I want to talk about metrics and how they effect our product development.
My co-founder, Jon, has a phrase that sums up our approach, “Informed Intuition.”
Every feature we build is informed by three feedback loops: we’re active and opinionated users of our own product, we gather extensive feedback from Lift users via emails, interviews and surveys, and we have detailed metrics which measure almost every aspect of usage.
When I first started Lift, I thought gathering feedback would mostly be about looking at numbers and charts in order to get a boolean validation of what we did. The metrics would answer the question, was a change successful or not?
But over time, we’ve found that it is much more important to have the kind of feedback that generates new ideas.
If you’re familiar with the world of Lean Startups (a methodology for entrepreneurship and innovation that many people use both for startups and within corporations), you probably think in terms of having a hypothesis.
How do we respond to the results of putting a hypothesis to the test? The numbers tell us when we need a new hypothesis. But your feedback and our own usage is where we build up our intuition in order to generate new a new hypothesis.
At the founding of Lift, we had an intuition that we could build a universal system for boosting human potential. This is basically the vision statement and hasn’t changed in any significant way.
That initial intuition wasn’t the same as knowing what product to build. I’m often thankful that this is my second company. I don’t think I was mature enough as a first-time founder to be able to publicly express complete confidence in vision while also allowing for total humility about our implementation.
Of course, the completely naive intuition that we had on day one is now quite a bit stronger. We built and threw away five different products before launching Lift 1.0. We’ve helped people take tens of millions of steps toward improved versions of themselves (the Lift team took 19,318 of those steps). We have built partnerships with some of the best selling self-improvement authors of all time (Tim Ferriss, David Allen, and more).
You’re going to be seeing some significant changes over the next few months. Those changes were sparked by our improved intuition. But they’ve also already been validated in small experiments. Let me share the best part of that validation: participants were 70% more likely to succeed as compared to our baseline Lift users. That’s the kind of real world improvement that we’re hoping to get out of improving our own intuition.
