Letter #3; 18 Feb '24
Bias to action
I sit down to write this letter every Saturday afternoon at the Blue Tokai next to office with absolutely no clue on where to begin. But somehow, I just keep typing and something half decent comes out after an hour or so. I imagine myself walking through a dense jungle with vegetation over 6ft tall, machete in hand, not knowing what lies even a few feet ahead - but slashing leaves and marching forward nevertheless.
This isn’t very unlike how any self respecting startup functions. There’s always ambiguity, a non-zero level of uncertainty about what we’re building - will customers love our product? will the market accept our positioning? will our product be world-class? A few of these lie completely in our hands, other not so much. Despite this, all we should be doing is keep our heads down and plough ahead, slashing leaves and heading into the unknown as we go. We’re confident of where we’re headed and we know we’re in the right direction. This already puts us in the top quartile of startup at this stage.
1.
🗓️ Week at a glance
I’m glad that things remained streamlined this week, we weren’t completely shabby in delivering things on time. But there’s more work to be done here, especially in making design timelines more reliable. Using learnings from the ‘upload stocks’ flow, Jugal and I have put together a new design process that will help us:
make design timelines more predictable
get quicker feedback from stakeholders on the user experience
split work amongst Jugal and Jyotir more efficiently, and
improve the quality of design
You can find the link to the workflow here.
We’ll try out this new process starting with the Mutual fund ingestion flow. We’ll keep learning from every feature and make tweaks to this process to make it more reliable. Now before you attack me saying we’re a tiny startup, why are we wasting time with processes?!”, hear me out - how we decide to work today will influence how we’ll work 5 year later. Habits we build at this stage will trickle down the company as we grow, and there is no fucking reason we should settle for a mediocre way of working. Every great company that’s worth its salt started out with an exemplary standard of working. And we will do the same.
After weeks of brainstorming and debates, we finally have the full flow of uploading a family office’s stock holdings onto Famo. Here’s a glimpse of the UI when the user sees all their stocks for the first time on Famo! This is open to feedback and feel free to put your thoughts on our slack channel!
📣 Shoutouts
Jyotir stepped up this week to tackle all the iterations on the stock upload flow and ensured that we have screens for every state. Let’s keep it going!
Jugal’s experience with design really shone through this week. He’s taken the visual cue set by Lollypop and already 3x’ed the look and feel of our designs. There’s still a long way to go to achieve the design vision we have, but it’s a fantastic start!
2.
🍞 In the Oven
I am working with a singular focus - to ensure that product and design are at least 2 weeks ahead of engineering. This allows us time to get the right feedback, iterate better and deliver a better product. We are currently running a week ahead, but we hope to churn out more user stories and wireframes to get to the 2 week mark and kick start the feedback loop asap.
3.
💡 Experiments
Experiments are the lifeblood of innovation. They need not necessarily lead to something real, but they make you think. Given the nature of our users, we don’t have the luxury to run frequent experiments with the product, but we will damn well try to experiment as much as we can without affecting user experience and hope to keep making the product better.
Here’s our first experiment, light mode v. dark mode. Let me know what you guys think!
4.
💪🏼 Prep makes all the difference
One of my favourite books is ‘An Astronaut’s guide to life on earth’ by Chris Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut who’s commanded the International Space Station and has recorded a cover of David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ in uh….space. What a legend.
Anywho, in this book, he talks extensively about being ultra-prepared for any situation in life, just as an astronaut would be for their space missions. I have personally used this multiple times before presenting something to ensure everything is just right. For eg., before any grooming call, I ensure every doc or design I need is just a click away.
I expect the same from every team at Famo - do a dry run, albeit mentally, before you have to present anything to anyone. It shows you’re prepared. We were expecting more from the feature demos scheduled on Friday, but alas. Let’s try to foresee these issues and do a quick internal dry run before presentations. It’s time to learn quickly from this and improve.
5.
🥊 Competition
I spent a lot of time studying reviews and offerings of Mprofit, a portfolio management tool that’s been around for almost a decade and caters in part to our segment of users.
The #1 thing their customers love about them? Support. 299 out of 300 reviews on Playstore and their website talks about how quick their support TATs are. Great insight.
Maybe Yash could do a session next Wednesday on some of our top competitors and what they are upto. And of course, how we plan to get ahead.
6.
On to some personal stuff
This week went by in the blink of an eye for me. Between late nights working and doing laundry (the bane of my existence), I have no idea where time went. That’s good, I guess?
There’s some dope new tech dropping every week now - and this week, its Sora from OpenAI. Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions, and it’s fucking amazing. If you’ve not checked it out yet, I urge you to - here’s a great video to get you upto speed!
That’s all from me fellas, until next Sunday.
Let’s keep the momentum going folks, onwards and upward to v1! 🚀
—
Cheers, Varun
Here’s the iconic video of Chris Hadfield singing Space Oddity from Space.
PS: I’m a sucker for dark mode, so I’m a little biased.