🍰 Thin Slice

Hola 👋🏻

Welcome to the first edition of the Thin Slice.  Although there’s more butter cream in this week’s newsletter than on most cupcakes.

The Thin Slice is the name for my lush new newsletter, that’s one of the foundation parts of the product strategy I’m crafting (if you keep scrolling you’ll find more info on that).

I figured that if I’m going to build the Unperfect Universe, and then a helpful slice of info into your inbox is the place to be.  I’m also a great believer in showing, don’t tell people.  So I’m going to be showing you how I build products for myself, and how I help others to build products.

I’m including language and concepts that product people use to design and build products.  So you’ll get used to the formula.  Handy, eh?

So far the loose outline I’ve got for the Thin Slice looks like this:

• Show & Tell - this is where I show you what I’m working on, and share with you the inner workings of constructing something.  It’s a little like a behind the scenes.
• Disco Problems - Disco is short for discovery, it has more sparkle that way.  When we do discovery, we always start with “what’s the problem we’re trying to solve”. So Disco Problems is all about problems you might want to solve and how you solve them.
• White Rabbit - For those times when I follow the white rabbit and go down rabbit holes finding out information.  It’s all about how I connect dots to come up with ideas and gnarly solutions.
• Fail Whale - Are you as sick as I am reading people celebrating all the wins? like failure doesn’t happen to them.  If you want to build successful products, you need to fail, often.  So I thought I’d share and celebrate my failures (and encourage you to do the same).
• Parish Notices - This one is probably going to come a little later, when I’ve got things I can share about my lovely little parish (aka you lovely lot).  I’m not religious, but I do live in a village and we have a parish council.

What’s the frequency Kenneth Emma? Well, this lovely little gem will be going out weekly.  The thin slice will always be free, but it will be a lot thinner than this version.

This is a taster of what I’m building for my paid community, but hey, you want to try before you buy.

The paid for community will be served by the Phat Slice (👀see what I did there).  Don’t worry, it’s super cheap (to start off with it’ll be £5 a month or £50 a year).  You’ll be getting a newsletter that’s more like this one, plus a fortnightly Unperfect Product Lab (scroll on for more deets).

Right, shall we get on with it?

I sat here thinking, what on earth could I include in the first Show & Tell? It’s less a case of not knowing, it’s the choice I’ve got.

So I’ve got two parts to this.  The first is talking about what I’m building, and the second I thought I’d share my product strategy V1.

Unperfect Products

The conversation about how I found myself in this current place is one for another day.  Or you could read the abridged version on my website.

The very, very short version is I can’t rely on contracting to bring in money anymore.  I’m also tired of building things for other people.  I want something for myself.

At the end of last week I felt so very lost and adrift.  Like I had no purpose.  That I didn’t have anything anyone wanted or needed.  It made me really sad.

Then a few things happened at the start of this week that made me realise there is a place for all my skills, and it solves some of the problems I’ve experienced myself.

So I’ve taken my Unperfect Method and bolted it onto my MANY years of experience, and I’m at the point where I’ve decided to help small business owners who want to build their own products.

What is a product?

To clear this up.  A product is something that’s packaged up and can be sold at a fixed price.

Digital products - You can have digital products, that’s the thing you’re reading this on - email, a web browser, Substack. They’re all products.

Services - You could package up your services and sell them like they’re a product.  These can take the form of consulting, coaching, mentoring, creating etc.

Courses - workshops, 1:1 teaching, or on demand digital courses are also products.

Physical things - these are tangible things, from lipsticks to cars (not helping you build a car tho, most other products are included).

Communities are not really a product.  You can make a product and attach a community, but they’re a much more specialised build.  For all things Community, my recommendation is to check out Lara Sheldrake’s Found and Flourish community.  She’s awesome, tell her I sent you.

So while your product is unique to you, how you build them is pretty much universal.  And as all I’ve done for the last 26 years is work with products, from fixing them to designing them, I know a thing or two about building ones that make money.

Unperfect Product Strategy

This leads nicely into my product strategy.

Meet the Unperfect Product Strategy.  It’s really lose at the moment because I want to do research and testing with it.  The Thin Slice is a test at the moment.  I’ve started with what would a good newsletter look like, and I’m learning from your engagement.

If you’re having difficulty reading the strategy, DM me or reply to the email and I’ll give you the web link to view it.

What’s the problem I’m trying to solve with Unperfect Products?

With any problem, there’s a problem you’re trying to solve for the customer, and one you’re trying to solve for your business.

In my case, the problem I *think* I’m solving for you lovely readers, is giving you access to insight, help, support, training, whatever you want to call it, to help you build your own products.  Whether that’s now, or in the future.

Aside from bringing in money, the problem I’m solving for myself is the sense of disconnection I’ve had since deciding to build my own business.

When you work in design, you’re forced to collaborate (whether you like it or not).  As part of our design approach we have lots of well purposed meetings that help us develop products:

• Stand-ups - where we say what we’re working on today and what our blockers are
• Sprint planning: a sprint is where we take something in our backlog and as a team agree to work on it for two weeks.  At the end we aim to either have learned something, built something or tested something.
• Retro’s - short for retrospective.  We look at what went well, what sucked, what we could do differently.  We do these every sprint or two (depends where you work).
• Show & Tell - when you have huge design teams working on different parts of products or the business, a show and tell is the chance to show stuff outside the bubble you work in.

These little sessions are both really annoying, and world expanding.  Done well, and you build amazing products.

So I wanted to find a way to replicate them to help you, and help me.  Short answer? I’m lonely and struggling.

The Thin Slice is only really awesome when people collaborate with it. To get this (thin) slice of awesome in your inbox, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The thing I fell down a rabbit hole thinking about over the weekend:

Sociopathic1 Products. Yeah, my brain is a weird place sometimes.

I started with reading an article in the FT with the founder of Meeno, Renate Nyborg (it’s paywalled, but you can get 1 free view of it I think).

Nyborg used to be the MD of Tinder, and while there received a LOT of death threats. Men were angry that they went on the dating app looking for love, but ended up feeling cheated out of money and not getting love.

When Tinder was created, it was created for good.  It was designed to help people meet, date, and hopefully fall in love.  It wasn’t created to do harm.

Yet what it’s inadvertently done is help create Incels2.

When creating digital products that are revolutionary, I don’t think the creators ever look at their product and see the ways it could get misused.  They don’t see the butterfly effect of it.

Which led me to think, should more tech start-ups have a sociopath test?  To subvert a product in such a way that they can see how it could destroy lives.

I’m writing this after the Bondi Mall attack and after a report that showed how much big tech companies like X, Google and Facebook have gutted their trust and safety departments.

Going to finish on a light one. Ish.

I am SO tired of being in communities and social media, andseeing people celebrate ONLY the wins.  Yeah, they’re great, but that’s the summit of mount awesome.  I find people talking about how they failed, and what they learned from it WAY more interesting.

Also, because I’ve failed more than I’ve succeeded in the last 8 months.  I’ve cried more than I’ve whooped.

So I’m going to share a fail from the week, and what I’ve learned from it.  And I would love for you to join the conversation on this post to share your fails, and what you learned from them.

This week’s year’s fail

I’ve been too scared to do proper research on my ideas.  I’ve told myself all the reasons why someone won’t help me.  I’ve let my inner dick be, well, a total dick.

Part of it has been knowing what I had wasn’t strong enough or unique enough to feel like I could stand out.

Part of it has been asking myself it this thing I’ve been working on is really the way I want to make money.

A massive part of it has been not knowing who my ideal customer should be.

It’s taken a lot to get out of my own head.  But the biggest thing I’ve learned from this is that I’ve been in too much of a hurry to get to my destination.  I turned the volume down on how I actually work, and it’s well and truly f*cked me over.

Monday of this week, I was popping. I could see the product hypothesis.  I could see the type of people I wanted to talk to.  So I started reaching out to people to have conversations and test my hypothesis.

What’s your fail whale of the week, and what did you learn from it? share in the comments.

More next week on why the term “validation” or “validation testing” is banned. It’s proper spicy that one.

Laters lovely humans!

Emma