Day 23 - User Emotion Engineering (n.)⚡️
How to create magic moments? Speed to Value (⚡️BetterFriend Project Day 8 - 38)
Emotion [ih-moh-shuhn]
noun.
: an affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate, or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive and volitional states of consciousness.
: any of the feelings of joy, sorrow, fear, hate, love, etc.
: any strong agitation of the feelings actuated by experiencing love, hate, fear, etc., and usually accompanied by certain physiological changes, as increased heartbeat or respiration, and often overt manifestation, as crying or shaking.
Quick Recap:
Stay in touch w/ Friends
We are building a simple v0.1 of BetterFriend app by using WhatsApp Chatbot to remind people their loved one’s birthday with AI.
BetterFriend.xyz landing page is LIVE ✅
Shame
We all know what this means. It’s when we don’t remember the birthday of someone that means a lot to us.
Most people who don’t know the birthdays of their family or friends know this pain intimately. It’s painful or shameful to directly ask them for their birthdays. Avoiding this direct interaction is VERY important.
HOW do I find it WITHOUT letting them know that I DIDN’T KNOW 🫣
Yes sure, some of them may have the birthdays on facebook, but most people don’t use it anymore and our elderly aunts certainly don’t have them on there. The older they are, chance of finding it on the internet is harder. It’s an unique challenge.
Typically relying on users to manually collect these information is just not a great experience, but in this case, what choices do I have? Scraping by the names of their friends and families online is not only illegal but creepy - I hope their birthdays aren’t on there because it means they were stolen from somewhere.
So I need to be clever. I need them to use this as an excuse to reconnect with their loved ones. Send them a message that’s customized and make the experience positive, easy and natural.
Fail #1
I went down the rabbit hole of trying to create a survey link to do this and integrate this into the database directly that’s tied to their name. Otherwise, I will have to manually insert each response from a survey like form. This is not only terrible for privacy and also the least efficient.
First I needed to figure out if we can generate a link that’s uniquely associated with an account recorded in my database and directly insert the responses into a specific database. How do I do that!? With which platform?
Typeform became the go to choice but I need to automate the answers.
Then I needed to think about a copy that could make it warm, fuzzy and personal to send this link to whoever.
Here comes the grandma test:
“Grandma, can you help me fill out your birthday on this link?”
It failed. Miserably. My grandma is turning 90 this year. Yes she uses WeChat and enjoys watching Chinese version of TikTok, but she will not be able to fill out this link.
This is more challenging than I thought.
First Bad Option
Ultimately I’ve settled on teaching the users to ask a 3rd party who knows the birthdays.
“Aunt Jenny - I’m trying to be better about planning my trips around birthdays, can you tell me the birthdays of Julie (cousin), Jim (cousin), Uncle Joe and yours?”
You can see here I’ve sneaked in the ask for Aunt Jenny’s birthday as well - in most scenarios they probably won’t think too much into it and think “oh my nephew forgot my birthday.”
Asking for the birthdays of their family members and then include their birthday make it less obvious that you are shouting, “I FORGOT YOUR BIRTHDAY”. I think it softens the blow and the shame.
For friends, suggesting asking mutual friend or their partner is also a good strategy:
”Hey Meaghan - I need to know Trent’s birthday to send him something could you let me know?”
“Hey Eric, What’s Trent’s birthday I want to send him something”
You can then copy and paste this with BetterFriend bot and it will help you store it.
Unfortunately, I will have to test this out with people before coming up with a better solution. So far this is the best I got. Comment below if you have something better!
Needs Solution:
“How do you smoothly get your grandma’s birthday that’s not on the internet without letting her know that you didn’t know her birthday.”
Speed to Value Problem
“The users won’t see any benefit until it reminds them a birthday - which could take months”, says my younger brother.
He’s also building his own software as an entrepreneur and he’s more tuned into these things than I am, or maybe he just listened to a hundred more podcast from guys like Hormozi than I have. But in this case, he’s not wrong.
The magic moment of clicking a button in the Uber app, and a car shows up - This doesn’t happen in BetterFriend until the birthday comes around for the users and they get reminded, which could take months or weeks.
That’s a problem. People will forget about BetterFriend by then.
"Speed to value" refers to how quickly a business can deliver tangible benefits or results from a new initiative or investment, focusing on creating value for customers and the market rather than just launching a product. It is a strategy that prioritizes delivering useful outcomes by minimizing delays, accelerating the process from idea to revenue.
This is the boring Gemini AI / Google Definition. I don’t think it explains it well to be honest.
Speed to Value -
simply means how fast can you add value to people’s lives.
I couldn’t find a good article about this so maybe I will write about it when I solve it.
Review
v0 of BetterFriend is a WhatsApp / Telegram Chatbot.
v1 of BetterFriend app will be a native iOS and Android app that’s fully end-to-end encrypted. Locally encrypted data such as photos, media and personal data that’s stored and hosted in the cloud, and it stores birthdays locally on your phone for easy reminders. Locally run AI to interpret message and insert the data into the database on your phone and encrypted to send to cloud.
I will need to think about how the app interacts with Whatsapp or if Whatsapp Bot is going to be useful at all when there’s a standalone app.
Hope this is helpful for anyone building anything. We all need to think from the user perspective more.
How / When will they wear your gym shorts / yoga pants?
How do they feel after your Pilates Class?
How does their body feel after they eat your ice cream?
Fun questions.
See you tomorrow!
(⚡️BetterFriend Project Day 8 - 38)