How can you build your product in a way that drives behavior change?
How can you build your product in a way that drives behavior change?
In order for people to adopt your product, you need to make the path to behavior change easier.
Forest Key, founder and CEO of Voodle, is working on the fourth product software company he’s launched – and he’s learned a whole lot along the way.
In this /Founders Focus episode, Forest shares how his approach to product development has evolved through trial and error.
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✈️ This episode is brought to you by Upside Business Travel. Upside offers a free platform that allows you and your team to book, manage, and track business travel in one place.
Scott Case 0:00
Welcome to Founders Focus, a podcast made for founders by founders. I'm Scott Case, CEO and co-founder of Upside. And we created Founders Focus to share free resources and actionable advice. Together, we're building a community for business leaders, entrepreneurs and founders to come together to tackle today's challenges. This podcast is powered by the awesome team at Upside.
Scott Case 0:20
I'm super excited to be joined today by Forest Key who is the founder and CEO of Voodle. We're going to talk about what happens when you find product market fit and then all of a sudden a pandemic hits and accelerates a whole bunch of things. But before we get to that, Forest, could you just tell us about your founder journey and how did you get where you are now with Voodle?
Forest Key 0:44
Thanks for having me, Scott. I've been a founder a couple times now. Voodle is kind of my fourth company, where I've started from scratch and building IKEA furniture and hooking up printers and hiring the team and trying to figure out the market. In the past, my startups have been born from my passions. My first startup, I worked in the film industry and visual effects, so I built some visual effects software. My second, most successful, startup after it was a travel company, I love travel and being in hotels, so I built a SaaS product for the hotel industry. And in the case of Voodle, it was actually a pivot from a VR company, I was very passionate about VR, company called pixvana. And we ended up pivoting and reforming around Voodle, which is what I'm doing now. So it's my fourth product software company that I've done.
Scott Case 1:33
Oh, well, if we have time, I want to get into that pivot game, because everybody hears about these mythical pivots but few have really actually made them work and survived. So you've clearly done that.
Scott Case 1:46
So tell us a little bit about the Voodle adventure, like where were you in 2019? I know you were just in the process of starting a company. But let's talk about that pivot piece of it, but also like, what was the basic idea, the problem you were trying to solve and then how are you solving it?
Forest Key 2:06
Essentially, as a VR company, pixvana, we had this great team, a ton of great technology, but we were just waiting on the VR market, the virtual reality market was very slow to get going. So the insight around Voodle was what can we do with our toys, our technology and our team that would address a billion user market very quickly. And what was very clear in 2019 is that people were using their phones, obviously not just a little but a lot, and in particular, people are starting to use their phones to communicate socially with short video. So snap, Instagram stories, over a billion short videos made and sent a day between consumers. Look who I'm with, look what I'm eating, look where I am, look what I'm experiencing, so kind of projecting a sense of themselves to their friends and family. And this essentially, the idea for Voodle is that what if people did that at work as well. So Voodle is a short asynchronous video platform for people to express themselves and connect empathetically with their colleagues or the people they work with. And we started that in 2019, literally, like December, January, restructured the company in the pivot. Got going about three, four weeks. So we were early in development, hadn't released a product yet, and the pandemic hit and things shut down. And it's been an adventure ever since.
Scott Case 3:27
So do you think that the short video format was served by the fact that everybody, certainly knowledge workers in the United States quickly went remote? Like most people tack back to like March 13 or 14th - that was it. Then anybody who could they went remote. Did that pose challenges for you or do you feel like you were set up for it? Talk a little bit about like that playing in to I guess that big shift that kind of happened overnight?
Forest Key 4:02
Yeah, there's two profound answers. One is Voodle itself, a team of about 15 folks, how it affected us and how we went about building a product. We decentralized from our office, obviously, we actually moved out of our office in April and decided we were going to commit to being a remote first team indefinitely, so that was a huge cultural transformation for our team. We actually have continued to hire, instead of being a Seattle based team, which we were previously, now about half of our team is dispersed throughout the United States. So we're fully remote committed remote. And that's been its own journey, learning how to do that and do that well.
Forest Key 4:38
But as far as the product goes and the relevance of our product to the market, I wish I could tell you that it was like a no-brainer that like oh because everyone was remote, suddenly they were drawn to the idea of short video work. But it turns out that getting users to behave differently, to try new things, to shift their behaviors in terms of the tools that they use on their phone or their desktop is actually herculean hard in all times and particularly hard during the pandemic. It turns out during the pandemic a lot of people retreat to this kind of safety and comfort of the tools that they're used to using, the modalities you're used to using. So it has not been gangbusters like oh my god, everybody's looking for short video at work. Far from it, we've had to be really clever, really instrument the product, really work hard at finding the sweet spot to get people to try something new and adopt something new.
Scott Case 5:24
Let's talk about that behavior change piece, right? So you're in an enterprise sale, whether it's a small company or a big company, it's still that process to adopt. What do you think, just in terms of advising other founders, have you found some insights into tips and tricks for driving that adoption to make the path easier for people to make the behavior change – and whether it's inside Voodle as an illustration or elsewhere?
Forest Key 5:57
Yeah, I think, if I could go back and give myself advice a year later, you know, I always say, if you want to go back and do things differently, you didn't learn anything. And if you didn't learn anything, then what the hell are you doing? So yes, I've learned a lot, I would do things totally differently, knowing what I know. Now, in particular, I think I probably in all the products that I've made, but in particular with Voodle, because it is a viral product, where you would start adopting it using it with colleagues, those colleagues would use it with other colleagues and you have like a very product lead growth kind of model. So it's really critical to spark that initial phase of kind of adoption usage.
Forest Key 6:30
And I think we over invested for the first year of building the product in the features that would make a lot of sense once you had already adopted the product, as opposed to the features that were going to drive you to adopt the product, what we call setup now colloquially inside of the company. So we've shifted almost all of our attention away from like the robust features that I for example use in Voodle all the time, because I'm a big adopter, I use Voodle all the time, so there's a lot of great features for me as a frequent user. But it turns out that what we need to spend a lot more time on and we've been doing the last three or four months, we're about to do a big release next week, is what do you do for the person coming in for the very first time to allow them to set up the product and get kind of hooked and get that first cycle going for them? A little bit of like a single player mode so that there's things they can do without colleagues in the product. And then maybe a modality, like the big thing we're working on right now is an unauthenticated modality, so that when you come into the product, you don't have to like create a username and password, name your team members and wait for them to join - bunch of like IT administration. Turns out, that's no fun. What is fun is making and sending videos and having people watch your videos. So starting next week, when you open the app, there's a button that says make a Voodle and that takes you to the camera and you're making a video and now I can send it to you over iMessage or slack or any of the places that you normally share messages. Whereas we spent in the particularly the first six months of the product on the market, it was all about IT administration, it was like welcome Scott, give us username and password, who are you going to work with, what's the domain that you're using, and that was no fun. So we had a lot of breakage, you know, 85 90% of people wouldn't get very far because they were stuck in IT administration. It seems so self evident now a year later. But man oh man, if I could talk to 10 founders about to start their projects, I would say, think about the first time user getting them going, think of that as the number one goal for the first phase of the project, and then build into that over time, the features that are going to make them want to come back every day, like we started the opposite way.
Scott Case 8:30
It's such good advice, and so hard to see, especially when, as you put it, you know, when you're using your own product as much as you are, you're running into all kinds of friction, because you've adopted it, and so your natural instinct is to figure out how to reduce that friction. But if nobody can get in and start using it, it doesn't matter. At the same time, you're building an MVP out and that notion of kind of what's that first hook and you touched on it here, which was, hey, we're in the short video making business let's get you to make that first one. And I love what you said about single player mode.
Scott Case 9:11
So I'm curious. You know, I see a lot of products that they're early on very interested in getting the expand part, right, they say that let's get you expanding into it, let's get you to do this stuff. How have you had the discipline to really build out things that are in that single player mode? Like, how has that been for creating for your product team, creating the roadmap and where have you set the discipline around that and then I want to come back to like how are you measuring that you've done a good job?
Forest Key 9:45
I think initially, like all of my startups, the initial product was really built for me and I think sometimes that works really well. Like when I was doing visual effects. I was working at Lucasfilm, I actually worked on Star Wars. My name is in the credits of the Star Wars films, I knew a lot about visual effects. And in particular in the mid 90s, I knew a lot about certain workflows for visual effects. And I went off and built a great product. And that product really solved the problem for the market. And when we took it, it was almost like instant product market fit, right? Because I was essentially building a product for myself.
Forest Key 10:19
With other products, it's a lot trickier. In hotel space, I didn't actually know the hotel industry. So I was building a product for hoteliers, myself never having operated a hotel. So there was a lot more trial and error to get that right to really understand the customer needs.
Forest Key 10:32
In the case of Voodle, I think we didn't do enough research with different person users to understand how different users would approach from a demographics perspective or personality perspective, approach the kind of anxiety that might be produced by the selfie camera being turned on and suddenly you're talking your monologue into the selfie camera. It turns out young folks, people in their teens and 20s very, very comfortable their selfie camera native. So pretty much all of our research has shown that you give it to a 22 year old and they're going to be fine. They're going to just improvise and try some things. But it turns out 30 40 and 50 year olds struggle mightily and there's also some gender differences in terms of male female cultural differences different parts of the world. And thematically, it turns out, you can't just turn on the camera and say go, you actually have to give some inspiration, some utility direction like this is the kind of thing that you Scott or you Billy or you Sarah, this is what you might do a short video, this is why you might use short video instead of a zoom call or a slack text message or email or whatever other modality you're using. So user research getting in front of focus groups, we actually hired a UX research firm that helped us really uncover a lot of user needs and user opportunities that I think we couldn't just get to by thinking about ourselves. It wasn't just like, hey, how would I use the product, we needed to go beyond that. And I think that that discipline, sometimes is difficult, cuz you want to go fast, you want to go fast, you want to go fast, I always believe in like shipping things, watching them fail and trying something else, as opposed to perfectly ideating in the lab and thinking about the exact solution for the market. But it turns out, it's a balance, you have to do a little bit of both. And user research is really informing at this point some of the things that we're building.
Scott Case 12:20
Your point about that user research component of it and really understanding the insights and recognizing, and this is really important, we are all building products for multiple generations now with very different digital expectations, social media experiences, etc. And you can even see it with Zoom. And I think that Zoom and video calls has probably helped you because more people are spending time in front of cameras than ever before. And that's good and bad, depending on what you're thinking about those things. But, there is a comfort there. And your point about the about kind of the demographic and the psychographic shift. So we're in the business travel space, we have people who travel for work at all these, basically these generations, and the generation of millennials Gen Z-ers they don't want to talk to anybody, right? They want to chat on the phone to be able to make a change. But then you got Gen Xers and boomers who want to pick up the phone and talk to a human being. And you've got to have all these systems in place to basically get to all of them.
Scott Case 13:26
So I'm curious, have you adapted your onboarding to kind of lean into that and sort of let people skip steps if they're ready to go and bring people along on an onboarding journey that says oh No, no, let's, let's actually help you. As Alexander Graham Bell had to do figure out, what do you say when you answer the phone? We had to invent the idea of saying hello, because that wasn't a thing. So have you had to do those kinds of things?
Forest Key 13:54
Yeah, in fact, wow, I'd heard that Alexander Graham Bell anecdote before. And I've traveled internationally and lived overseas. So like in Japan, they says Moshi, which I think is really cute when they answer the phone. But you know, I hadn't thought of that. Well, you're absolutely right. That is exactly what we have to do. We have to tell people this is how you Voodle. Like to me it seems so obvious, like, Oh, you're just yourself, you perform, you say the things you want to say, you express yourself. And you know, Voodle allows you to use the selfie camera primarily, but also the rear camera. So sometimes it's like, here's what I'm seeing, you know, and in construction company or gardening company, people physically documenting the spaces around them.
Forest Key 14:32
But we have a whole module we're building that's been informed by several PhDs that have helped us with research around kind of seven or eight categories of Voodling and within that prompts to like get people going. So for example, there's a bunch of fun ones that are just to spark conversation and human connection amongst the team, which is a great place to start. It's just like, hey, let's have a little fun, let's have a little bit of exchange where we reveal a little bit about ourselves and that builds kind of psychological trust amongst a team and that social capital is necessary to then be able to collaborate through other means, including, you know, going through zoom calls. So for example, like defend a bad movie that you love and why, or show us your pet, or what's your home office look like? In fact, classically, here, I'm looking at you meeting you for the first time and I see your cat person, which is great. There's only one other cat person, there's a lot of dog people at Voodle. And I see a little bit of your home office vibe, just like you're seeing me and that's part of our connection. So it turns out even with the Voodle team, 15 of the team that I worked with for years as part of the previous company, I didn't know about their pets or about their home offices or their passions on the weekend. So some of that human connection, I've gotten to know my colleagues in some ways better during the pandemic, than the kind of table stakes coffee walks and lunches and relevance we used to have, which I think we lazily leaned on those to think that we were really connecting and really understanding one another, it turns out, explicitly making Voodles and using short form video as a way to connect can lead to some profound human connection.
Scott Case 16:04
I love the prompt, I think one of the things that I've observed in this, now more companies are remote, more knowledge workers are remote, both from their teammates and from their clients, customers, partners, etc. We're doing a lot more of this video engagement and whether it's through short video form like you do, or just in general, where and I think one of the things that the pandemic has done well is it's allowed us to accept the fact that yes, I am roommates with the cat, I'm not really a cat person, but the cat lives with me. And at the same time, the empathy that can come along with the fact that Oh, you do have a dog, you do have family, you do have other things in your life. But the prompts piece, I remember early on when you know, hey we'd have breakout rooms in zoom and you drop four people into a breakout room and they're all like, what do I do now? Right? Like, I kind of know everybody, but you know, probably half our team has joined in the last in the last year or so. And not everybody knows everybody, not everyone has been in the same room together.
Scott Case 17:07
So I'm curious, when you think about that shift and your observations, fast forward with me five years, look at all the trends, not just what's going on in Voodle, but like, how immersive is video? You started in the VR space so that's just straight up video 10x. Where do you see this goes at work with this video? Is it? Is it multimodal? Do some things settle in, it becomes, you know, one or more of them become dominant? How do you see this playing out over the next five years among knowledge workers in particular?
Forest Key 17:45
Yeah, I mean, I'm in the camp, that work has forever been changed for many categories of workers, not just strict information workers. But I think a lot of employment in the United States, in particular in developed markets in the world, is going to go to remote. Less commute, more work life balance, opportunity to do focused individual work. So even if only like 1% of all of jobs go in that direction, it's still a huge market, I think it's going to be 25 30 40%. I think the next decade is really going to be a different decade formed by the pandemic shift.
Forest Key 18:19
Within that space, I think you're right. Video is a media type within our collaboration workflows. I think it's going to be dominant everywhere. I think you'll see it in Google Docs, I think you'll see video instead of Excel spreadsheets, certainly real time meeting technologies like we're using here, zoom, I think, for me personally, I had done some video conferencing in the previous years. But I think more often than not, I would do phone calls, right? So still using just voice telephony for synchronous meetings.
Forest Key 18:50
I think now, you know, multiple apps on my desktop have a button that's like, go into a real time video conference, right? It's not just zoom, I can do that in seven or eight apps on my desktop. So I think we will be using video and projecting ourselves to audiences very, very regularly in the future. And in particular, the biggest like the magic thing about asynchronous video, in particular versus synchronous video, which we're doing on zoom is the inclusion and the diverse voices that can participate. So it turns out on an 18 person call, that's how big our team is today on zoom, the talking stick you know who gets to speak who dominates the conversation who actually leads the conversation tends to be the same four or five personalities. And they're not necessarily the four or five people that are smartest or right all the time or have the most to say, they're just the person that feel most comfortable in that environment, taking the talking stick and going. When we move our conversations to Voodle and we say hey, what do you think of the strategy, what do you think of this feature, hey, this customer should come up. When we have those thematic conversations asynchronously, we have a much higher rate of participation and you hear the quietest person who is a little bit left brain engineer like suddenly speaks as confidently and projects herself as amply as the most aggressive red personality type on the team, you know, who is the older more experienced person, suddenly their two voices are normalized and everyone has like an equal podium to participate. So I think one of the biggest transformations will be to bring forward diversity in all of its forms, age, experience, gender, tone, personality type. And that's probably what I'm most excited about in building Voodle, the company, is kind of how it can bring diverse voices to the fore and help people like communicate and collaborate.
Scott Case 20:36
I love that. I think the participation piece, even just the notion of asynchronous allows you to correct for it right, I can edit it. Whereas in real time, I'm real time. It's live, baby, and this is what it's going to be.
Scott Case 20:48
Alright, I have one last question for you. It's very selfish, which is okay, your whole team has gotten remote. A bunch of people are now outside of the Seattle region. How are you thinking about traveling for work? So we're obviously a business travel company, how do you think about traveling for work? Do you have sales people that are moving? What are you thinking about as it relates to travel for yourself and for your team?
Forest Key 21:11
First and foremost, I mean, certainly there'll be, you know, I'll go to conferences, events to meet with clients, meet with venture capitalists. So there's like the traditional business travel of people like networking and traveling, but as a team, because we're now a remote team, travel for work is actually going to be a bigger part of our lives. Because in the past, maybe none of the engineers would travel at all, maybe they go to one conference a year. Now, I think, at least quarterly everybody on the team will travel. So I actually think travel is going up overall for our units of travel per individual on the team by quite a bit, maybe by a factor of five organizationally. Because most of us are vaccinated, we've been doing a bunch of like off sites together to get to know each other, to have fun together. We're gonna go to Palm Springs in October. We're really excited for our first all hands, everybody gets to go to Palm Springs. And we're going to spend three days, not trying to work, but rather just having fun and getting to know each other. So a lot of morale events, treasure hunt, cooking class, you know, that kind of stuff. Because we have to be good at working together remotely, synchronously and asynchronously using the internet technologies. And we're doubling down, tripling down on those. So now travel for the team is less about work and more about how we kind of build bonds and relationships amongst our team. I personally am in more of a sales posture, you know, partnerships, things like that, will be traveling quite a bit like I used to – probably every three or four weeks a trip somewhere in the United States.
Scott Case 21:16
That's awesome. Well, I'm glad to hear that and I'm glad you're bringing the team together and I can't agree with you more about the idea of creating those times in person where it's less about work and more about creating those bonds. So thank you and if you need a travel solution, I've got one for you at upside.com. Appreciate you being with us, Forest.
Scott Case 23:04
Thanks for tuning into this episode of Founders Focus. We love getting feedback. So if you've got a topic for us that you want us to discuss or you've got a founder you want to hear from hit me up on LinkedIn at T Scott Case, or you can always grab one on one time with me at foundersfocus.com. Stay awesome.