As we get ready to close out what was a challenging year for many of us I wanted to take some time to reflect on what we’ve learned here at Charli AI and why we’re even more bullish on our mission to give you more life back in your work-life balance.
When the idea for an AI powered productivity solution first came to me I focused a lot of energy on solving the technical barriers to building a product that could automate administrative burdens. As a software engineer at my core I jumped into the hard AI problems right away, it was exciting, and in those early days we made breakthroughs that serve us well today.
However, we took for granted that the problem of productivity killing tasks was well understood, we took the nodding heads from our earliest beta testers, investors, friends and family to mean we really understood the problem and solution space. Over the course of 2020 we realized that the devil was in the details and despite having a very easy way to articulate the problem, surfacing the solution to users the right way was going to be challenging.
What we did well...
Focused not just on user problems but also their workflow because knowing how they work is half the battle
The team had hundreds of conversations with users, we did 1:1 white glove style onboarding, and spent countless hours with users understanding their productivity challenges. It wasn’t just to learn about the problem space but to understand when and where people worked. We can solve their problem all day long but may never deliver the solution to them where it counts. We invested our time in becoming experts in our users daily workflows to understand not only the problem areas but how users like to work and where Charli could show up and add value.
Centering user experience and feedback during prioritization discussions
We set an early discipline to not build products from an ivory tower. We have a vision and roadmap for Charli that is propelled forward by timely feedback from our users. We don’t ship new features until we understand how users have responded to what already exists. We do however, experiment and look to get first hand feedback on new features before fully committing.Focus on quantitative AND qualitative metrics
Being product led is the foundation of our GTM and growth strategy which made metrics even more important to our decision making. We rightfully focused on activation first because you can’t move the needle on anything if you don’t first activate your users. Defining activation, testing, and iterating was an important step to validating the core value Charli delivered for users. We also realized that numbers could only explain half the picture and qualitative research would not only provide us the other half of the picture but serve as an opportunity to engage our early adopter users.Experimenting to find the truth
I’ve written before about the importance of experimentation and having a strong framework within your team to execute on experiments. The team at Charli grounds their work in data, formulates hypotheses and runs experiments to improve our KPIs. And it is critically important to experiment quickly and often to get feedback that guides your roadmap and priorities.
What we learned...
Listening to too many diverse users and their feedback creates competing priorities
While testing early with users and focusing on user research was important, we cast our net a little too wide at the beginning. We got excited about ideas from a diverse group of users which spread our team too thin. We quickly refocused so it was not a huge miss--perhaps we wouldn’t have landed on our Ideal User Profile otherwise. But a warning to other founders, be very specific about who you invite to be early beta users and the feedback you listen to.Designing a next gen user experience for the future of SaaS is hard work
The SaaS user experience has gotten markedly better in many ways for some applications while others have lagged. Our challenge has been to reinvent the way users interact with applications. We first focused entirely on our conversational UX and AI automation expertise, but users felt like it was a black box. Next we wanted to aid activation at all costs and took users down a highly curated path, still aided by NLU but driven by the GUI. This helped users onboard but was overly-simple and hindered activation and retention. We learned an absolute TON about how to introduce users to new ways of interacting with applications while still keeping enough things the same to aid adoption. More to share on this in January.Creating new habits is also hard work
Like I mentioned above we spent a lot of time understanding our users, their productivity problems, how they like to work, and yet still aiding their habit formation has been a challenge. Especially in 2020 when many of their usual ways of working were upended with the pandemic. Our users started spending more time in their inboxes, on Zoom calls, and in Slack. What we learned is that getting users attention and solving for the right strategy would be challenging. Manufacturing triggers at the right time to pull users into a new habit is a delicate balancing act. We don’t want to be yet another notification to snooze or ignore. We focused our efforts on finding more areas where users already interacted like their browser and inbox, using to them as acquisition channels AND as an area to help users form habits. Stay tuned for the Charli Chrome Extension coming early 2021.
Where we’re going...Looking forward to 2021
2020 taught me many things about myself and about other busy workers trying to run a business or kick off a new side hustle. We’re all trying to do a lot at once and multitasking is perhaps not serving us very well. Multitasking is a huge productivity problem that has only gotten worse this year due to the pandemic, it has most of us feeling like we don’t have much control over our lives. So how do we do less and get more control?
Here are a few things to look forward to in 2021:
Digital declutter - Join us in January for a 10 day declutter challenge to help you get more control of your digital workspace. Stay tuned for details and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Facebook to participate in the challenge.
Get organized - Charli is making it even easier for you to manage your content and get some time back in the day. Keep your eyes peeled for an exciting release on Jan 20 (Hint: we’re organizing more than just your files :) )
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I truly love about Charli and as a biased founder I have many, but one of the things Charli does really well is find the content you are looking for. Notice how it’s find and not search. It’s an important distinction. More on this in January, I have a follow up newsletter on this that i’ll write over the holidays.
The Charli team and I feel pretty strongly that we can help give you back that feeling of control and simplify the tech stack you use to get work done. We’ve got some exciting things brewing for 2021 that will help you hit reset and get organized to tackle another year.