also discuss realizing our team has a bias towards action and some ways to help us interview and hire the people that naturally have this bias.

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Transcript: Season 2, Episode 15

Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim I'm Jason. This is episode 15, season two, and we were talking about our favorite thing, not our children, our business as stop X. And there's a good one coming up a phrase that I've been like reading recently. That's really motivated me in changing the way I think about business.

But first let's also talk about how do you know if a feature will be popular. Yeah. So I'm going to talk about a feature that's been brought up repeatedly historically for our product. People have mentioned it and then we'll decide maybe we'll make a plan for how would you evaluate whether the popularity of this?

So, one thing is. WordPress user accounts. We're a membership plugin for WordPress. So it tacks onto WordPress allows you to create members in your WordPress site that login can access private things. Um, you can do a paid membership or you can do a free membership. So for this feature, um, all WordPress user accounts require an email address.

People have long said, what if I don't have users with email address? Is there a certain, uh, age that they're not email users? Along with that. What do you do if somebody has an account with an email address and just wants to update their billing, doesn't want to have to authenticate. Doesn't want to have to log in.

So I guess the feature is kind of twofold, a user accounts without an email address or some kind of magic links that would come to you by email, and you could use to authenticate yourself without a password to manage your account. Whether it's to update a payment method on file access and invoice, you see like magic links, a lot of places, whether it's secure codes or, or secret code sent to you, all kinds of things.

So how would you even evaluate if we should do that? It's been. In our internal channels for awhile and it's tough. And I know why we have them because I think the notion is that this is easier. It's less, you don't even have an email, but not in this case. It's like the internet expects you to have an email address and kind of accounting for those cases where you don't have one, or you already have an account on the site is complicated.

And that's why we keep kicking the can down the road. But it, um, we need like, There's other stuff they'll say, I want to be able to check out without an email address, but there's probably like something else. We could get more specific about what they really need. Um, But it is, uh, yeah. So both of those things w cause people are asking for them, is it still a good idea to do this also came up again because we're talking with a crypto protocol, which part of the unlock protocol and part of, uh, you know, crypto in general is kind of privacy.

And, uh, you know, you could sign in with a Ethereum wallet and we don't know your email address, and that's kind of one of the problems that has to be handled. And they're kind of diving in head on. Um, like how about WordPress user count without an email? Um, and just try to fake it. Um, Hm. So how would we evaluate if it's, I don't, I don't even, it's funny.

Like, I, I believe people would use this and like I would, on my own side, I realized, yeah, that one where like, w uh, on the alumni association site, we imported a bunch of users and then they want to come donate, but they have an account that they mailed in 20 years ago. They don't even know their past. And they say I'm going to donate a hundred dollars and says, well, we can't donate.

You're trying to donate with an email address as an account. You have to log in first. And I think there's some things we can do. This is like tricky too, because you worry about privacy, but we can, um, take their money. Like, like if someone went to like dot com and put in your email address, And then said, I'm going to pay your cable bill and then explain to me to be like, whoa, sign in first before you pay, I would, we should actually test it out.

Like big companies do this, but I think they do. I think Netflix is like login and then we're going to figure out your you and then charge you. But there, the thing where like, Hey, just let them pay and then don't log them in, like our checkout logs you in. But if you were, if it was like, if we detect there's a previous account, you know, just take their money and give them an error.

Like, Hey, I took your money, but you have to like also retrieve your account. Cause the thing is retrieving an account is so hard. Yes. I'm talking through this. She convinced me that that's why you want to just take the money because no one's going to do that. But the magic link thing is kind of cool when it works.

It's like we emailed you, but sometimes people don't know their email. They have different emails. Um, it would be, you know, yeah. Send me a magic link or however, you know, slack does this, however select does this. Yeah. Wait, is it like, so it's like JavaScript now notice how this is like one of the most popular things we could ever program into the plugin, but you're at checkout, you submit, you put in a password.

If you didn't, it's like what it's going to say, your put your password. We can even do that detect, um, I think I still would like it. Yeah. I know you probably like put in a password cause you're not logged in or whatever, but detect like actually, maybe even just by JavaScript, when you write in the email, you're like that's an existing email pop up.

Hey, you got to log in to continue. And then the magic link is kind of one of the easiest thing. Like you already put in the email address. So. I guess it's a way, this is also difficult privacy thing. Now your checkout form becomes a way to like validate someone's end-user on your website. So you'd have to put at least, like, I think three sites are getting over these, but yeah, like kind of like, Hey, you know, this feature turns off.

If you change the email, a couple of times I could see this is like rabbit hole of like what needs to be done, just so that like people that can't log in. Yeah. If you had a checkout form and you entered an email address and just took their money. I can change your membership account. You could be locked into a legacy, $147 a year version of paid memberships pro bought 10 years ago.

And now I could make you and lock you into a $600 a year where people have done this on sites. They do like donations, they'll do light bulb to whatever, you know, um, and then they can like, see it come up and they're like, look, they make fun of someone that for donating to the wrong. The magic link gets around that.

As long as you preserve and limit how many retries someone can do the other thing, and you don't have to validate that. It's true. You can just say if an email existed for this account, we have sent you a link. You don't have to say great. I found you in an email was sent. I've seen it. If, if you exist, we did something and it's not obvious on the browser, whether it's true or false results.

I think the other direction, like some big sites go is, you know, that, which is something you want to look into also, which would complicate this in some ways dependent. What we do is like multi-step checkout where like you have to log in first, you either register a login or you you're not even at the stage where you can pay.

Um, but it's kind of like more self-contained for people and maybe you do lose customers like that. And there's also these companies like fast and Stripe is house where maybe they're working together. All these payment gateways and apple pay, Google pay is like, you're on the checkout page. It's like, I know you're not logged into the site, but Google knows who you are and knows your credit card.

So just click a button and you're good to go. So try to just like accelerate it. Cause you're. But there's also this thing of like, you know, my 90 year old grandfather is in like the car club and doesn't have an email address, but he still wants to pay. So that's the thing too, is like, there's like, this comes out with a lot of these kinds of features.

There's like four different flavors of this. And is there a solution that kind of solves all four different problems or is one more important than the other? Or like, if we solve one and I don't know, they're like kind of related, but. But how do we make a decision? Like we just, yeah. How do we make a decision?

This is important versus the other stuff that we do. I don't know. Can I add one more version of this that people have asked for? Do we have a couple of minutes on this topic? Uh, people have asked for a membership account where somebody is the account holder for the access to the premium things. And someone is the account holder for the payment.

Yeah. We definitely want to management of the accounts. So really one person can get on the forums or carries the accreditation as the national nurses association of, of the United States of America. But somebody else is the person that makes sure that gets all billing related. It's all expiration and cancellation related notices.

And can log in and update the payment method or update and repurchase th