I’m Marie, co-founder of FYI and Product Habits, AMA 🔥

@katebour In hindsight, there are 3 things I'd recommend. 1) ask yourself the right questions, 2) give yourself the best pep talk you've ever given yourself 3) get practical 1) Are you really ready to do this? Is this something you want to work on for years to come? Do you have a financial cushion to fall back on (i.e. did you save up some money)? What does your heart want? Is this an industry you are really into? Why am I doing this? 2) Have some real talk with yourself. Say something like: Alright self, I'm about to embark on a journey into the unknown. This is going to hurt. I'm going to think I'm amazing on some days, and a total dunce on others. I'm going to make mistakes. Sometimes I'll make the same mistakes over and over again. And I am going to learn so much, and evolve as a person in such a huge way, that all the ugly parts are worth it. Remember self, you rock - and don't forget that on days when you feel down. Always get up. Keep going. Keep learning. 3) Do all the research you can before you take the leap, if you can. Learn as much as you can about the industry you want to go into, start customer research if you can, plan out how you're going to validate your idea and hypothesis. This goes for making major career changes too - initially I quit my job to go be a comedy writer - so before I did that I made sure to write A TON, get to know a lot of people in the industry, and learn everything I could about the industry.

@ryannegri Learn as much as you can. Treat the entire experience as a way to learn about whatever it is you are doing. And bring what you've learned from your time founding multiple startups to your new role - big companies are dying for entrepreneurial people who think differently. If your company already has innovation frameworks they are using, see what you can bring into the process that will fit. For example, can you bring in postmortems? Is there a framework you can bring in for coming up with product names? Complementing existing processes is great. And of course, be humble - otherwise it's really tough to learn.

@lenny_rachitsky I think of everything that's happened as something that's "worked out." Why? Because I learned from it. I became a better version of myself. I went through an experience I didn't have before. I met people, saw things, found things out about myself. The common traits for when it was something I really enjoyed / feel proud of are - 1) I was terrified or at least very scared of doing it, 2) I thought I was possibly wrong and had to figure out if that was actually the case (this goes for customer research big time), 3) I was driven to do it by some unseen force, drawn to it even if there was no logical explanation, 4) I found myself pouring so much time and effort into it, and couldn't help myself from working late nights on it, 5) it felt good to do and work on. I'm pretty judicious with my time these days, so when there is something to tackle for FYI we base our decisions on research, intuition, desired outcomes, as well as interest. Even for marketing initiatives. For Product Habits, we make sure it's something that's valuable to our audience (i.e. our customers) and that we'll enjoy and learn from as well. On the personal front, I follow my heart and intuition.

@marie_prokopets 🙏

@mijustin Hey Justin! You just won my favorite question 😺I LOVE the new sober drink products + low alcohol products like Kin Euphorics and Haus. Another one that I have my eye on is Seedlip which funny enough my old company Diageo (largest spirits company in the world) had invested in in the past and just became a majority shareholder of. If that's not a sign, I don't know what is. Well, maybe people like @justinkan announcing that they've stopped drinking, then having 1000s of people join Telegram groups to also go sober. This category is small, but it will grow over time. There will be acquisitions, and there will be growth. Plus a lot of these companies will be more innovative and tech savvy than the giant slower-moving alcohol behemoths. Sober bars are popping up in cities (for real). I even got to enjoy a wonderful non-alcoholic Seedlip-based cocktail at Trick Dog in San Francisco recently. P.S. - I quit drinking about 2 years ago, hence my excitement. If there are any non-alcoholic products out there who need some advice, feel free to hit me up :) In terms of cannabis drinks like Cann I think this is a totally different category with a way different growth trajectory and set of challenges. One sign here is that tons of people I used to work with at Diageo - even very very senior people - have moved from the alcohol industry to the cannabis industry in the US and Canada. This industry is going nuts, and needs experts who are used to navigating highly regulated industries. There is a lot of uncertainty in the industry, issues with banking, lots of risk - but eventually it will be a behemoth of an industry. Constellation has invested in the category already (40% of Canopy Growth) and Diageo has said they are tracking it: "On cannabis we’re just tracking it, it’s at a very early stage. We’re looking at the sector, it’s nascent and we just want to understand the consumer behaviour.”

@manuelabarcenas Hi Manuela :) Product Hunt is amazing if you have something that you can launch. That means it can't just be a blog post and has to be special. Do some searching on there and see what's done well in terms of the topic you are going after and what format it was in. Twitter is a really great place to share content - try doing tweetstorms, getting friends to share your content, and also sharing something personal helps too. After that, Hacker News and Reddit are great. We don't normally submit things on our own to Hacker News, but (and I mentioned her in another response) I've seen @anthilemoon submit her blog posts on her own to Hacker News and it work quite well. We've submitted to Reddit on our own and it's worked, but you have to pay attention to the policies of the subreddit. And of course there's LinkedIn. I haven't mastered it myself yet, but if you study what's doing well on there you can probably get a good amount of views from it :)

Thank you @marie_prokopets !

@vincentturner Love this question. I used to work in the alcohol industry. Many of those roles weren't conducive to remote. Bottles running down lines with people making sure everything was working, people doing quality assurance, winemakers, people making tequila, people who work to harvest the grapes or agave, those who take care of the land, sales people who need to be with customers and accounts with a home-base near the rest of their team. Same exact thing can go for hardware. I would say Product and Design roles are more challenging for people if the company isn't 100% remote. Today, there are few Product roles as well as design roles that are remote. Those roles are challenging to do remote as is, so it's even more challenging when the rest of the company isn't remote. That said, I think any role (with the exception of roles that need to be at an office that are creating physical goods) can be remote, with the right dedication and process. (One exception to that rule is probably HR where there are a bunch of people in an office and you need the physical presence of an HR person who can help with any issues that arise).

@suthen 1) Share your writing, even when you think it sucks. I nearly didn't ship a post on remote work tips because I didn't feel like it was good enough (thank you, internal hater). But I shared it anyway, and ever since I shared it people have been thanking me & saying it's the most thorough thing out there. Listen to the hater as you edit and keep making the post better. But once you've done everything you can (or have the time to do), just ship it. It helps to get feedback from friends too, who can tell you how to make it better and if it's amazing. 2) just write, even when you don't feel like it. Some of the best things I've written came from times when I thought I had serious writer's block and I kept making excuses for why I couldn't write something. And then I'd sit down and what would come out was better than when I normally feel in the flow. 3) write often - even a morning journal practice (what Julia Cameron author of The Artist's Way calls morning pages) works. Keep writing and getting better. No matter what type of writing you do. Keep writing and getting better. 4) don't be so hard on yourself. the more you write and put out there and learn from your audience, the better you'll get over time. so keep putting things out there. I look back at things I wrote a year, even 6 months ago and think they are so much worse than what I write now - and that's totally fine and normal. 5) be grateful for what you write, thankful for the ability to express yourself in whatever way that you can and do. gratitude and love is everything. 6) read! 7) be unerringly optimistic. have hopes and dreams about your writing. keep at it.

@amritamathur Know your customer. Seriously. Your customer & your copy are everything. Research to nail your product's positioning is key. In terms of tech stack and data, you can get away with Google Analytics for quite some time, so you shouldn’t over complicate it until you really need to. Focus on understanding your customers really really well and determine the positioning and copy that resonates most with them. That will be the best foundation you can create for yourself which will inform all your marketing, no matter which channels you decide to go after. Since the business already exists and you are pivoting, imagine that you are starting from scratch.

@kennygrant I recently wrote about them here: https://usefyi.com/remote-work-r...

@marie_prokopets thanks, that looks useful.

@anandp29 We started out by taking the most basic feature and testing that - for us, it was searching for documents across multiple apps. So we built a really simple interface to let customers auth G Suite, Box, Dropbox, and OneDrive and then be able to search for documents with a search box. We built it in 5 days, first 3 days we had a working prototype for the team to play with and then we took 2 more days to iterate it before we shared with people. We tested it with 10 early access customers - we asked them to talk to us for 20 minutes each week for 4-6 weeks, either on a call or via email. And boy, did we learn a lot. We learned that search isn't enough, we learned we had to build an interface like what we have today if we wanted to solve the problem of finding documents across all the apps you use. That MVP was the best decision we made early on, and it keeps paying dividends.