Gregory Brown and Mitchell Moffit are the creative tag team behind YouTube channel AsapSCIENCE. Together, the two meld art and science to answer their viewers’ many questions. The duo has been asked so many questions, in fact, that they recently published an entire book of them. As part of our ongoing series profiling some of our top knowledge partners, we chatted with Greg to ask about the making of AsapSCIENCE, their biggest fans, and what keeps him curious.
CURIOSITY: Your book is called “AsapSCIENCE: Answers to the World’s Weirdest Questions, Most Persistent Rumors, and Unexplained Phenomena.” If you could start a rumor about one scientist (living or dead), who and what would it be? Why?
GREGORY BROWN: I would try to start a rumor about Watson and Crick so they couldn’t steal credit from Rosalind Franklin [for discovering the double helix structure of DNA]. I would make up some rumor that would have been really scandalous at the time, like that they [Watson and Crick] were secretly women, or stole a car—a really old car. Which I would feel bad about, but they deserve it. Done.
C: Your ideation is driven largely by your audience, who asks you questions. Have you gotten to know any of your followers? Met any in person? Have they influenced your style, given you feedback?
GB: Every video is sparked by a comment on YouTube or a tweet from someone on Twitter. In that sense, many, many people have influenced us.
There are a lot of people who interact with us through Twitter or Instagram fan accounts and we got to go meet them on our book tour. Obviously we know people are watching the videos in high numbers, but then it just feels like numbers. Going on our book tour, meeting people face-to-face helped us contextualize. There’s a girl who runs an Instagram account called @asapscience.fan. We met her, and it was so touching. She got really emotional. She was young, but had such an articulate way of sharing how the videos had made her passionate about science.
C: What’s the weirdest question you’ve ever been asked? Have you ever been stumped?
GB: We have definitely been stumped. In fact, we’re stumped almost every time. We’re actually working hard to help people see that we’re not all-knowing. We spend a lot of time researching. So much of science is pitched as geniuses who are all-knowing.
A lot of people ask us about their specific medical ailments, like a growth on their toe. It’s just like, “Oh my God go to the doctor.”
People also ask what happens when we die a lot. If we could answer that, we would be a lot more famous and rich. That one I think is funny that people even think we could answer that.
C: What are your favorite, most trusted resources for research? Have you ever gotten the answer wrong? How did you handle that?
GB: It depends on the topic, but we use PubMed/NCBI, Science, Nature, and other scientific journals a lot. We both have degrees in biological sciences, so we have the skills to digest and translate scientific journals.
The thing about science is that it evolves, it changes. We love that in five to ten years, a lot of our videos are going to have to be redone. We did a thing on yawning and at the time there was a study that was saying that when you’re yawning it’s to physically cool your brain. But since then there’s been a lot of new research saying that’s not the case. I don’t think it warrants redoing the video, though. Nothing is ever set in science. That’s why we’re never like, “this is the answer.” We say, “this is the theory.”
We always include our references in the hopes that someone will want to read them and go out and explore on their own. We think the world would become a better place if people would become more critical thinkers about science, especially people of different backgrounds.
C: Let’s say there’s some perfect All-Knowing Being out there (maybe it’s Bill Nye) and you can ask him/her one question. What do you ask?
GB: Bill Nye and Neil de Grasse Tyson are inspirations to us. I would want to ask them about their manifestos as science communicators. Like, how have you made your life so successful around making science popular? What is your goal every time you speak about science?
Also, NASA said recently they’re going to find extraterrestrial life by 2025. So I would ask NASA what’s up, where is the nearest lifeform outside of earth?
C: How do you stay curious?
GB: One way of staying curious is to diversify your interests. We subscribe to a lot of science magazines, but are interested in other things. Like I love art and painting. Having hobbies outside of science prompts you to wonder, how does science fit into this? Stepping outside of science can inspire you. It allows you to think of how other people view the world as well.
“Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning” -William Arthur Ward
This morning, Curiosity.com CEO and founder, Gabe Vehovsky, had the great opportunity to speak with “Bootstrapping in America” on tastytrade, who described Curiosity as "a resource tool for content such as long and short form, academics, amazing talks, and a wide array of educational material.”
Emily Graslie is the Field Museum’s Chief Curiosity Correspondent, host of the YouTube series “The Brain Scoop,” and creator of all-around awesome content. Because she’s a leading content creator in the video education space, Curiosity.com features Emily among our hand-curated collection of top knowledge partners. We traveled to Chicago’s Field Museum to pick her brain about what makes her curious, how it feels to be a burgeoning name in science and academia, and how her content has helped inspire the next generation of inquisitive minds.
You come from an artistic background and have said you never thought you’d be where you are now. How did you get started working in museums?
I was studying art at the University of Montana and by the time I was nearly ready to graduate I was starting to finally branch out a little bit. And it’s one of those things where your graduation date is looming three months away and you’re thinking, “Oh my god, did I make the worst mistake of my life? I’m going to graduate with an art degree and do nothing with it.” It was kind of that crisis mode, and so I just started wanting to get more involved in what other people were doing and that’s how I found the natural history museum on our campus. I really just seized the opportunity to volunteer there and just do as much as I could because there weren’t a lot of other people volunteering, if any, so I had a lot of freedom to just explore and do a lot of hands-on projects and just kind of explore my own creativity as an artist in a natural history museum. Then I started a blog, which evolved into a web series, which eventually got picked up by the Field Museum.
The Field Museum gave you the title, “Chief Curiosity Correspondent.” What does that mean to you both personally and professionally?
Both personally and professionally I think the title bestows me some motivation to drive and inspire curiosity within others. In my experience a lot of people want to be curious about our planet, who we are and where we’re going, but don’t necessarily have a launching point. Hopefully by looking at my position and understanding my background as a non-scientist, it can help inspire learners of all ages to begin asking questions and gaining a new appreciation for the world around them, and encourage others to do the same.
How much of what you do is art, and how much is science? How do they interact?
I think we really do ourselves a disservice by thinking that art and science are separate things. Because again, it’s like looking at the biodiversity of life around us—we have way more in common with these two things than they’re different, really. There are just so many parallels and similarities as far as both artists and scientists have to be creative, they have to come up kind of ingenious ideas, they have to have good critical thinking ability, be able to take in a big picture concept and break it down into tiny pieces. The thinking process involved in both art and science are the same, it’s just that one is being executed using data sets and one is being executed using paints and pigments. But it’s all an interpretation of things we’re observing in the natural world, at least in biology. And I don’t think that’s emphasized very well as far as teaching biology in high school or even to undergraduates, I think it could be a lot more creative.
What would you say has been your biggest challenge as a content creator in the YouTube education space? What conditions would make your creation process, and overall position as a curator, ideal?
One thing that I’ve noticed that really sets [The Brain Scoop] apart is that, other than Brady Haran, The Brain Scoop is really the only in-house YouTube series. There’s no other museum who’s doing YouTube—like, we’re doing it. So viewers don’t have a lot to compare us to because they’re only comparing us to other scientific channels on YouTube. To some extent you get the cross-feeding of audience which is super helpful, but when I look at [other creators] I know these guys are working with dozens of staff, so they’re able to churn out content in an incredibly fast and effective and engaging way. We can’t. I’m functioning in an institution with at least 200 scientists and 27 million objects that all deserve their own air time. Something that would really help us is if we could increase our production staff.
But there’s so much research here everyday that’s positively benefiting the world and offering unique insights to how we know [our environment]. It’s just trying to figure out how to best get those stories out there in a timely manner. And anybody’s office you walk into, they’re bound to be an expert on something. So it’s like working in an interactive encyclopedia in that way, where you’re just like, “I want to learn more about legumes, there’s a guy for that!” So I find that really charming about the people who work here, and the fact they’re so eager to talk about their work. And I don’t think it’s Chicago necessarily as a city, I think it’s the Field Museum as an institution. Like the world is my oyster here and whatever I decide I want to do, they find a way to support me. So I really like that creative aspect of what I do, and I think that’s been the most valuable thing for me.
You wrote in a recent blog post that YouTube education creators like yourself need to start citing digestible, contemporary examples of the importance of Curiosity Correspondents and museum curators—and you talked a bit about the challenges of finding people qualified to hold a Curiosity Correspondent position. How can creators, or those passionate in the field, become empowered to take their content to the next level?
I think we just need to make more opportunities for these people to come out of the woodwork, because they exist. Right now I’m the only Chief Curiosity Correspondent, so it would be great to have somebody to have someone to compare myself to—like how can we work together, what are they doing. They exist, you just have to give them a place to express themselves and to use their skills to do so. But I think museums and other academic and research institutions are super eager to bring people on. I just think it’s a matter of big ships turning slowly. When I think about that, I think it’s totally remarkable that I have a job here. For somebody in their mid-twenties, you can’t beat a job like this.
I imagine it must be pretty great to have the The Field Museum as your playground—are there any other places you’d like to have a “Night at the Museum”—type adventure in?
I think it would be really fun to have a program like The Brain Scoop that just traveled to every natural history museum in the world. I think so many of them have so many unique things. If you look at a mammal collection, there’s no two mammal collections that look even remotely the same. They all come from different areas of the world, different types of species that they specialize in. So I think it would benefit museums everywhere to have a platform in which they could talk about the unique things that they have and how they’re using those specimens for research. Plus I like to travel and meet people.
Who do you learn from?
Everyone, everything. Everyday, just all the time.
What is your experience working as a scientist and creator in a male-dominated field?
We’re still living in that world where it’s a pretty negative climate in regards to women in science, so when I can look around to my female colleagues I just have so much respect for everything they had to overcome to be in the position that they are. You see how hard women scientists have to fight everyday. I think a lot of people take that for granted if they work in certain industries. It’s really challenging to [hire qualified scientists] because you have to have a strong recognition and acknowledgement of what women and minorities overcome just to qualify.
There’s an entomologist that works here, Dr. Corrie Moreau, and she’s a world-leading expert in ants. She founded the Field Museum Women in Science group here, and she’s been a huge proponent of the group, and to try to integrate what we’re trying to do not only within the institution, but in the Chicago region. So I have a ton of respect for her and all the women upstairs, and the guys of course.
One of the most difficult things, when women scientists try to progress in their careers, they have people judging them on the number of papers they’ve come out with…things like that without taking into consideration maybe it took her longer because she had to do it all herself. I think my version of that are the trolls on the Internet who make my job difficult and frustrating. It has gotten a lot better since I addressed it, and my fans have been really empowered to support me.
What are some of the best comments or feedback you’ve gotten that makes you feel the proudest, or that affirms you’re following your passion?
It’s the little kids, especially the little girls. They’re such malleable human beings, they have no biases against anything. Like, they love their mom, they love their dad, they love cereal and they love The Brain Scoop?!
There’s this girl, her name is Maggie and I met her when she’s just turned four, and she loved The Brain Scoop. So her grandpa started writing me letters being like, “Maggie loves The Brain Scoop, she loves Emily. When she gets dropped off at daycare she makes them write ‘Emily’ on her name tag so the other kids will ask her and she’ll tell them all about who Emily is.” He said she has a pair of play, blue-rimmed glasses she’ll wear and carry around her stuffed animals and pretend to do dissections. So I invited her to the Field Museum and she told me she was really nervous to start kindergarten. So I told her “Maggie you’re so smart, you have all this knowledge to share with your classmates, they’ll love you! You can tell them new stuff everyday!”.
I just got a letter from her mom last week saying Maggie started kindergarten this year and she’s become the go-to girl for science in class and everybody loves hearing about what she’s learned from The Brain Scoop. I’m just like, that is the most overwhelming and positive kind of encouragement. So when I’m having a hard day, I think about Maggie. And I’m just like, “You go girl.” That’s the best kind of legacy you can leave on the planet, I think, that I had a positive impact on a couple of little kids.
What advice or motivation would you give to a kid who isn’t entirely encouraged to participate in STEM fields? In reference to the blending of arts and sciences, what would you say to a kid who feels they don’t, or can’t, belong in science?
I think just as a society we’ve done a terrible job of depicting what a scientist is. We have this idea that scientists are super geniuses, who are introverted, who are logical, analytical, uncreative thinkers who work completely independently—and they only fit in this certain type of stereotype of scientists. Everyone assumes if you’re not cut out for sterile lab work then you’re not going to be cut out to be a scientist, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean, there are scientists from every walk of life in this museum. You have people wearing a suit everyday and people in sweatpants because they just got out of the field. I think we’ve done a really terrible job of building up these stereotypes to the point people are so convinced that is what a scientist is and what a scientist does. It’s detrimental to how people actually view the entire field of science. It’s like, why have we done this to ourselves? There’s billions of people on the planet and not all artists and not all scientists fit into those characteristics.
Even if you Google image search ‘scientist,’ for one thing, I think it’s the first 38 images, because I’ve counted, it’s usually a male in a white lab coat holding a beaker that has a bubbling fluid in it. I’ve never met anybody who actually fits that image. It’s too bad because scientists are the coolest people I know.
Do you feel compelled to be creatively educating? If so, why do you think that is?
Oh yeah. I think I’ve always been a ham. I wouldn’t want to do anything else. When I think about other jobs, they all involve doing outreach with the public, science education, hosting, I just like being in front of a camera, who wouldn’t? I think that’s the most fun part of my job. We did an eight hour shoot the other day for this project we have coming up, and there wasn’t a second where I was bored. I just like the creative process of it.
What keeps you curious and inspired?
We’re never going to know everything. We’re not even going to start to know the beginning of everything, and so I think it’s impossible to be bored. The great thing about curiosity is that it’s infectious. Once you start asking questions and you let them evolve, you end up with far more questions than you have answers to. And I’m the kind of person that’s motivated by frustration, so when I don’t understand something, then I’m motivated to go out and make that happen—that’s curiosity for me.
Who are the next YouTube education creators you want to collaborate with?
Oh god, like all of them. I love working with the guys on Crash Course, and Hank and John Green are fantastic to work with. And their team of people are awesome, they’re so enthusiastic, so smart and energetic. I got to be on a panel with the guys of AsapSCIENCE at the American Museum of Natural History, I’d love to collaborate with them. Adam Cole does NPR’s Skunk Bear, their science blog and video channel. I love his work, he does awesome videos. I want to bring Charlie Engleman onto our show, I really like that hands-on approach to his videos. So pretty much everybody, I can’t really think of somebody I wouldn’t want to work with at this point.
You posted recently on The Brain Scoop blog about how other species, specifically the Asiatic tadpole, also go through awkward life stages, just like humans. Do you ever find yourself identifying with what you’re studying?
I think working in a natural history museum and working around so much diversity, you start to understand that humans aren’t that unique. I mean, we’re pretty unique for a species, but really we have more in common with other life forms than we could care to say. Like that tadpole picture, it looks super awkward like it’s halfway in its childhood, in a weird puberty stage. Not that the poor tadpole has to endure middle school, but I think that there’s a lot of similarities across the natural world in general and it would probably behoove humans if we embraced those a little more. I mean I wish I could fly, that would be awesome, but you can at least get a little bit of appreciation looking at pictures of awkward baby birds and being like “Ah, I was that, that was me.”
Horns or antlers? Anteater or pangolin? Moths or butterflies?
Horns, Pangolin and moths.
You can visit Emily’s work on her blog, “The Brain Scoop,” as well as Curiosity.com and her YouTube channel. The Field Museum is located at 1400 South LakeShore Drive, Chicago, IL 60605.
At Curiosity, we are constantly curious about what sparks your curiosity. Through analyzing the performance of our social posts and featured videos, we try to be better informed about what makes a topic interesting to learn about. Each month, we will share a few insights that are hopefully not only interesting, but also highlight how and what you are learning.
The most obvious measure of interest level is relative video popularity, but we have the Popular page for that. Here we look deeper at the behavior of users as they found and interacted with the videos on our site in February. (These stats are filtered for statistical significance, so only videos with over 100 views are included in the results.)
Highest Play Rate of Facebook Posts
A major way users find our content is through our Facebook posts, but not everyone who reaches our site from Facebook is in the time/place to watch a video. Often they are in “news feed” mode, or simply cannot have audio playing at that moment. For people coming from Facebook last month, the average “play rate” (people who watch a video after hitting the site) was around 60%. Here are the elite posts of February that compelled Facebook users to hit play at the highest rate:
While we try to direct our users to the most educationally engaging videos from the best providers, no two videos are made the same. Sometimes you are hoping to learn one thing, but get a slightly different angle as the video progresses. A video can be surprisingly entertaining, or just not quite what you need. Maybe the video is great, but you just can’t sit through the full 15 minutes. In February, the average user got through 62% of each video they watched. These videos kept people glued to their screens for much longer:
While completion rate looks at how far users got through a video, it does not account for the video’s full length. The average user spent 2 ½ minutes on each video they watched across the site, however some of our longer featured videos captured the average user much longer. The provider WonderWhy, despite their videos’ longer run-times, kept people interested with their compelling topics and fun graphics.
Do you have thoughts or comments about the insights here? Have your own ideas about how users behave? Email zach@curiosity.com, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Last week, we celebrated our first birthday here at Curiosity.com! As our team continues to grow and take shape, we’ve been narrowing our focus on developing our app, moving into our new Ravenswood office and, of course, eating donuts in celebration.
Thanks to all who have helped and supported us along the way so far—cheers to 2015, a big year of great things to come.
When I first considered joining the Curiosity team back in early 2014, my initial instinct was to understand Curiosity’s philosophy on the relationship between product and engineering. I believe proper alignment between these two business concerns is absolutely essential to the success of any company, especially one whose aim it is to build a business on the strength of its software products.
Having been an engineer for all of my career and having worked at several organizations, I have seen many examples of how these two business concerns are integrated. In the division I worked at in Amazon, for example, software engineering managers functioned much like product owners and often had technical product managers that reported into their teams to help drive product definition and execution. Engineers were coached to think like product managers to the extent that their aim was to build the best possible experience for their customers—even if their customers were other engineers within the company. Bloomberg LP in New York had a similar model while I was there, where sales teams interfaced directly with engineering managers to negotiate new features to build. In both cases the model worked well for the most part, as there was a heavy emphasis on customer satisfaction that pervaded each company and a culture of mentoring.
However, these approaches to software development weren’t necessarily optimal and certainly won’t work in all contexts, especially at a company like Curiosity where we aim to build the best possible learning experiences for people around the world. Product management is a discipline unto itself, and when you meet an experienced, capable product manager, it becomes quite obvious the value they offer that software engineering managers generally don’t. Product managers have, or ought to have, a strong intuitive understanding of what makes for a great user experience. They understand how to separate user needs from business needs, neither of which necessarily line up perfectly with technical needs. Great product managers are highly skilled at working with customers and stakeholders to gather and catalog all of these needs into a cohesive story. They understand how to sort out conflicts of interest and quickly resolve on business priorities. They understand how to build forward-thinking roadmaps and keep their stakeholders informed of updates to roadmaps and progress along the way. The very best product managers are data-driven. They apply tooling and metrics to ascertain how their products are performing and how customers are reacting to those products. They don’t let emotion, internal biases, nor do they let technology preferences of the engineering team drive the next course of action; they listen to these concerns and use structured data and smart analytics collected from within and outside the company to inform the next best course of action.
Talented software engineering managers may have many of these attributes as well. But arguably, their primary focus ought to be on: (a) insuring they have the very best team to execute on the company’s technical objectives, and (b) insuring their team is delivering the best possible architecture given those objectives and whatever constraints might lie in the way. In startups and even many larger organizations, they are also likely responsible for managing technical operations and are concerned with the growth, stability, security and general maintenance of their company’s technical infrastructure.
That said, I’ve seen and collected many anecdotal stories of how organizations can swing too far in the direction of product, or worse, sales. When companies treat engineers as malleable resources, and especially when business objectives change too frequently or when deadlines stay consistently tight, the results can be costly at best and detrimental to progress at worst. Technical debt builds up very quickly and problems get shipped to the customer. When a company doesn’t properly integrate technical concerns into an “all-in” roadmap, the company runs the risk of releasing sub-optimal, buggy code. Databases and libraries get out of date when time isn’t allocated to maintain and support them. The company may end up with several versions of its software in production at once when business needs too quickly outgrow a product’s original architecture, with older generations becoming harder and harder to support over time. When engineering is applied to too many goals at once, the team becomes fragmented and unable to align on common solutions across related business needs. Or, when engineering isn’t able to dedicate attention to operations, engineer on-call rotations can end up being a true 24/7 experience, and even when not on-call, engineers may find themselves in frequent “firefighting” mode to address problems in production. These conditions can result in engineers having to catch up on their nights and weekends to hit deliverables on time. Eventually, this leads to burnout, which inevitably leads to attrition. Even the most talented, most dedicated employees may end up delivering sub-optimal results. The list of potential problems goes on.
For example, the veteran engineers I met at Amazon related horror stories about a team in the early days of Amazon that faced many of the problems I described above. On-call rotation was every other week and engineers were required to live in an apartment above their datacenter to fix any software or hardware problems that were likely to occur over the course of that week! Not surprisingly, attrition was very high and engineers in other parts of the company dreaded the thought of working on that team.
This was perhaps more of an artifact of Amazon’s incredible pace of growth, and while this is an extreme case (Amazon has gotten well past these issues while becoming a mega-success!), I was very cognizant that I would be joining a startup, where the pressure to deliver can be intense in the early years.
So after I met Gabe Vehovsky, founder of Curiosity, and was introduced to his senior team, I asked to have a one-on-one meeting with the head of product, Andy O’Dower. I wanted to be certain that (a) Curiosity had strong product leadership and that (b) I would be effective in working with product leadership, especially in terms of voicing technical concerns. Would Curiosity be sensitive to the need to dedicate at least a portion of our team to systems so that the rest of the team could focus on product features? Would Curiosity allow me to allocate time for occasional research spikes to determine the best technical solution before proceeding? Would I be able to allow engineers to finish a deliverable from conception all the way to insuring logging, monitoring and alerting rules were in place for that deliverable—before we considered it completed?
Given that I was in the mode to learn all that I could and that I wanted to get Andy’s honest, unfiltered thoughts, I asked an open question: “In an ideal world, how do you see product and engineering aligning to achieve the optimal goal?” Without missing a beat, Andy went up to the whiteboard and a drew a triangle. At the top he wrote down “User Experience”, at the bottom left he wrote “Product”, and the bottom right he wrote “Engineering”. He then pointed at the middle of this triangle and said the center represents a shared vision. All of these teams must be in alignment on this vision and have a shared understanding of what it takes to deliver on that vision, always.
This depiction instantly resonated with me. I have always believed that product and engineering are like yin and yang, neither exists in isolation without each the other. Embracing this truth is key to success. The product leader that excels is passionate and informed about the technology and teams that make their products possible. The engineering leader that excels has a deep respect for the customer and shares a sense of ownership of the end product.
I have also always believed that elevating the user experience as a discipline, not just externally, but within the company in the form of tooling and APIs, is what separates the best companies from the mediocre. Engineers, too, need to be deeply concerned about the user experience. This is ultimately how we are all measured. Think about how user experience impacts every product and every tool you have come to know and love. For Andy to treat UX as a first-class citizen in his philosophy, not just as a subset of product, helped give me the confidence to take the leap with Curiosity.
All of this is to say that since joining Curiosity, I have felt empowered as a technical leader. I was fortunate to inherit a great team and a strong technical foundation, made possible by an earnest commitment to maintaining synergy between product and engineering, and of course, UX. As of a result of this synergy, in the short time I have been with Curiosity we have been able to make massive improvements to our applications, internal tooling and technical infrastructure. Borders are crossed all the time in the quest to excel. Designers code and engineers comment on design. Our team is productive and highly motivated. “Firefighting” isn’t a term we use here, but “delivering” is. And while we haven’t yet mastered every aspect of the software development lifecycle, we continue to find ways to improve upon it while building a steady flow of features. Importantly, this is an environment where our engineers can thrive all while delivering value to our business.
If you are an engineer and have similar stories to share, I’d love to hear them. Email me at mike@curiosity.com. Better yet, if you’re looking for a new opportunity to continue to hone your skills as an engineer and work on truly interesting problems, see our open job descriptions here. We are hiring and looking for the best engineers to join us. It’s a great team and an awesome opportunity to change the world of learning!
We’ve reached 500,000 Facebook fans! We’ve had an exciting year, and things keep getting better. In January we launched in beta, in November we became our own entity with the help from amazing investors, and this afternoon we hit a huge social milestone.
We enthusiastically announced our spin-out from Discovery Communications on November 11, 2014 as part of a $6 million acquisition in Series A funding with local investors Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Origin Ventures, Chicago Ventures and Corazon Capital. After more than a year of partnering with top-quality educational content providers, sourcing talent, and closely working with Chicago-based investors, it was time to unleash our ever-maturing tremendous growth. As we move forward, we will continue a six-quarter partnership with Discovery Communications as part of cross-promotional social media and advertising deal.
“During my seven years with Discovery, I have been inspired by a mission-driven culture that values curiosity and growth on all levels, and I am grateful for Discovery’s foresight and support for Curiosity.com,” said Vehovsky. “With this solid foundation and thanks to our forward-thinking financial partners, Curiosity.com is ready for its next chapter, reaching growing audiences and, most importantly, making it fun and easy for them to never stop learning.”
Curiosity board members now include Sean Atkins, Discovery Communications’ senior vice president of digital media; Adam Koopersmith, partner at Pritzker Group Venture Capital and Brent Hill, partner at Origin Ventures. Learn more about what Founder Gabe Vehovsky’s has in store for the “Pandora of educational content.”
We’ve got an incredible team of designer/developers here at Curiosity, and we’re iterating quickly. However, there are always times when we’re moving so quickly we can fall into the same trap of shipping before getting user feedback.
So, we build checks into our cadence to keep us honest.
Here’s a bit of advice and some tools to help you along your way:
Don’t wait to dive into the feedback pool.
Don’t do three redesigns from only three pieces of internal feedback.
Don’t let your product flail due to lack of feedback, the oxygen needed to keep momentum and improvement on a steady basis.
Give your product air. Free it. Cheaply and easily.
Talk to users any way you can. Social media is one of the easiest ways to do it. On their turf, on their terms. Get in person. Use Craigslist. Use the phone. Use the coffee shop. Just talk to real users in person, ideally in the environment where they might use your product. Don’t fake the environment. The 5-day design sprint is a GREAT framework to start using for early stage product development.
Say to get a good toolset is $300/month. Is $300/month cheap? If you compare that to a month designing and building the wrong thing with three people at 50 hrs/week and $20/hr (assuming a Ramen-eating startup), maybe you’re at $12,000/month. $300 and feedback is a no-brainer.
But calculate your hourly dev rate at a seed or Series A startup and you’ll find that the time and rate of $300/month is insane not to be spent compared to the opportunity cost of wasting your team’s time at say around $50/hr for three developers… before benefits, you’re talking around $25k/month. What’s even $5k of time and tools to ensure you’re building the best product?
Let it set in that the earlier you are, the more qualitative your feedback is going to be. Don’t shy away from this fact. Buy gift cards on Amazon for people that help. Fire them off instantly via email. Be thankful it is all this easy.
Qualitative
http://verifyapp.com - Great for getting static mocks in front of a lot of people quickly a few different ways. $19/month + $1 per user if you want to buy traffic. A/B test pages without ever building a site.
http://usertesting.com - Sometimes $49 for a user to use your site (or whatever URL or link to static clickthroughs like Invisionapp for 15 mins). Get discounts buying credits.
http://ethn.io - $49/month. Use it to help funnel a large net to get users for in person or more phone type feedback.
https://clarity.fm - This tool is a way to connect over the phone with top experts in tech. Some use it for mentorship (I do as well for first contact) but I’ve had great success using it for feedback in certain areas of product development. Want UX feedback? Why not get a UX expert on the phone tomorrow? :) The cost is variable depending on who you talk to and how long you talk. I got great feedback from Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover himself not too long ago!
https://usabilityhub.com - Find real users. Free, then $20 to start out. Just used once so far. Not too bad.
http://unbounce.com/ - Test an entire business idea in a couple hours. I often recommend this to friends with new ideas. If this stage stumps them they get a wake up call.
http://www.producthunt.com/ - Of course! Submit your new thing and be very open and responsive when users respond with feedback of all types.
Quantitative
https://www.intercom.io - $79/month to start with some minimal JS implementation. Great way to message your users. Use in conjunction with the ‘first dashboard’ concept from Andreas’ post above. Intercom’s service is awesome, by the way.
https://mixpanel.com - Free, then quantity pricing based on users. Focus first on retention…what drives it? Amplify that. I have a list of things I’d like to see automated but it is improving and their service is great.
http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/kibana/ - Free, but very feature rich and pro level and used only with elasticsearch. We’re using it here at Curiosity for much more granular user analysis.
On-page and in-app testing
https://www.optimizely.com - $17/month to start. Doesn’t have heat maps. Have a good testing framework and tests or you’re just slowing down page load for your users for headline testing.
https://vwo.com - $49/month to start. Save caveat as above. Includes heat maps though.
https://mixpanel.com - They also has some A/B testing options now. Haven’t looked into them yet, but assume they’re up to the quality of their other products.
https://www.crazyegg.com - $108/year to start. Headmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps. See where users gravitate and click.
To quickly see what your favorite companies are using to track your passive and active feedback, install https://www.ghostery.com.
Ideas and workflow management
Caveat: we print out flows on the wall and have daily standups for most communication. These below are more repositories and ways to capture conversation during remote work. Tools can’t ever become excuses for poor communication. Like scrum wall better? Use it. Constantly prioritize.
https://basecamp.com - $20/month to start. We use this as our catch all for ideas, ranking todo lists as a general roadmap so we can all track design iterations and attach qualitative feedback to them.
https://www.pivotaltracker.com - $7/month to start. As the work moves from 'discovery to delivery’ each day/week (we push to prod 5-10 times/day) we use Pivotal to track work more granularly with different states meaning different dev environments before deployment.
http://buzzsumo.com/ - Target users talking about your thing. Contact them. Offer some value first before you say “hey you, give me feedback!”.
Product management is many things rolled into one. This post only covers some tools. The point is, as Josh Elman so eloquently states, “Help your team (and company) ship the right product to your users”. So, keep learning how to do this better and better every day.
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