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

@figelwump Does Postmates count as a daily habit? 😹 One main daily habit of mine is actually abstinence from things. I quit coffee. I stopped eating meat (for a while I also didn't eat fish, dairy, or gluten - I still eat those sparingly). I stopped drinking. No drugs (not even CBD). And at times, no TV. I've found that giving these things up has had countless benefits. First of all, I freed up mental space - no thinking about if I should grab a drink after work, no craving coffee, no jonesing for a glass of wine to facilitate relaxation. I also stopped a lot of bad habits - for example, when I ate meat I couldn't help myself but eat lots of food that wasn't healthy (burgers, bbq ribs, bacon, you name it). I'm also more present and less unconscious. As far as daily habits, at my best (and I'll be honest that I'm not at my best all of the time), my daily habits look like this: - Meditation, the sweet spot for me is 30-45 minutes per day - Gratitude, I like to do this when I first wake up, to run through a mental list of things I'm grateful for, the small things and the big. Helps me be more present and happy - Walks or hikes, usually with my dog Ralph - Healthy meals, aka lots of veggies and fruits - Look up the content of my near-daily dreams in a dream dictionary (my favorite is Dream Moods) - Do journaling or write. Doing this in the morning and the evening is most nourishing. - Work on myself, either via squares (a technique that brings your desires and fears/cravings and aversions to light and helps you release them) or focusing (a technique where you focus on sensations in your body or energy field/chakras) - Work a bunch - Read - Getting out of the house to be around people so the remote work isolation doesn't set in At my worst, my daily habits look like this: - Wake up and reach for my phone right away. Snooze the 10 alarms over and over again. Then look at Twitter, Instagram, email, Slack while still in bed - Work non-stop (aka replying to AMA questions after midnight on a Sunday) with little time to do anything else - Forget to drink enough water - Watch TV, I consider excessive TV watching to be a way of numbing out and typically if this is happening it means something is off for me - Postmates instead of cooking - Not leaving the house in favor of working a ton - Thinking, not just doing. This goes for work and for personal. I think as a founder it's easy to fall into the bad habits trap. And thanks to your question I am going to read Atomic Habits stat :)

@marie_prokopets This is fantastic, thanks the detail and the honesty! I'm a big believer in habits, and at the same time I struggle with good habits as much as anyone else. I'm always curious to learn how others think about habits, what's working for them, what's most impactful, etc. Appreciate the thoughtful response, and awesome work on abstinence and establishing so many positive habits :)

@katetalbot2 50-50 chance that I was right :) I think we all have intuitive abilities and can tap into them if we try. So I'm tapping into my intuition which I've honed quite a bit in this lifetime.

@abari_dennis I recommend doing pricing research to decide how to price your product - learning from your customers, not making decisions simply because of how a competitor is pricing. For all you know, the competitor has no idea what they are doing, or, they realize that their pricing isn't working and they are in the process of changing it. One thing you could start with to understand how customers think of the competitor's pricing is by reading reviews where customers mention pricing - what are they saying? (I don't just mean a few reviews, you'll need to read 100s if you can).

@csallen Hi Courtland! I love this question. So I came into tech/startups in 2016 and hadn't ever heard of the fit frameworks, even though I had already spent a decade as a business person. I just did business, launched new products, did research. And then suddenly, once I got into startup land everyone was talking about all these types of fits. And it's intensified quite a bit recently. I love product/market fit as a survey methodology and a way of thinking about a milestone to hit and then keep hitting again and again as the market and customer expectations change. I wish I had known about it sooner! But beyond product/market fit surveys and the concept of attaining product/market fit, it feels as if there is an obsession with different kinds of fits. My hunch is that it helps people have a mental model about how to operate. But I don’t see people regularly thinking in terms of fit. For me, my response to Nathan’s question is how I think about businesses I'm running. Using honesty to guide you. You could call it self-honesty fit. (oh no, now I'm coming up with fit frameworks!)

@helengriffinjr We discovered the problem through 52 interviews, 1000s of survey responses (feature/value, pricing, competitor analysis/NPS, early access surveys) and tons of user tests, and then even more customer interviews. Plus, we monitored usage of our MVP and the product as we iterated. This was not the normal way that most people do early research, we had a lot of data to work with and also we'd found a particularly painful problem to solve. We were also public about the research we were doing and shared what we learned along the way, which helped us get a lot more responses. We used the same process then as we do now to learn from the data. There's no real difference except that we've been able to refine how we analyze surveys/interviews/user tests to be even less biased by quantifying everything.

@alida_ouandji I've always had a strange aversion to business books, I discovered it in college and the aversion lives on nearly 20 years later. And yet I had no problem reading 600+ page Victorian novels day after day during graduate school and still delight in that practice. But try as I might, I can't finish business books. I think it's because I personally learn best by doing. For resources, I can recommend this directory of hundreds of marketing templates that we curated Marketing Resources List - it will rock your world :) I almost finished a great marketing book called "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" and really enjoyed it. Lots of good learnings in there. If anyone else has ideas, please chime in to help Alida :)

@marie_prokopets thank you. It will help a lot

@nat_sandman 1) Overcommunicate 2) Get on video when in meetings 3) Encourage accountability and build it in 4) Have fun! I have a whole post on the top 11 best practices for remote work that you should check out https://usefyi.com/remote-work-b... Our tech stack is.... Slack - We use this as a team to communicate G Suite - Product/marketing/growth is all about G Suite Confluence - Engineering prefers Confluence FYI - We can't live without FYI ❤️ Quip - A few writers we work with prefer Quip Google Hangouts - for smaller team meetings Zoom - for bigger gatherings Trello - We've used it in the past, but recently we've steered away

@brianmwang As a preface to my answer, Atomic Habits will be arriving on my doorstep any minute now via Amazon carrier. Let go of each and every fear. Let go of the ego. Move beyond attachments (material, mental, other people). Live from the heart. Live in the service of others. Trust completely (and exercise discernment). In the meantime, while I work up to that... one thing I want to do is create from my heart and be in the creative flow consistently. That goes for creative writing, product work, whatever I do. Beyond that, I don't have many "dos" that I crave to accomplish in this lifetime.

@marie_prokopets what a lovely reply. I appreciate how much you seem to value ways of doing rather than the "accomplishments" themselves.

@matthew_hollingsworth I do a pretty bad job of this... Work non stop in my apartment, not leaving the house, late hours. At my best, I make time to see friends in person during the week, make sure to have packed weekends filling myself up, and go work at a coworking space and/or coffee shop. I think the main key is getting out of the house and socializing with people who aren't your significant other.

@marie_prokopets It's constant struggle for sure! Thanks for sharing your experience and doing this AMA. Really admire what you and your team is doing at FYI!