Prototype Thinking in Action

About Prototype Thinking in Action

The podcast that shows Prototype Thinking in action, helping founders get new designs to 70% validation without design or development, by strategically user testing what matters most, one bite at a time. prototypethinking.substack.com (https://prototypethinking.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

J Li

Category

arts · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

17 Feb 2025

Latest episode

28 Oct 2025

Latest episodes

13 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   28 Oct 2025

   Prototype Thinking in Action Ep 13: How Working with PTL Got Rhenari Funding

   Rhenari discusses how working with Prototype Thinking Labs secures funding, highlighting the practical application of prototype thinking in achieving tangible business outcomes in this interview.

2. 

   21 Oct 2025

   Prototype Thinking in Action Ep 12: Live User Test with Rhenari

   Rhenari participates in a live user test, demonstrating prototype thinking in action and providing valuable insights into user experience; this is an interview.

3. 

   14 Oct 2025

   Prototype Thinking in Action Ep 11: How to Edit a Prototype Based on a User Test

   This episode discusses how one edits a prototype based on user testing, offering insights into iterative design improvements.

4. 

   7 Oct 2025

   Prototype Thinking in Action Ep 10: How to Do a Dry Run User Test with a Friendly

   This episode discusses how to conduct a dry run user test with a friendly, offering insights into effective user testing methodologies.

5. 

   30 Sept 2025

   Prototype Thinking in Action Ep 9: Step by Step Prototype Building with Rhenari

   Rhenari explains a step-by-step process for prototype building, offering listeners practical guidance on how to create effective prototypes.

6. 

   23 Sept 2025

   Prototype Thinking in Action Ep 8: Tackling Employee Burnout with Automated Prevention

   This episode explores how automated prevention strategies address and mitigate employee burnout within organizations.

7. 

   29 Jul 2025

   Prototype Thinking in Action Ep 7: Tackling the Counterfeiting Problem

   This episode likely explores how prototype thinking can be applied to address and mitigate the challenges posed by counterfeiting.

8. 

   29 May 2025

   Prototype Thinking in Action Ep 6: How to Debrief After a User Test

   This episode likely discusses user testing debriefs, offering insights into analyzing user feedback and improving prototypes.

9. 

   23 May 2025

   Prototype Thinking in Action Ep 5: Listen to a Live User Test

   Carley Hart discusses her Brushing Buddies Toothbrushing Solution with Stephanie, a user and mother, in a live user test to gain insights into product improvement in this interview.

10. 

    13 May 2025

    Prototype Thinking in Action Episode 4

    Today we talk with Carley, founder of Ahhhsome Kids and inventor of the Brushing Buddies toothbrushing solution, about how we can help with her biggest problem: growth. Get full access to Prototype Thinking Labs at prototypethinking.substack.com/subscribe (https://prototypethinking.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

11. 

    17 Feb 2025

    Prototype Thinking in Action Podcast Episode 3

    Today J and Pablo talk with Norman Tran, founder of Relating Between the Lines, about his need to validate his self-guided emotional relativity course and how he can approach user testing. Get full access to Prototype Thinking Labs at prototypethinking.substack.com/subscribe (https://prototypethinking.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

12. 

    17 Feb 2025

    Prototype Thinking in Action Podcast Episode 2

    Today we check up with Frances to see if she's recruited her power user for our live test and discuss the importance of user testing and how to recruit users. — Transcript Pablo: Welcome to Prototype Thinking in Action. I'm Pablo, your host, and this is the podcast where we talk to founders, dive into one big challenge that they are facing, and help them solve it by using the prototype thinking method. Let's get started. Pablo: Frances, welcome back, it's lovely to have you again with us. I know that J gave you homework, so to speak, which is always the challenging bit of the process, specifically because this homework was about talking to your power users, your early adopters, those users that we can get really valuable feedback from. So can you tell us how that went? Frances: So entrepreneurs aren't good at homework, as we all know. I did not recruit power users because I feel weird about it, like I don't I don't know them. I can easily look up the stats on my email list on who has like the highest opens and click through rates, but I don't know these folks, they're parents obviously, they're really busy, and I feel like I can't ask them to do something for me without giving them something. I've been hesitating. J: I noticed that because we emailed you a few times being like, hey Frances, do you have your user? I noticed that when I send you emails about other things you respond to them instantly, but you ghosted five messages from our team about user recruitment, so it sounds like there was something here that was tough for you. Frances: Yeah, I apologize for being a fuckboy on a dating app. J: No no no no, I mean that, the data, right, like that is the most interesting thing. When things don't go as expected, like that is the juiciest part. Frances: You know, yeah, like I have no problem talking to people in real life, but this feels like a heavy ask for someone to like do something for me and they don't know me despite the fact that I do believe they've been getting value out of the newsletter. I have this fear that I'm going to look at the data and the people with the highest clicks and opens, the most engaged users that we are looking for are people that I've had no interaction with whatsoever. I just don't know them. They're complete strangers, and I don't have anything to offer them, to give them back in return for their time. Pablo: This is fantastic, Frances, because you're not alone in this. J knows that I've been teaching entrepreneurship and innovation for many many years at business schools and teaching corporations how to do these kind of customer discovery processes and everyone kind of like gets maybe the logic behind it and the value in talking to customers but then when when they have to take that that leap, that plunge, they are like, Damn, this is not as easy as it seemed in the workshop or in the explanation. J: Let's dive into this. First of all, I'm curious. Like right now you said that you were nervous about looking at the data and what if they're strangers. Can you go look at the data right now? Frances: Okay, I'll look at the data. J: Okay, I actually think it's better if they're strangers. I'm hoping they're strangers, but we'll see. Frances: Finding the data that we're looking for is actually not as easy as I thought it was going to be. J: Okay, why don't I give you the homework of going and digging through your email platform and seeing if you can pull a few power users from it and if the data is available and if not, you're just going to have to add a recruitment message at the bottom of a newsletter. Pablo: I was precisely going to suggest the same thing as J. People will self-select in a way. This is the good thing about having this sort of ask, Frances, if people don't want to talk to you, you're not forcing them to talk to you. J: Yeah, power users are the easiest users to recruit. Pablo: Correct. There's a definition that I teach my students, the definition of early adopter and the short version is that an early adopter is the person who has the problem that you're solving, they're aware that they have the problem that you want to solve, and they're looking for a solution, and when you're building a product or trying to design a solution around that, they're eager to talk to you because you are actually going to be doing ad hoc personalized customized consulting for them. Frances: Yeah, I mean, I've been on the other end of this and have totally been that person, but I've also been a founder, so I'm like oh of course I want to offer feedback, but wouldn't that person be like biased? J: I think there's a few threads here, right? One is, why do we want to be talking to power users right now, and the answer is, when we want to know what's successful about the past usage of our product, we talk to the people who are already experiencing success. When we want to know about what's failing, we talk to the people who are experiencing failure. So for example if you came to me and said we have a retention problem, people come, they look at one email and then they never click again, which is not the case with you, then I would tell you, you want to talk to your reluctant adopter because you want to talk to the people you are failing to retain to figure out why they are dropping. But in this case, what we're trying to do is refine your value proposition for the purposes of a tighter marketing strategy, so for that reason, you want to talk to the people that you are already succeeding with so that you can replicate your successes. Frances: Say someone responds to that request to speak to users and they actually have like relatively low open rates or clickthrough rates. Or would that just not happen? J: No, I mean, they certainly could, right? Like they could respond because they didn't like it and they have a beef to talk to you about. So let's talk about how to think about the activity of user recruitment. To begin with, we have a principle that we call user intimacy, and it's essentially like, in early stage the relationship that you want to be having with your users is very close one-on-one with a lot of high bandwidth social and emotional and personal back and forth where you're being authentic about what you're building you're being authentic about what the vulnerabilities are and you're very very socially present for them and you're holding the space for them to show up and be authentically themselves as well in how they're responding to you. So in some sense you're not asking them to come and user test, you're asking them for the favor of coming and having a serious one-on-one conversation with you about something that matters to you and perhaps it also matters a bit to them. So for example, Frances, you're on your prototype thinking journey, and you have been following us. We met you because you followed me on LinkedIn and you've been following us on substack so imagine that after following us for a bit I reached out to you and I said, hey, Frances, I've noticed that you've been, you know, following me a lot and commenting a lot on my posts. I need to ask you for a big favor. I am building out a new self-serve prototype thinking process for founders and I'm trying to figure out the best way to design it and which parts of it work for people and I would love to just ask you for your help. Do you think you have 30 minutes to do a one-on-one video call with me so I can learn more about what you need and what you're thinking and so we can kind of iterate on a few options together and do some co-design and I can build a solution that better works for people like you? And I'm only talking to five or six people at this early stage and I looked at all of the people who have been corresponding with our company and you seem like a perfect fit, so it would really help me out a lot to have your opinion. Frances: That I would totally feel more comfortable messaging with versus a blanket like is anyone interested in like a 30 minute blah blah blah. J: Right? Like how does that make you feel when I ask you that? Frances: Like flattered. J: Flattered, yes! Frances: Yeah, what you were saying about that intimacy with users is really interesting because that's kind of what I try to manufacture. J: Yeah, so even in the worst case, if you're not able to pull individual user information, imagine that the Shitty Mom Guide subscribers got a separate email that said, hey quick request, Shitty Mom Guide needs your help. We’ve been growing and we want to figure out how to refine and improve the parts of Shitty Mom Guide that are more valuable and we just need to talk to a very small number of people at this point. Are you somebody who's been reading Shitty Mom Guide every week? If so, it would help us a lot if you'd be willing to talk to us and we'd love to invite you to be a part of the design of the future of our newsletter in the next year. Frances: I love that email. Do I have to offer them anything? J: No, the only type of users that you do truly need to cash incentive are people who are sufficiently low income that they cannot afford to spend time to talk to you unless there's a cash reward. Pablo: Jay, do you think it's counterproductive to offer them anything? Is it better actually not to? What do you think? J: So this is how I think about recruitment from a user point of view. People get inundated with user testing requests, right, or user survey requests, and you generally hate them. Why do you hate them? It's because they treat you like a number. I get this lovely email from some platform I'm subscribed to and they're like hey we would love your feedback. I'm like I have so much feedback for you, I would love to give you my feedback and I click through and it's like please answer these three survey questions about things that are not things I care about. Or even like I get into like a one-on-one user test they want me to click on a bunch of stuff and tell them what I'm doing next and I'm like this is not the conversation I want to be having. And the fact is that people actually are dying to have conversations with businesses that are out there to help them and everyone has an opinion and everyone just wants to feel valued but most of how people get taught to do user testing today actively tries to treat users like a number because they're trying to be scientific. But we're not trying to be scientific, we're trying to be intimate here, so it actively makes you feel worse than average to go to a typical user test and get shoehorned through their anonymous process but you're offering something much, much cooler than that. You're like this is half an hour to an hour, I want to give you my undivided attention, no one but you and I want to listen and hear about how you think about things and just talk about your point of view and toss some ideas back and forth and work with you. And most people love that. Pablo: This is awesome. That's great. J: People are incentivized to user test for three reasons. The first is people love helping people. I always ask people to open a user recruitment request with just saying, can I ask you for a favor? The best way to build social capital for your company is to ask them to help you because they keep feeling good after they help you. Always say I just honestly need help from you, like I can't do this without you, I need your help. The second is being valued by you, demonstrating in your recruitment language that you're there to listen to them and really like receive their advice. People love giving advice and how often do you get to give advice to somebody who actually is going to listen to you? And then the last piece is exclusivity, the sense that there's something special about you and we're honored to be talking to you. It's not like we're trying to survey 2,000 people and you're going to be a dot on my graph, it's like I'm only talking to six people right now you're going to have your true territory in my brain. Pablo: Connecting this with what you just said, J, one of the dangers some of my teams found out or one of the dangers that they would run into when they were running customer discovery interviews was that essentially they would take the opinion from randos that were not relevant, that really are not interested in the problem or the solution. J: It’s okay to fire a user, right? Like when you're testing with consumers, about one in four consumers that you recruit to talk to is a dud. Like they turn out to just not be able to be authentic or they give you endless advice about something you don't care about or they turn out not to be a qualified user. That's why you just pad a few extra users on your schedule. If you are having a user conversation and you're finding that it's not valuable, you don't have to keep having it. You just have 5 to 10 minutes of the conversation and go, hey, you know, that was super valuable, thank you so much for your time, I got what I needed, I really appreciate it, bye. Right? And just don't spend the rest of your user test time on them. Frances: I'll either put a blurb in the next newsletter or maybe just send out a plain text email. J: I actually think the ladder would be more helpful because then it gets visibility on its own and you can do that social capital building in a way that, by the end of a newsletter, nobody's ready to receive social capital. Frances: Yeah, okay, this is scary. Like I used to send out plain text emails all the time at Awkward Essentials and they were the most, people loved them, it was super interesting, but I've done it and I did it with like 200k people, but I don't know, it's like, it's different, it's scary. J: Pablo, you had said something earlier. I don't remember the exact wording of it but it's essentially like, what if I'm talking to users and they're not qualified, right? And the answer is like you just ask them. Right? And it's like, what if I'm imposing on them? Well, users are capable of consenting to having this conversation with you. Pablo: Yeah, here here, certainly. J: And like that's the thing about looking at it from an intimacy perspective, right? Is that I've noticed there's this thing that happens with founders and team leads of all types no matter how social and gregarious they are naturally, is that when it comes to user testing they just kind of freeze up and they feel like they can't ask about whatever they want and I think it's because there's this like scientificization of user testing that has been drilled into us, right? And we're Like, what do we do, I'm talking to this person, they're not giving me the answers I want, I don't even know if they’re the right person, like I don't know if they open my newsletter. I'm like, just ask them if they open your newsletter, you know. Like at the early stage and especially with what we know are Frances’s strengths at communication and back and forth and relationship and intimacy building, just play your strengths. You're trying to be these people's friends, right? Just talk to them like they're your friends, trust that they're able to consent to the relationship, ask them what you really want to know. And this goes for the user test too. I see people freezing up in user tests, they're like, I don't really know why this person isn't responding to anything that we're putting in front of them, and I'll just talk to the user and be like, hey I've noticed the last few things we put in front of you, you've been kind of like “blah.” Tell me what's going on with that. Pablo: I think that's fantastic advice, J. Like don't tell them anything you wouldn't be telling your friend. You don't have to pretend that you're something else. Frances: Just be normal. Pablo: Yes, just be normal. J: Just be normal, yeah. Pablo: It's great. J: Yeah. Frances: Okay, cool. J: How's that feeling for you? Frances: No, this is so interesting cuz I think you're right. When people think about user testing, they think about everyone in a room and there's this… J: Guy in a white coat and a clipboard. Frances: Like, yeah! J: I was in one of those, actually. Frances: I think you assume that if you take that friendly approach, it's biased. Guy in the white coat in a room, that's the unbiased like systemized way to get the right answers, and so this is the opposite. It's really interesting. J: Yeah, it is, right? And I get that question a lot. Well, won't this bias the user? And I'm like, well they're all different, we're only talking to six of them, bias is all over the place in early stage, there's no such thing as no bias because what we're trying to do is build qualitative deep understanding. Essentially what we're trying to do is find the right biases, the right heuristics to be applying. When you're running high volume tests and you know that the framework that you're testing is valid and you're trying to get mathematical data, then bias matters. Pablo: So Frances, now that we've been hammering you with this, you can be honest with us. Tell us, how are you feeling about this? Are you feeling more confident? Frances: It still makes me nervous, but I think that's just like any new thing that you launch, right? Like it's something you care about. I have my homework. I think it was just like, what's the best way to like do it. J: Definitely. And you're just going to play to your strengths. Frances: Yeah, the context around like it being a more like intimate ask versus like, “hi users, I would like data” is helpful. Pablo: Thank you for listening to Prototype Thinking in Action. Please don't forget to Like and Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, join our email list, and follow us for exclusive access to tools, case studies, and live workshops. All links can be found in the description below. See you next time. Get full access to Prototype Thinking Labs at prototypethinking.substack.com/subscribe (https://prototypethinking.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

13. 

    17 Feb 2025

    Prototype Thinking in Action Podcast Episode 1

    In this episode of Prototype Thinking in Action, we talk to Frances, second time founder of Shitty Mom Guide, to help her tackle the challenge of growth. — Transcript Pablo: Welcome to Prototype Thinking in Action. I'm Pablo, your host, and this is the podcast where we talk to founders, dive into one big challenge that they are facing, and help them solve it by using the prototype thinking method. Let's get started. J: Hey, Frances, thank you so much for joining us today. Frances: I'm so excited to be here! Pablo: Frances, if I'm understanding this correctly, you're a second time founder, so maybe you can briefly tell us a little bit about your previous startup as much as you're comfortable with. Frances: Oh, I'm comfortable, to the detriment of the audience. So my previous startup was called Awkward Essentials and we made a cum sponge, so it was an after sex cleanup tool. Those of you that are having sex with a man and have a vagina, everything comes out if you're not using a condom, and it was incredibly annoying, and I was like, why is there no solution to this? I told a few friends, they were like go for it, so I I did it. Pablo: One of the things I love is that you're a problem solver. Frances: I'm a founder, that's just who I am. I have this disease, it's genetic, it's never going to go away, and I like to build things. J: What are you building this time? Frances: Shitty Mom Guide is a weekly free email newsletter for parents in Orange County who are just like looking for things to do on the weekend all in one place cuz as a parent things are just insane, and it's so hard to plan ahead, but then the weekend comes and you're like I need to like get out of the house with my kids. So it's all the events that are happening kind of broken down by area in Orange County with some additional like parent relevant stuff. It comes every Thursday, and it just has like a list of everything that's going on. Pablo: What would you say makes it different from other guys? Frances: So I noticed that when I was working 9 to 5 and had my baby, I was like I want to take her to do things, right? Like I want her to have a good childhood. I want her to have experiences, this is important. People on Instagram were like, oh look at me and my daughter at this like tea time and this like amazing like Mom walk in art class and dance class and I was like, I want to do those things, of course, right, but all of those things were always in the middle of the day, and I was working full-time and they'd be like, we have this amazing story time hour at 10:00a.m. on a Tuesday or at like 12:00 p.m. on Wednesday, and if you're working full-time hours, like you can't do that. And I was like, there have to be other parents who are also working full-time, there are many parents who work full-time, so where's all the stuff for us? So initially I wanted to be like specifically for working parents, like stuff on the weekend, and then I thought about it a little bit more. I thought about, I'm a huge brand person, I thought about my personal brand, and I was like you know what, I actually feel like a really shitty mom because I can't do this, so I decided to name it Shitty Mom Guide instead. J: Like, realistic mom guide, really. Frances: Right? Like we all feel like shitty moms, right? Like the internet is like, you're a shitty mom! That's kind of the whole like essence of the brand. Parents are people. We are people too! We are humans, like our entire self is not just as a parent, and so it's that tone that I also want to capture to differentiate like, yeah we're people and we just happen to have kids but we also do other things. And then the fact that it is an email that comes directly to you. It's not like a social account that relies on the algorithm. It's not a blog where you have to like do the mental work to like go to the website and click through everything and figure it out yourself. It just comes directly to you in an email and it's sort by location which I also find can be an issue when looking for things to do. J: You're building a resource for real life parents, by default parents with full-time jobs. The goal of it is to make this more approachable and accessible. Frances: Yeah, like let's make your life a little bit easier and put everything in one place. Pablo: I love it. I think it's a fantastic pitch. What do you say is the biggest challenge you're facing now in terms of the business? Frances: It would be growth. We've already sent out quite a few newsletters. Great open rates, great clickthrough rates, great feedback, and so I want to reach more parents, and I know the majority of email newsletter owners do it via paid Facebook ads. I don't have a million dollars to dump into paid, so what are the alternatives? Pablo: I see. Yeah, can you give us a ballpark feel for how many subscribers you already have and that sort of thing? Frances: So we have 800 people on the email list. I'm doing a little bit of paid ads, I'm doing a little bit of organic social. The plan is to partner and do a couple like in-person events, so do things and do those a little bit differently too. So I always want to provide value to the parent themselves right because yes, it is about your kid, but it's about you too. Like come on. Like nobody thinks about us. And so an example for an event would be like, okay we'll do an event, try to have some babysitters on site so that you can actually connect with other parents and have a full-fledged conversation, because it's impossible when your kids are running around, and then maybe do like how to take better family photos with your iPhone. It benefits everyone. So that's the idea for some in-person events which are definitely more like time and labor intensive. Pablo: Have you figured out monetization? What's the current thinking about the revenue model? Frances: I would like to hit 5,000 subscribers and then we can begin charging for sponsorships. J: But then, you're really also building a community, right, because events are a very different thing to sell than newsletters, right? Frances: They are. So the event thing, I go back and forth on because I know local newsletter folks that actually have venues that pay them to host the event, to like bring people to the venue. J: Okay, so let's talk about your engagement. So you said you have 500 people on it right now. Like, what is your clickthrough rate? Frances: My clickthrough rate is in the 30%, and the open rate is in the 70-75%. J: And you're getting people to consistently be doing that like week over week? Frances: Yeah yeah, it's like the same people are consistently using it. Well, so it's growing pretty quickly, I'd say like 100 to 200% week over week just because it's so small, so we're at 800 people so it's growing consistently. J: And those statistics are consistent? Have you debriefed people on what the experience is like? Have you talked to users who have been using it for a while? Frances: I haven't. I've only sent out like five maybe. J: I see, yeah, for me the thing I'm curious about, how many people really are using it consistently and what value are they getting out of it? Like if we go back and debrief them and be like well you're opening this every week and you're looking at it, what is the value you're getting out of it? And one of the things we're looking for is, are they getting a behavior change transformative amount of value in it, or is it just one more piece of information in their feed? Are they all clicking in it because every piece of information that could possibly be relevant they want to look at or is this something that is good enough to be recommendable? So one of the things that we talk about is our value impact scale, right? So on a scale of 1 to 10 where one is horrible, 10 is mind-blowing, and five is like normal, it's fine, how valuable is it for the person in question? And the the way the value impact scale works is that for consumers, you want about a three-point offset from your status quo or your alternative to be better enough to drive organic growth behavior change and adoption. In this case, you're giving people water in the environment they're starving in, right? Like they are starving for this information, so what about the newsletter becomes valuable and growth worthy beyond yet another piece of information about what's available? How do we make sure that your newsletter is good enough to be valued for for the curation itself and valued for the information in it instead of you know one of 20 pieces of information they get? Frances: Yeah, I mean, I think it's the aggregation. So it's the aggregation and like visually it’s not it's not cluttered. I mean, I wanted to do the aggregating myself manually, like there's no VAs, it's literally me scouring like multiple websites, copying and pasting links to just like get a true understanding of like, this information is very disjointed, it is in multiple places, so it is that aggregation for. From a defensibility standpoint, I would like the actual like tone and personality to be the thing that just differentiates it, like it's entertaining, it's funny. Not only is it valuable for this, but I look forward to reading this, and that is kind of important to me for a lot of reasons. I mean, I think there's a lot of local newsletters and it's good and a lot of people have a hard time injecting personality into to brand. J: I am 100% your target user on this, right? Like I'm dying for a resource like this. I completely understand the value proposition, right? I think that our next step is to get data about it, right? So what I would recommend you do is to go and debrief your power users and get their language for what is resonating with them. There's a million ways to aggregate. What is it that people actually care about? Is it events? Is it what's going on at their library? Or is that everywhere and it's like you know these kind of really specific little things that are happening? Right, are there like unique local vendors? There's different types of things to prioritize aggregating and specifically the grammar that they're thinking about the value proposition in because your key to scale is going to be in that grammar. So I think like as parents, like certainly in my mind like what you're describing is the thing I think I want right but then like actually the humans who have had the experience of going through it like, which individual line items resonated with them and why, and quite often what happens is that the things that resonate with us are not actually in our conscious mind. Like if you were to verbally interview me with what I wanted as a parent versus if you were to actually debrief my experience of the newsletter, almost every consumer user surfaces different results once you actually debrief their interaction with your prototype. So then you're looking for what those key touch points are to go and scale those. Frances: It's kind of like how we used to say like okay let's read the reviews of our product and figure out what language those people are actually using and like kind of pull that together. J: Yeah, but you can do like 15 or 20 minute debrief calls with them, just systematically go through like every newsletter they got and be like, what was your reaction to this and what things did you look at, but like ask super broad questions. You know, it was 2 weeks ago, this hit your inbox, walk me through everything that happened, talk out loud, what was going on in your mind? And what they'll do is they'll pick different parts of the newsletter to respond to. Rather than systematically asking them questions about what did you think about this, what do you think about this, then we pay attention to well, which parts of it did they react to and what are they saying about it and what words are they using to describe it and then what are the trends across people, because then ultimately what you're going to have is a much tighter value prop, right? Like there's something in there that's the Magic Moment. Is 90% of your newsletter the magic moment or is 15% of your newsletter the magic moment and the rest of it is other stuff? And once you know what the Magic Moment is, then you can design the rest of it around that. As I've, you know, done this with a lot of other projects, right, like the results turn out often surprising, right? Maybe it's like everybody actually responded to these two lines. You've done all the research but people just care about these two categories of things. Your newsletter could actually be a text message, right? And like, but like if you nail those two things in every neighborhood, everybody wants a text message. Or it could be this one neighborhood behaves really differently than all other neighborhoods because like there's something frustrating about the way that people are getting information there and maybe growth is neighborhood by neighborhood, like you really nail one neighborhood, figure out the grammar of what it takes to nail a single neighborhood, and then scale it to the next one. That's kind of what we don't know about scale until we can figure out the grammar of what's been working for people. Pablo: Okay so next episode we're going to be talking to one of Frances's power users and do, which is really fascinating if you ask me and really interesting, a step-by-step live user test with them. Like there's many methodologies out, there many ways to do this, but we're going to deep dive into how Prototype Thinking does and how J, who is a master at this, how she does it. So please join us next time, I think it'll be really worth your while and see you soon. See you next time. Thank you for listening to Prototype Thinking in Action. Please don't forget to Like and Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, join our email list, and follow us for exclusive access to tools, case studies, and live workshops. All links can be found in the description below. See you next time. Get full access to Prototype Thinking Labs at prototypethinking.substack.com/subscribe (https://prototypethinking.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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