Podcast appearances and mentions of jane portman

Benedikt used to be a freelance software engineer and co-founded Userlist in 2017 as a side project with his co-founder Jane Portman. They went full-time on it in 2020. Benedikt enjoys database query optimization just as much as pushing around pixels on the front-end Show Notes * https://userlist.com/ * https://slowandsteadypodcast.com/ * https://bsky.app/profile/benediktdeicke.com Sponsors Hosting for The Ruby on Rails Podcast is provided by Fireside.fm. If you want to start a podcast and are looking for hosting, visit fireside.fm/rails (http://fireside.fm/rails) to get started. Alright, let's talk about deploying code without having a full-blown panic attack. You ever push something live and immediately regret it? Like, ‘Oh no, I just nuked the homepage'? Well, guess what—Flipper's got your back. Ship your code whenever you want, roll out features on your schedule, and if something goes sideways? Boom. Roll it back. No redeploy, no drama. Plus, you get multi-environment sync, audit history, and fine-grained permissions, so you don't wake up to a ‘WTF happened?' Slack message. Best part? Sign up at flippercloud.io/rails (https://www.flippercloud.io/rails) and get 10% off your first year. Flip the switch and chill out.

saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love, brought to you by https://saas.group/, a serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies. Following our previous live AMA sessions, join us for this one uncovering some of the best email marketing frameworks today with Jane Portman, Сo-founder & CEO of Userlist, an email automation platform for SaaS companies. ----------Episode's Chapters-------------- 00:00 - Guest Introduction: Jane Portman 02:32 - Challenges in Building UserList 05:14 - Growth Strategy and SEO Focus 07:13 - Customer Success and Consultation Calls 16:25 - The Atomic Emails Framework 25:06 - Example of Effective Email Campaigns 27:23 - The Importance of Personalization in Emails 27:56 - Effective Personalization Strategies 31:44 - Data Tracking and Its Pitfalls 42:11 - Crafting Engaging Email Content 48:47 - The Role of Personal Branding in Email Marketing Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish twice a week - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group Stay up to date: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaaS_group LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796

Ever wondered how to turn a passion for design into a thriving SaaS business? In this episode, we're diving deep with Jane Portman, a UI/UX expert who co-founded Userlist, transformed email marketing, and juggles entrepreneurship with motherhood. Tune in to discover her secrets for building products that resonate, scaling a business from the ground up, and mastering the art of balancing it all. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jane Portman shares the twists and turns of becoming a founder, how it has changed her view on design's value, and the role of writing in career success. Highlights include: Why is it best not to know in advance how difficult something is? What made you realise that UX is not a big part of startup success? Why is a product's marketing website more important than the product? Why do designers need to understand their contribution to revenue? Why is it important for designers to also be good writers? ====== Who is Jane Portman? Jane is the co-founder of Userlist, an email marketing and in-app messaging platform that's built with B2B SaaS in mind: enabling companies to onboard, engage, and nurture customers and leads.  Before Userlist, Jane was the founder of Tiny Reminder, a SaaS product that helps busy creatives and consultants to send automated notifications to their clients about the things they need from them. She is also the founder and host of UI Breakfast, one of the world's longest running and most successful design podcasts. The show has been on-air since 2014 and boasts over 260 conversations with a wide-range of industry experts. Given Jane's talent and track record as a podcaster, it's no surprise that she hosts another podcast. This one's called “Better Done than Perfect” and it explores email automation, marketing, content and product strategy for founders and product people. ====== Liked what you heard and want to hear more? Subscribe and support the show by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). Follow us on our other social channels for more great Brave UX content! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/TheSpaceInBetween/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/ ====== Hosted by Brendan Jarvis: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/ Website: https://thespaceinbetween.co.nz/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanjarvis/

It's not every day that a patient-doctor relationship turns into a Techstars-Funded medical innovation startup. In this episode I sit down with Dr. Onyinye Balogun and Eve McDavid, the co-founders of Mission-Driven Tech, a women's health venture in collaboration with Weill Cornell Medicine dedicated to the transformation of cervical cancer care with modern technology. Onyi, as her friends call her, is the CMO of Mission Driven Tech and also an Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at Weill Cornell Medicine specializing in the treatment of breast and gynecologic malignancies and does research into improving cancer care in low and middle income countries. Eve, the CEO, is a former Google executive who is also a Stage IIB Cervical Cancer survivor. Eve and Onyi met during the pandemic, when Eve was undergoing cancer treatment under Onyi's care. I heard Eve and Onyi's presentation at the 2023 Techstars Demo day in New York and was stunned by the fundamental disparities in historical improvement in gynecological cancer outcomes - as they point out in this conversation, in recent years, Prostate cancer treatment has achieved a nearly 100% five year survival rate. In the same period, cervical and uterine cancer mortality has gotten worse, while cancer treatment for all other cancers has improved exponentially. Their company exists to change that story. Co-Founder Communication Insights This conversation is one of a series on co-founder communication. Check out my interviews with the co-founders of online gaming start-up Artie on Pivoting while staying sane (the secret - have a coach and a therapist!), a conversation with Carolyn Gregoire and Scott Barry Kaufman, the co-authors of the 2015 bestseller, Wired to Create, on navigating Paired Creativity, and this interview with the co-founders of collaboration tool Range, Jennifer Dennard and Dan Pupius, on the keys to healthy conflict. One key that Beth Bayouth and Mario Fedelin, the COO and CEO (respectively) of Changeist, a non-profit organization dedicated to youth empowerment, discussed was the importance of co-founders sharing how they are really doing so that they can be sure to not fall apart at the same time, a sentiment that Eve and Onyi echoed. I also discussed the idea of “prototyping partnerships” with Jane Portman and Benedikt Deicke, co-founders of Userlist - and they helped me see that the healthiest companies have partners that have worked together in some capacity - and indeed, in this interview, Onyi and Eve called Eve's cancer treatment their “first collaboration”. Know yourself and each other The start of a startup journey can be optimistic, so we explore what they have learned about each other that has helped them to better communicate and collaborate together since they started the project. Accelerators can't do it all for you Eve and Onyi share how the accelerators can help with structure, mentorship, capital and community, but that ultimately you need to have something worth accelerating - a key customer insight or a core technology - both of which Mission-Driven Tech has! Have multiple modes and frequencies of communication Eve and Onyi have a weekly meeting just focused on their flagship product, the Blossom device, and another meeting weekly for other issues, and to simply connect. Meanwhile, they have a Whatsapp thread that enables them to constantly stay connected and in touch with each other. Balancing always-on connectivity and scheduled connectivity is key. A partnership is a marriage and reflective listening is key! Onyi shared their perspective that being in a co-founder relationship is like marriage, and that communication is key for any marriage to work. As she says, “The future of this company rests partly in how well we're able to communicate. So we tell each other the good, the bad and the ugly.” She shared their simple and effective approach to communication - making specific time for it, and using active listening intentionally: “I hear what you're saying, I reflect it back to you. You hear what I'm saying and you reflect it back to me.” Know who your real audience is We discuss user-driven product development, which Eve and Onyi, as a former patient and doctor, are a unique example of…but we also discuss how in their current stage, investors are their actual “buyers”. Onyi discussed how she's developed a keen sense of “push vs pull” when they are making their investment pitch - some investors just get the commitment required to make a startup like this successful, and those people are their real audience. It's not about convincing the wrong people, it's about finding the right people. Balance Now and Next Every startup needs to balance managing their current challenges and opportunities with putting energy into strategic vision and planning. Eve points out that this is a particular challenge for medical and device companies - the rate of change can be slow, due to fundamentals of the problem space. So, there needs to be more patience and intention put into planning and hypothesis testing. As Eve pointed out, There is immense pressure to achieve immediate results, but real impact takes time. Head over to theconversationfactory.com/listen for full episode transcripts, links, show notes and more key quotes and ideas. You can also head over there and become a monthly supporter of the show for as little as $8 a month. You'll get complimentary access to exclusive workshops and resources that I only share with this circle of facilitators and leaders. Links https://missiondriventech.com/ LinkedIn: Onyi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/onyinye-balogun-md-ms-22b57283/ Eve: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evemcdavid/

Jane Portman, CEO & Co-Founder of Userlist, discusses how they repositioned themselves from a customer messaging platform to a more established email service provider (ESP) category tailored specifically for SaaS businesses. In this interview, she shares insights on how they acquired their first set of customers, how they use content marketing to drive leads, and how their repositioning has helped them, among other topics.The interview covers the following topics:How Userlist helps B2B SaaS companies with email automationHow they acquired logos like SavvyCal and Transistor fm as customersHow they used personal branding to acquire their first few customers and why it doesn't scaleHow most of their top-of-funnel leads come from inbound leads via content marketingWhat their sales cycle looks like and why customers switch from their competitorsThe backstory of their repositioningTeam, funding, and vision.

In this episode of SaaS Origin Stories, Phil speaks with Jane Portman, Co-Founder of Userlist, an email marketing platform built with B2B Saas in mind. Together, they discuss Jane's history of creating successful products and how they led to what Userlist is today, the experience of joining an accelerator program as an SaaS founder, and why expansion revenue is the goldmine of SaaS.Guest at a Glance:Name: Jane PortmanAbout Jane: Jane Portman, Co-Founder of Userlist, an email marketing platform built with B2B Saas in mind. A UI/UX consultant, specializing in web application design, Jane also runs the UI Breakfast Podcast. Jane on LinkedInUserlist on LinkedInUserlist WebsiteUI Breakfast WebsiteLinks from the episode:Jane on LinkedInUserlist on LinkedInUserlist WebsiteTopics we cover:[00:07] - The Problem that Userlist Solves and How Jane Discovered It[01:26] - Jane's History of Trial and Error in Creating Successful Products[06:41] - Making the Decision to Join an Accelerator[09:54] - Business Growth after Joining an Accelerator[13:35] - Finding Your First Customers[19:38] - Dealing with Surprising Customer and Non-Customer Feedback [24:25] - Learning the Limit of Resources[26:04] - Expansion Revenue as the Goldmine of SaaS[27:44] - Tiered vs. Metered Pricing Models[31:54] - The Problem with Pricing Too Low[33:02] - A Look into the Current and Future Picture of Userlist

saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love brought to you by https://saas.group/. In this episode #39, we are talking with Jane Portman, co-founder @Userlist (https://userlist.com/ ), an automation tool for sending behavior-based messages to your SaaS users. Email marketing is something Userlist leverages for its growth as well and Jane is sharing the tips that help activate the free users and upsell your paying customers if you have a freemium version of your business. Subscribe to our channel to be the first to see the interviews that we publish twice a week - https://www.youtube.com/@saas-group Stay up to date: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaaS_group LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/14790796

This is why I love doing interviews on Substack.I got to ask everything about building out a killer onboarding sequence, including:* The 3 part foundational setup* Design and copy tips, as a founder and marketer* A review checklist for onboarding championsAs the co-founder of Userlist, a B2B SaaS email platform, Jane knows this inside out and shared generously in the interview. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit benjaminboman.substack.com

In this conversation, I sat down with Beth Bayouth and Mario Fedelin, the COO and CEO (respectively) of Changeist, a non-profit organization dedicated to youth empowerment. They are building a community of young people that utilize their personal agency to create a more just society.  Changeist's programs help 11-26 year olds learn a common civic language, engage in dialogue, and build community to investigate local and global social justice issues. Participants also work with other local community-based organizations to implement local solutions to local problems. Together, Mario and Beth explore how they met, built a relationship and decided to work on this project together…and how they continue to manage themselves and each other in the entrepreneurship journey.  A few insights we'll unpack about conscious co-founder relationships: The key to a great co-founder relationship is that both of you do not fall apart at the same time! Fighting Well and how Cofounder Intimacy can help: With cofounder intimacy, there is an understanding that often there's something else behind a conflict or a mood. Because when you're close, you tend to know about what's going on or that it's safe to ask. Knowing yourself and your skills The Power of working with someone with a Different Skill Set but Similar Values  On Knowing yourself and your skills, and finding compliments on your core team:  A great leadership team requires Comfort with yourself and your skills and Respect for the skills of others... and it takes Balance - but Balance of what?! On a leadership team you need: + Architects and Visionaries + Multipliers - someone who brings something you do not have to the table, who is also committed to the vision and the journey Another way to think about this is that you need: + A Balance of Openers and Closers on the team. This is the essence of conscious collaboration - knowing if you are more comfortable in a generative or divergent mode, ie, opening, or are more natural in the “Synthesizer” role - organizing, closing, or planning towards action. Mario owns his limitations as a “closer” and intentionally chose Beth as a COO for her natural “shark” skills - her ability to move things forward with clarity. Mario and Beth also talked about their balanced styles in “Speeding up”  and “Slowing Down” creative conversations - Beth will pump the brakes and ground ideas in reality when the time is right. Feeling that balance between creativity and clarity, speed and thoughtfully slowing things down, is the essence of conscious creativity and conscious collaboration…being comfortable with both opening and closing modes is critical, but collaborating with others who complement your natural approaches is powerful. Be sure to check out my other co-founder conversations. I discussed building an Integrity Culture with the co-founders of Huddle, Michale Saloio and Stephanie Golik, and investigated prototyping partnerships with Jane Portman and Benedikt Deicke, co-founders of Userlist. (Which Mario and Beth absolutely did, as well!)  I also sat down with Jennifer Dennard and Dan Pupius, the co-founders of Range to unpack Healthy Conflict in Cofounder relationships. Conflict and collisions will inevitably happen in relationships, so you might as well learn to lean into it! You may also enjoy my interview with Carolyn Gregoire and Scott Barry Kaufman, the co-authors of the 2015 bestseller, Wired to Create, where we unpack how they managed their working relationship and discuss Paired creativity, which is totally a thing! And if you really want to dive deep into the idea of being a conscious co-founder, make sure to check out my conversation with my friend Doug Erwin, the Senior Vice President of Entrepreneurial Development at EDAWN, the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada. Head over to theconversationfactory.com/listen for full episode transcripts, links, show notes and more key quotes and ideas. You can also head over there and become a monthly supporter of the show for as little as $8 a month. You'll get complimentary access to exclusive workshops and resources that I only share with this circle of facilitators and leaders. Links Changeist On Healthy Conflict: https://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/managing-healthy-conflict-co-founder-conversations

In this conversation I talk with Jennifer Dennard and Dan Pupius, the co-founders of Range, software that helps teams be more connected, focused, and productive no matter where they're working. Global teams at Twitter, New Relic, CircleCI, and more keep their teams in sync and connected with Range. Jen is the co-founder and COO. Prior to founding Range, Jen led Medium's organizational development team. Jen has partnered and consulted with startups and multinational corporations on empowering autonomous and distributed teamwork. She lives in Colorado with her two cats and husband. Dan is co-founder and CEO of Range. Prior to Range, Dan was Head of Engineering at the publishing platform Medium. And before that he was a Staff Software engineer at Google, where he worked on Gmail, Google+, and a variety of frontend infrastructure. He has an MA in Industrial Design from Sheffield Hallam University and a BSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Manchester. In past lives he raced snowboards, jumped out of planes, and lived in the jungle. This is a fairly meta conversation (in the old sense of the word!) since we talked about how Dan and Jen structure their relationship and how they built their company…which is a company that builds software that structures relationships - specifically, effective teams. As Dan outlines, “Human behavior requires structure to facilitate it…in an organization, software provides a lot of architecture, which shapes our behavior, but we're (often) not intentional about that software. The whole theory of Range was… how can we build software that acts as architecture that shapes the behaviors that we believe to be present in effective teams?” My book Good Talk is built around the idea of a Conversation OS, or Operating System.  One element of the Conversation Operating System is error and repair. As Jen says in the opening quote, conflict and collisions will inevitably happen in relationships. Dan suggests that “if you have productive conflict or if you encourage productive conflict, there will be times when you step over the boundary and it's what you do then that is the important thing, in how you recover.” In other words, how you repair the error or breach in the relationship is often more important than the error itself. Many folks shy away from conflict, or hope it never happens. Planning for it and knowing it will happen is a fundamentally different stance, a more effective Error and Repair Operating System. I also love the “reasonable person principle” that Jen and Dan use in their relationship, as long as it never slides into gaslighting. We unpack a lot more great stuff, from uninstalling Holacracy at Medium to the importance of being journey-focused in entrepreneurship relationships, and the power of crafting explicit processes ahead of needing to use them. Dan and Jen are also big believers, like me, in the power of the “check-in''. For example, in my men's group we share in 30 seconds how we're doing emotionally and physically at the start of every group. At Range, it can be as simple as a “green, yellow, red” check-in or as deep as going straight to the question “how are you…really?”  They suggest that baking human connection into each and every meeting is much much more effective than trying to isolate connection into one “vibes” meeting. As with many of my co-founder conversations, there is a common thread of clear roles along with an awareness of and respect for the Venn diagram of skills between the co-founders. Another common thread, as Dan says at the end of our conversation: looking after yourself and attending to yourself is key, because “if you're not in a good state, you can't be a good teammate and you definitely can't be a good leader.” Be sure to check out my other co-founder conversations. I discussed building an Integrity Culture with the co-founders of Huddle, Michale Saloio and Stephanie Golik, and investigated prototyping partnerships with Jane Portman and Benedikt Deicke, co-founders of Userlist.  You may also enjoy my interview with Carolyn Gregoire and Scott Barry Kaufman, the co-authors of the 2015 bestseller, Wired to Create, where we unpack how they managed their working relationship. Paired creativity is a thing! And if you really want to dive deep into the idea of being a conscious co-founder, make sure to check out my conversation with my friend Doug Erwin, the Senior Vice President of Entrepreneurial Development at EDAWN, the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada. Head over to theconversationfactory.com/listen for full episode transcripts, links, show notes and more key quotes and ideas. You can also head over there and become a monthly supporter of the show for as little as $8 a month. You'll get complimentary access to exclusive workshops and resources that I only share with this circle of facilitators and leaders. Links Range Lawrence Lessig's Pathetic Dot theory Daniel Coyle's Belonging Cues: Belonging cues are non-verbal signals that humans use to create safe connections in groups. The three basic qualities of belonging cues are 1) the energy invested in the exchange, 2) valuing individuals, and 3) signaling that the relationship will sustain in the future. Kegan's Levels, specifically, Stage 4 — Self-Authoring mind Lead Time Chats

Don't miss out on the next #womenintech podcast episode, get notified by signing up here http://womenintechshow.com. Be featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/“Remix: Colleen Brady, Karen Dwyer, and Jane Portman”   #womenintech Show is a WeAreTech.fm production.To support the Women in Tech podcast go to https://www.patreon.com/womenintechTo be featured on the podcast go to http://womenintechshow.com/featureHost, Espree Devorahttps://twitter.com/espreedevorahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/espreeGuest,Colleen Bradyhttps://www.iheartnocode.comhttps://twitter.com/colleenmbradyGuest,Karen Dwyerhttps://www.instagram.com/iamkarendwyerhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-dwyer-/Guest,Jane Portmanhttps://twitter.com/uibreakfastListen to the original episodes below:Colleen Brady, https://podcast.womenintechshow.com/episodes/colleen-brady-creator-of-i-heart-nocodeKaren Dwyer, https://podcast.womenintechshow.com/episodes/karen-dwyer-the-ms-coachJane Portman, https://podcast.womenintechshow.com/episodes/jane-portman-of-userlistBe featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/In LA? Here's some awesome resources for you to become immersed in the LA Tech scene -For a calendar of all LA Startup events go to, http://WeAreLATech.comGet Podcast Listeners, http://getpodcastlisteners.com/Resources Mentioned:I Heart NoCode, iheartnocode.comYarn Love, yarnlove.coKaren Dywer TedX, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQx6ccvFS5oFocusmate, https://www.focusmate.comAntifragile, https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680Start With Why, https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447The Mom Test, http://momtestbook.comWrite Useful Books, https://www.amazon.com/Write-Useful-Books-recommendable-nonfiction-ebook/dp/B0983HFQX7Credits:Produced and Hosted by Espree Devora, http://espreedevora.comStory Produced, Edited and Mastered by Cory Jennings, https://www.coryjennings.com/Production and Voiceover by Adam Carroll, http://www.ariacreative.ca/Team support by Janice GeronimoMusic by Jay Huffman, https://soundcloud.com/jayhuffmanShort Title: Colleen Brady, Karen Dwyer, and Jane Portman

In this conversation, I sit down with Huddle Co-Founders Stephanie Golik and Michael Saloio. Huddle is a platform for designers and builders to invest in startups with their time.  Stephanie has spent her career building alongside founders at studios and leading design and product at fast-growing tech companies. She was an early design leader at Cruise, building user experiences for self-driving cars. Before that, Steph was Head of Product at Mapfit (acq. by Foursquare). She's a proud Cuban-American born, raised and currently residing in Miami. Michael is a product and team-focused entrepreneur and investor. He's spent his career working with technology executives and investors. As an investment analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., he followed some of the biggest names in technology including Cisco, EMC, and Apple. Prior to Oppenheimer, Mike covered special situations at Sidoti & Co. Over the past five years, Michael reimagined his career to focus on early-stage businesses. He was the first employee at SuperPhone, a messaging application backed by Ben Horowitz, Betaworks, Bessemer, and more. Since 2014 he has consulted with, invested in, or advised more than 35 startups that have raised more than $200M in venture financing. I met Michael years ago and have tracked his rise…when I saw that his latest venture raised 3.3M and was a co-founded company, I reconnected to include him in my co-founder conversations series. My question throughout this series has been simple - what does it take to build and sustain a powerful co-founder relationship?  Michael and Stephanie shared some of the insights and principles that helped them do exactly that. The biggest aha was the umbrella concept of an Integrity Culture, and how many powerful values fall into place with a focus on Integrity. As Michael points out, it's not just “I do what I say I will” it's also about a culture of Coaching and Feedback to help everyone right-size their commitments and to give themselves (and others) feedback along the way when they find themselves falling short. Stephanie and Michael share a conversation format that they use over the course of each week to keep their team on track and in integrity! Integrity Culture also implicates one of my favorite words: Interoception, a concept I learned from Food Coach Alissa Rumsey. Michael and Stephanie's vision of an integrity culture is one where you commit to a thing because you are intrinsically motivated to do it, not through force or pressure…you self-select the thing you are going to do. And that means you know what you want! Interoception is the ability to feel and know your inner state.  Some additional keys to a powerful co-founder relationship that line up with the other conversations in this series are the ability to have Healthy Conflict (rather than an unhealthy “peace”) and the regular asking and giving of generous and generative deep feedback. One other insight that was fresh for me in this conversation was Michael's idea of a good co-founder relationship as one that is “Energy Producing” vs. energy sucking. A powerful co-founder relationship is like a flywheel - the more energy you invest into it, the more energy it throws off. Be sure to check out my other co-founder conversations, like this episode with Jane Portman and Benedikt Deicke, co-founders of Userlist, on how they connected through shared communities and learned how each other really worked through real-world, previous projects. You may also enjoy my interview with Carolyn Gregoire and Scott Barry Kaufman, the co-authors of the 2015 bestseller, Wired to Create, where we unpack how they managed their working relationship. And if you really want to dive deep into the idea of being a conscious co-founder, make sure to check out my conversation with my friend Doug Erwin, the Senior Vice President of Entrepreneurial Development at EDAWN, the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada. Head over to theconversationfactory.com/listen for full episode transcripts, links, show notes  and more key quotes and ideas. You can also head over there and become a monthly supporter of the show for as little as $8 a month. You'll get complimentary access to exclusive workshops and resources that I only share with this circle of facilitators and leaders. Links Huddle website

Jane Portman joins Collin Stewart on this episode of the Predictable Revenue podcast to discuss why segmentation is key for SaaS email marketing. Jane Portman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Userlist, an email automation platform specializing in understanding customer data. Highlights include: how to choose the right segmentation criteria for your email campaigns (4:21), matching your email outreach to the context (7:32), how to apply the lifecycle marketing model can apply to email (8:49), tips for writing a high-converting email sequence (12:15), why you need to integrate customer behavior data with your email marketing (16:34), tips for managing seasonality in your campaigns (22:40), using non-customer interviews to improve the product-market fit (25:01), how to niche down and find the right words to describe what you do (27:35), and tips for email deliverability (32:55). Are you looking to create repeatable, scalable, and predictable revenue? We can help! ► https://bit.ly/predictablerevenuecoaching

With Userlist, you can track company-level data and trigger campaigns based on company-level events. Onboard, engage, and nurture customers and marketing leads — under one roof. Connect with Jane

The decisive moment we're jumping back to in today's episode is a moment when two co-founders have to decide whether or not to take outside funding.In a co-founder relationship, each person is bringing their individual perspectives and past experiences into the decision-making process. How do you navigate such a scenario while protecting the relationship between the founders and also choosing what's best for the business?Today's guest, Jane Portman, did exactly that. In this conversation you'll hear how she quelled fears for both herself and her co-founder and closed a pre-seed round that, as she says, served as a multiplier for their time and skill.

In this conversation, I dive into the nuances of co-founder relationships with Clarity.so co-founders Richie Bonilla, CEO and Eni Jaupi, CTO. Clarity.so is a y-combinator funded startup that has built a groundbreaking DAO contribution platform. DAO stands for Decentralized, Autonomous Organization, which you should totally google if you want to know more.  While Clarity isn't a DAO, you can see how the radical transparency that is at the heart and spirit of the cryptocurrency movement is also at the core of Richie and Eni's relationship. I mean, it's also the name of the company! Like a few of the other conscious co-founder interviews I've been doing, these two co-founders prototyped their working relationship before jumping into their company together, which helped them build a foundation of trust and respect. They also talked a lot. Like A LOT before even starting the company. Starting with a few times a week, they gradually transitioned to talking for at least an hour, daily, for a year. What this conversation re-established for me was that it's important to have agenda-ed conversations, and it's also very important to have stream-of-consciousness, unagendaed conversations, too. Generally speaking, we're great at structure, and less good at making space for wondering and wandering. For more on the power of wondering and wandering, make sure to check out my interview with Natalie Nixon. Be sure to check out my conversation with Jane Portman and Benedikt Deicke, co-founders of Userlist, on how they connected through shared communities and learned how each other really worked through real-world, previous projects. You may also enjoy my interview with Carolyn Gregoire and Scott Barry Kaufman, the co-authors of the 2015 bestseller, Wired to Create, where we unpack how they managed their working relationship. And if you really want to dive deep into the idea of being a conscious co-founder, make sure to check out my conversation with my friend Doug Erwin, the Senior Vice President of Entrepreneurial Development at EDAWN, the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada. Head over to theconversationfactory.com/listen for full episode transcripts, links, show notes  and more key quotes and ideas. You can also head over there and become a monthly supporter of the show for as little as $8 a month. You'll get complimentary access to exclusive workshops and resources that I only share with this circle of facilitators and leaders. Links Clarity.so

Jane Portman, CEO at Userlist and UI Breakfast presenter, has tons of advice on how to write lifecycle emails for Saas.If you've ever been involved in writing Saas lifecycle emails – for example onboarding, activation, or upgrade emails – you know that it's easier said than done. That's because the actual writing is just the tip of the iceberg. As UX writers, we need to think holistically, define a user journey and set up sensible conversion goals.Jane goes through:Where to start designing effective emailsThe most important steps: The user journey, segmentation, and implementationHow to truly measure which emails make an impactWhy every Saas company needs a content resource library – and what to keep in your resource libraryAbout JaneJane Portman is the co-founder and CEO of Userlist, an email automation platform that specializes in understanding customer data. She is also the founder and presenter of UI Breakfast, a UI/UX design strategy podcast that has been running since 2014.LinksFollow Jane on LinkedInCheck out Userlist email automationUI Breakfast PodcastTry our free UX writing course

How do you make a friend? How do you become lovers with someone? How do you become business partners? In RomComs, there's a “meet-cute”...the hilarious and unlikely way two people in this topsy-turvy mixed-up world collide and fall madly, rapidly in love.  In the real world, taking time and gradually testing, trying and yes, prototyping a relationship is ideal. In love, we call it dating. There's no good word for “friend-dating”, especially when you're doing it with someone of the same sex.  And with founding a company…where does the conversation start? In this conversation, I sit down with Jane Portman and Benedikt Deicke, co-founders of Userlist, on how they connected through shared communities, and learned how each other really worked through real-world, previous projects. They also share their insights on setting the stage for both a long-term vision for building a company AND for a possible exit from a partnership through thoughtful conversations. Userlist is a tool for sending behavior-based messages to SaaS customers and recently completed a pre-seed round with 21 angel inventors. Benedikt is a software engineer from Germany who loves to plan, build, and grow web applications. He co-hosts the Slow And Steady Podcast and organizes the Femto Conference, a tiny conference for self-funded tech companies. Jane is a leading UI/UX consultant specializing in web application design, and has been the host and founder of the  UI Breakfast podcast since 2014 (she kindly invited me to join her show in early 2022). Enjoy my conversation with these two delightful co-founders as much as I did. Head over to theconversationfactory.com/listen for full episode transcripts, links, show notes, and more key quotes and ideas. You can also head over there and become a monthly supporter of the show for as little as $8 a month. You'll get complimentary access to exclusive workshops and resources that I only share with this circle of facilitators and leaders. Links UI Breakfast Userlist benediktdeicke.com Better Done than Perfect podcast  Jane's Story: Turning Thirty: Story of My Life Culture, Values, Operating Principles & More Inspire, Not Instruct: How We Do User Onboarding at Userlist

“What matters for people is the brand and the word of mouth. Nobody honestly understands what's inside until they have had a chance to deeply explore the product, which is good, could be a demo, but ideally, like actually using it for one of their projects, that's the only way to really closely know it and understand the benefits.” - Jane PortmanJane Portman emphasizes the importance of designing the core of your product around features such as storing properties and the ability to identify people within a company, within the product, such as Userlist, so that you can follow the data to improve decision-making and messaging. Its email automation tools enable you to track and deliver targeted messages to your customers throughout the marketing process. Tune in to this episode and level-up your marketing through email automation by not only getting more leads but by also engaging with your customers and serving them for longer years!Watch this episode on YouTubeIn this conversation:Jane Portman:Jane's Company: UserlistJane on Twitter: @uibreakfastBrian Casel:Brian's company, ZipMessageBrian on Twitter: @casjamThanks to ZipMessageZipMessage (today's sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations.  Use it for free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.Quotes:“In this industry can't really go out with a half-baked MVP, people are going to be sending emails to their customers, not behalf it's got to be polished in some way. So it was small, but it was definitely well-shaped like rather polished, and rather nice looking, and rather reliable.”“This makes us different from another email provider, because you can send your messages via email or in-app notification, and you can orchestrate those within campaigns to achieve the result you want.”“We help you mirror your internal data in our tool, meaning we can combine user accounts into company counts and show you a company profile. And you can also store data on the company level instead of having to duplicate it on each individual user. And the reason why it's life-changing is because if you deal with a team account, individual user activity doesn't make any sense.”“People definitely need automation tools, SaaS definitely needs good automation tools. So we never had doubts whether the product is useful. That's helping because like, if you're inventing a new niche or something if you're trying to educate and build awareness, that's a double challenge.”“I'm not saying sales is unethical, but aligned with your nature, what feels right and later, you can improve by hiring people who complement your skills, not expand your skills.”“In terms of automation, in the user list, you can send, you can see when something happens on the company level, and then you decide who's receiving information based on that. This is it's very simple in the UI, but it's very empowering.”

This episode is from MicroConf 3.0: No-Code. Jane Portman (@uibreakfast) shares how every customer success story begins with a streamlined, concise, and conscientious onboarding and nurturing experience. In this talk, Jane will review a variety of no-code automation recipes you can implement as your users move from leads to trials to customers and beyond. Links from the podcast: UserList Get the Slide Deck Watch this talk on YouTube Get your Tickets for MicroConf Remote Come to MicroConf Local: London UserList

This episode is from MicroConf 3.0: No-Code. Jane Portman (@uibreakfast) shares how every customer success story begins with a streamlined, concise, and conscientious onboarding and nurturing experience. In this talk, Jane will review a variety of no-code automation recipes you can implement as your users move from leads to trials to customers and beyond. Links from the podcast: UserList Get the Slide Deck Watch this talk on YouTube Get your Tickets for MicroConf Remote Come to MicroConf Local: London UserList

Many nonprofit organizations struggle to innovate, giving constituents redundant experiences year after year. Cloud technology has emerged as an efficient tool to help these organizations scale and build an agile solution. In this episode, Merkle's Nonprofit lead, Jane Portman, and Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Alex Hart join Jose to talk about key areas of transformation and key use cases for how the cloud can help. Resources: Merkle AWS Partnership (https://go.merkleinc.com/l/579173/2022-04-19/f6x9rp) 2022 Customer Experience Imperatives (https://go.merkleinc.com/l/579173/2022-04-19/f6x9rh)

Have you ever considered automating your SaaS and B2B email marketing campaigns? In this edition of the UpTech Report, host Alexander Ferguson meets with the CEO of Userlist, Jane Portman, to discuss email marketing automation strategies going into 2022. At its core, Userlist is helping to automate the email marketing lifecycle with its new email automation tool. It makes starting email marketing campaigns and delivering custom email blasts that are personally tailored to SaaS businesses easier than ever before. It's event-based email marketing, taken to the next level through data. Through data-driven analysis, Userlist's email campaign tools and autoresponders are able to learn about your customers on a deep level. Then, they'll take all of the necessary actions to onboard, engage, and nurture your marketing leads throughout the full customer lifecycle.

Don't miss out on the next #womenintech podcast episode, get notified by signing up here http://womenintechshow.com. Be featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/“Remix: Helena Belloff, Wes Kao, and Jane Portman”#womenintech Show is a WeAreTech.fm production.To support the Women in Tech podcast go to https://www.patreon.com/womenintechTo be featured on the podcast go to http://womenintechshow.com/featureHost, Espree Devorahttps://twitter.com/espreedevorahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/espreeGuest,Helena Belloffhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/helenabelloff/Guest,Wes Kaohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/weskao/https://twitter.com/wes_kaoGuest,Jane Portman,https://twitter.com/uibreakfastBe featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/In LA? Here's some awesome resources for you to become immersed in the LA Tech scene -For a calendar of all LA Startup events go to, http://WeAreLATech.comGet Podcast Listeners, http://getpodcastlisteners.com/Resources Mentioned:Levels, https://www.levelshealth.comKaggle, https://www.kaggle.comL' Oreal, https://www.loreal.com/en/Maven, https://maven.comAltMBA, https://altmba.comUserlist, https://userlist.comUI Breakfast, https://uibreakfast.comPeople Mentioned:Yann LeCun, https://twitter.com/ylecunCredits:Produced and Hosted by Espree Devora, http://espreedevora.comStory Produced, Edited and Mastered by Cory Jennings, https://www.coryjennings.com/Production and Voiceover by Adam Carroll, http://www.ariacreative.ca/Team support by Janice GeronimoMusic by Jay Huffman, https://soundcloud.com/jayhuffmanShort Title: Helena Belloff, Wes Kao, and Jane Portman

Don't miss out on the next #womenintech podcast episode, get notified by signing up here http://womenintechshow.com. Be featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/“Remix: Lauren Kelley-Chew, Jane Portman, and JJ Ramberg”#womenintech Show is a WeAreTech.fm production.To support the Women in Tech podcast go to https://www.patreon.com/womenintechTo be featured on the podcast go to http://womenintechshow.com/featureHost, Espree Devorahttps://twitter.com/espreedevorahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/espreeGuest, Lauren Kelley-Chewhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-kelley-chew-md-27052024Guest,Jane Portmanhttps://twitter.com/uibreakfastGuest,JJ Ramberghttps://twitter.com/jjramberghttps://www.jjramberg.comBe featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/In LA? Here's some awesome resources for you to become immersed in the LA Tech scene -For a calendar of all LA Startup events go to, http://WeAreLATech.comGet Podcast Listeners, http://getpodcastlisteners.com/Resources Mentioned:Levels, https://www.levelshealth.com/Goodpods, https://www.goodpods.comUserlist, https://userlist.comPeople Mentioned:Ken Ramberg, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-r-7692571/Credits:Produced and Hosted by Espree Devora, http://espreedevora.comStory Produced, Edited and Mastered by Cory Jennings, https://www.coryjennings.com/Production and Voiceover by Adam Carroll, http://www.ariacreative.ca/Team support by Janice GeronimoMusic by Jay Huffman, https://soundcloud.com/jayhuffmanShort Title: Lauren Kelley-Chew, Jane Portman, and JJ Ramberg

Don't miss out on the next #womenintech podcast episode, get notified by signing up here http://womenintechshow.com. Be featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/“Remix: JJ Ramberg, Jane Portman, and Mia Kogan-Spivack”#womenintech Show is a WeAreTech.fm production.To support the Women in Tech podcast go to https://www.patreon.com/womenintechTo be featured on the podcast go to http://womenintechshow.com/featureHost, Espree Devorahttps://twitter.com/espreedevorahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/espreeGuest,JJ Ramberghttps://twitter.com/jjramberghttps://www.jjramberg.comGuest,Jane Portmanhttps://twitter.com/uibreakfastGuest,Mia Kogan-Spivackhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mia-kogan-spivack-81188b216/Be featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/In LA? Here's some awesome resources for you to become immersed in the LA Tech scene -For a calendar of all LA Startup events go to, http://WeAreLATech.comGet Podcast Listeners, http://getpodcastlisteners.com/Resources Mentioned:Goodpods, https://www.goodpods.comUserlist, https://userlist.comUI Breakfast, https://uibreakfast.com Antifragile, https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680Start With Why, https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447The Mom Test, http://momtestbook.comCredits:Produced and Hosted by Espree Devora, http://espreedevora.comStory Produced, Edited and Mastered by Cory Jennings, https://www.coryjennings.com/Production and Voiceover by Adam Carroll, http://www.ariacreative.ca/Team support by Janice GeronimoMusic by Jay Huffman, https://soundcloud.com/jayhuffmanShort Title: JJ Ramberg, Jane Portman, and Mia Kogan-Spivack

Don't miss out on the next #womenintech podcast episode, get notified by signing up here http://womenintechshow.com. Be featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/“Remix: Jane Portman, Mia Kogan-Spivack, and Anna Gandrabura”#womenintech Show is a WeAreTech.fm production.To support the Women in Tech podcast go to https://www.patreon.com/womenintechTo be featured on the podcast go to http://womenintechshow.com/featureHost, Espree Devorahttps://twitter.com/espreedevorahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/espreeGuest,Jane Portmanhttps://twitter.com/uibreakfastGuest,Mia Kogan-Spivackhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mia-kogan-spivack-81188b216/Guest,Anna Gandraburahttps://twitter.com/anna_gandraburahttps://www.instagram.com/annglish_/Be featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/In LA? Here's some awesome resources for you to become immersed in the LA Tech scene -For a calendar of all LA Startup events go to, http://WeAreLATech.comGet Podcast Listeners, http://getpodcastlisteners.com/Resources Mentioned:Userlist, https://userlist.comUI Breakfast, https://uibreakfast.comTechville, http://mytechville.com/Techville, https://twitter.com/techville5Credits:Produced and Hosted by Espree Devora, http://espreedevora.comStory Produced, Edited and Mastered by Cory Jennings, https://www.coryjennings.com/Production and Voiceover by Adam Carroll, http://www.ariacreative.ca/Team support by Janice GeronimoMusic by Jay Huffman, https://soundcloud.com/jayhuffmanShort Title: Jane Portman, Mia Kogan-Spivack, and Anna Gandrabura

Don't miss out on the next #womenintech podcast episode, get notified by signing up here http://womenintechshow.com.Be featured in the Women in Tech Community by creating your profile here http://womenintechvip.com/“Jane Portman of Userlist”#womenintech Show is a WeAreTech.fm production.To support the Women in Tech podcast go to https://www.patreon.com/womenintechTo be featured on the podcast go to http://womenintechshow.com/featureHost, Espree Devorahttps://twitter.com/espreedevorahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/espreeGuest,Jane Portmanhttps://twitter.com/uibreakfastListener Spotlight,Mike Veldhuishttps://www.linkedin.com/in/hwveldhuis/In LA? Here's some awesome resources for you to become immersed in the LA Tech scene -For a calendar of all LA Startup events go to, http://WeAreLATech.comGet Podcast Listeners, http://getpodcastlisteners.com/Resources Mentioned:Userlist, https://userlist.comUI Breakfast, https://uibreakfast.comTinySeed, https://tinyseed.comIndy Hackers, https://www.indiehackers.comBetter Done Than Perfect, https://userlist.com/podcast/Podcast Hawk, https://podcasthawk.comGuestio, https://guestio.comLemonPie, https://lemonpie.fmRephonic, https://rephonic.comMicroComf, https://microconf.com/mastermindsIndie Hackers, https://www.indiehackers.comUpwork, https://www.upwork.comMighty Deals, https://www.mightydeals.comGum Road, https://gumroad.comAppSumo, https://appsumo.com/Antifragile, https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680Start With Why, https://www.amazon.com/Start-Why-Leaders-Inspire-Everyone/dp/1591846447The Mom Test, http://momtestbook.comWrite Useful Books, https://www.amazon.com/Write-Useful-Books-recommendable-nonfiction-ebook/dp/B0983HFQX7People Mentioned:Joe Rogan, https://www.joerogan.comCredits:Produced and Hosted by Espree Devora, http://espreedevora.comStory Produced, Edited and Mastered by Cory Jennings, https://www.coryjennings.com/Production and Voiceover by Adam Carroll, http://www.ariacreative.ca/Team support by Janice GeronimoMusic by Jay Huffman, https://soundcloud.com/jayhuffmanShort Title: Jane Portman 

Afraid of shipping your "good enough" product or feature and trapped by perfectionism? In this episode, we're talking to Jane Portman about the "better done than perfect" mindset. Jane is a seasoned UI/UX consultant who currently works at Userlist with her co-founder Benedikt. She has authored two books - UI Audit and Productised Consulting Guide and runs two podcast shows.

Jane Portman is a UI/UX consultant specializing in web application design, founder of UI Breakfast and Userlist. At Userlist, Jane's goal is to provide flawless onboarding and engagement for SaaS companies through a simple customer messaging platform. Jane has also been running UI Breakfast Podcast since 2014. In this episode, we talked about: How did Jane get into design? Software design and Saas Products Life as UI/UX consultant Productized Consulting Jane's workflow and process in writing a book How to network? Podcasting to build a network What is Userlist and what designers need to think about as entrepreneurs And MUCH MORE! Links: UI Breakfast Podcast Better Done Than Perfect https://userlist.com/ UI Audit by Jane Portman Authority by Nathan Berry Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick Stacking the Bricks with Amy Hoy - https://stackingthebricks.com/ The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick USE PEK300 as a code to get $300 OFF - https://userlist.com/

Jane Portman is a UI/UX consultant specializing in web application design, founder of UI Breakfast and Userlist. At Userlist, Jane's goal is to provide flawless onboarding and engagement for SaaS companies through a simple customer messaging platform.Jane has also been running UI Breakfast Podcast since 2014.In this episode, we talked about:How did Jane get into design?Software design and Saas ProductsLife as UI/UX consultantProductized ConsultingJane's workflow and process in writing a bookHow to network?Podcasting to build a network What is Userlist and what designers need to think about as entrepreneursAnd MUCH MORE!Links:UI Breakfast PodcastBetter Done Than Perfecthttps://userlist.com/ UI Audit by Jane PortmanAuthority by Nathan BerryWrite Useful Books by Rob FitzpatrickStacking the Bricks with Amy Hoy - https://stackingthebricks.com/ The Mom Test by Rob FitzpatrickUSE PEK300 as a code to get $300 OFF - https://userlist.com/

I conclude the mini season of interviews with a brief summary of the five interviews I conducted. A few weeks ago, my cohost had a cycling that student that broke his jaw. As a result he had to take a break from the podcast while he was recovering. In the meantime, I invited a few people to come onto the podcast and talk about their businesses, their work and themselves.The episodes:#198: Simon Bennett of SnapShooter#199: Jane Portman of UI Breakfast#200: Positioning for bootstrappers with April Dunford#201: Peter Cooper of Cooperpress#202: Bridget Harris, co-founder of YouCanBook.Me

Jane Portman is the host of UI Breakfast, a podcast covering UI/UX design, products, marketing.  Jane recently crossed the  2 million downloads milestone. Jane and I discussed the journey from the first episodes, with almost no listeners, to where she is today.Jane is also co-founder of Userlist. We discuss how Jane's podcasting experience helps with Userlist.Links:The UI Breakfast podcast How to sponsor Jane's podcastUserlistBetter Done Than Perfect podcast 

Not having an online platform these days is tantamount to being invisible. But how do you build and leverage it wisely? Today’s guest is Corbett Barr, founder and CEO of Fizzle. You’ll hear his take on social media, privacy, digital selves, platforms vs protocols, email lists, lead magnets, trends, and much more.Podcast feed: subscribe to https://feeds.simplecast.com/4MvgQ73R in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts.Show NotesFizzle — Corbett’s companyEmail, RSS, podcasting — open protocols (you own the connection to your audience)Episode 178: Your Personal Design Style with Meg LewisGary Vaynerchuk — an entrepreneur, author, speaker and famous Internet personalityJustin Jackson — a SaaS entrepreneur who is highly active in communitiesDesign Cuts by Tom Ross — a good example of “bundle” lead magnetsJames Clear — entrepreneur/author known for his huge email listSignal, Telegram — alternatives to WhatsAppUserlist — Jane’s productHeroku — a cloud application platformAWS — Amazon’s cloud computing serviceElectronic Frontier Foundation — an organization that defends censorship, privacy and online freedomPlatformer — a Subtext newsletter by Casey Newton on politics and technologyKara Swisher — a New York Times tech journalist covering the Internet since 1994Substack, ConvertKit — paid newsletter platforms geared towards creatorscorbettbarr.com — Corbett’s personal blogFollow Corbett on TwitterToday’s SponsorThis episode is brought to you by User.com — a marketing automation software for SaaS companies. The company is hosting the online SaaS Growth Summit (February 11-12, 2021), an event that will feature Saas keynote speakers such as Rand Fishkin, Nathan Latka, April Dunford, and more. UI Breakfast’s very own Jane Portman will also be joining the stage. Head over to saassummit.user.com to join for free.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here.Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here’s how.

Corey prepares to launch his new podcast Everything Is Marketing. Jane talks about the new direction for Userlist in 2021 becoming a full-blown ESP. They also talk about early-stage SaaS growth, starting and growing a podcast, and the new Swipe Files book club.

"How to Create The Best Onboarding Process for Your New Customers" with Jane Portman Join my Digital Marketing Method Group Coaching Program. Grow your business and your social media following. Go to www.DMGroup.Online to sign up today for only $29/mo! Link to my website: www.jeanginzburg.com

Jane Portman of Userlist and author speaks about discovering her passion from an early age, launching a range of businesses, and the lessons she learned along the way. Apart from being a user-experience, user-interface consultant and author, Jane Portman is a co-founder at Userlist. She specializes in assisting software companies to develop profitable and focused products. She speaks to Geordie Wardman about her journey. What You’ll Learn How Jane started her entrepreneurship journey How Jane transformed from doing UI breakfast and related stuff to launch Userlist What problem does Userlist solve? Strategies that Jane and her team use to address a SaaS problem Why real-time chat support is not always compulsory for small bootstrap founders What strategy did Jane and her team use to validate the need for their product? Why you should join a slack community Importance of understanding best practices before launching a company Why you need a launch goal for your product How small bootstrap companies can determine their target buyers Importance of understanding your product Jane’s plans for the future In this Episode Some of the best entrepreneurs in the world discovered their passion during their formative years. Jane falls in that category, and she gives Geordie a brief history of where it all started. You cannot miss the details in this podcast. Jane ventured into the book writing world before launching the UI breakfast, which she says is in its sixth year with 200 episodes under her name. She says she had been consistent in producing and publishing podcasts until she had her third baby and had to adjust her frequency. However, Jane is quick to mention that she is getting back to the weekly program with time. Jane says the UI breakfast podcast is a massive project that she plans to have for some years. Find out why she is pleased with the podcast's performance from this engaging discussion. Jane gives some insightful tips for aspiring podcasters that you should hear. The journey to establishing Userlist was not an easy one. Jane says she had launched another product previously, which did not yield much success. Still, she gathered massive lessons that would come in handy as reference points in her future businesses. Initially, Jane says Userlist was intended to solve a problem that she encountered first hand. Listen to this podcast to find out what the problem was. Userlist focuses exclusively on SaaS, which Jane says has enabled them to generate an appealing, concise, and simple yet robust product. Developing an MVP can be challenging and Jane seems to have done it differently. Listen to her as she explains how she went about it and how they developed their product from scratch. According to Jane, they launched their product late because they probably were not ashamed of it. She says they spend a lot of time, in the beginning, preparing the product to make it appealing and beneficial. Jane talks about the lessons she learned from launching Userlist. Listen to the podcast for more details. Jane mentions an equity splitting method that every entrepreneur needs to know. Having a launch goal, Jane says is crucial if you want to succeed in business. She goes ahead and discusses the launch goal they had and how significant it was for the business. However, she is also quick to mention that launch goals do not give you instant users. Jane talks about working with Tiny Seeds which gave them massive assistance. They also interacted with peers and discussed the problems they face as small business entrepreneurs. Working with Tiny Seeds saw them receive mentorship from experts they would otherwise not have known. Jane is excited to mention that they were privileged to have April Dunford, a positioning expert, as their mentor. She gives a detailed explanation of their experience working with April that you do not want to miss. At some point, she mentions how they compared Userlist with their competitors. Listen to the podcast for the details. Before Tiny Seeds, Jane says they had already acquired one of April’s books, which were instrumental in their venture. Find out what book that was from the podcast. Jane says that Userlist benefited from implementing April’s rules. What changes did Jane and her team experience? Listen to the podcast to find out. Still, in April's book, Jane mentions that they learned how to understand their product and figure out their ideal customers. This aspect is critical for every entrepreneur and one of the most insightful parts of the podcast. Jane gives out details about the funding they received from Tiny Seeds. What did it take to acquire the funds? Listen in to find out. Jane mentions various things they either have recently launched, or are planning to launch in the future. To aspiring entrepreneurs, Jane says; explore different options when it comes to searching for investors.  Resources Jane Portman LinkedIn Jane Portman Twitter Userlist UI Breakfast

What do you do if your customers just don't "get" your product? My guest today is Jane Portman, UI design expert, and co-founder of Userlist.io. We talked about why Userlist initial positioning didn't work, and the ten steps Jane and the Userlist team took to develop a new product positioning. From recruiting customers, to running customer interviews, and discovering the patterns and themes amongst qualitative data.

- The critical things you can learn about business to make you a better UX designer or researcher - How important is UX in the success of building new products - The business of consulting versus the business of products or software - How to stand out as a UX person in the world of generic resumes and cover letters

Why is it so critical to be aware of customers' Jobs to Be Done, especially when you work on their onboarding? In this episode, we chat with Ramli John, founder of Growth Marketing Today, fellow podcaster and consultant. You'll hear about Ramli's EURECA user onboarding  framework, as well as his insights on segmentation, minimizing friction, success metrics, analytics tools, and more. Visit our website for the detailed episode recap with key learnings.Show notesgrowthtoday.fm — Ramli's podcastWhen Coffee and Kale Compete — a famous book on JTBD by Alan KlementThe Stewart Butterfield interview wherein the Slack founder refers to the 2000 messages metricHow Userlist Onboards New Users feat. Jane Portman by Product-Led InstituteHow FullStory Onboards New Users by Product-Led InstituteProduct-Led's full list of user onboarding teardownsWave — a financial app and great example of segmented onboardingSQL, ChartMogul, Mixpanel — tools Ramli recommends for product analyticsHow Appcues' Jonathan Kim Boosts Retention — a ProfitWell article on Appcues' approaches on user retention and churn rate reductionjtbd.info — the Jobs To Be Done websiteUI Breakfast Podcast. Episode 181: Jobs to Be Done with Jim KalbachThe Product-Led Podcast — the podcast Ramli co-hosts with Wes Bushonboardingteardowns.com — visit for Ramli's onboarding reviewsramlijohn.com — Ramli's websiteFollow Ramli on TwitterThanks for listening! If you found the episode useful, please spread the word about this new show on Twitter mentioning @userlist, or leave us a review on iTunes.SponsorThis show is brought to you by Userlist — the best way for SaaS founders to send onboarding emails, segment your users based on events, and see where your customers get stuck in the product. Start your free trial today at userlist.com.

How different are tablet interfaces to those of phones and desktops? And what makes a tablet-based app fully functional and worth building? Our guest today is Mark McGranaghan, founding partner at Muse Software and principal investigator at Ink & Switch. You’ll hear Mark’s angle on tablet interface design, industrial research, user onboarding, as well as his advice on building tools for thought.Podcast feed: subscribe to https://feeds.simplecast.com/4MvgQ73R in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play Music.Show NotesMuse — Mark’s productInk & Switch — Mark’s industrial research lab focusing on creativity & productivityProductivity articles by Shawn BlancOnboarding with Jane Portman — a Metamuse podcast episodeMilanote — tool for organizing creative projectsNotion, Roam — modern tools for thoughtProcreate — a digital illustration app for the iPadMicrosoft Research — a great entryway to academic research on tabletsmarkmcgranaghan.com — Mark’s websiteFind Mark on LinkedIn and TwitterToday’s SponsorThis episode is brought to you by Hover — the domain name registrar that helps you brand your next big creative idea. With Hover, you can register a domain name for your design portfolio or creative business, choosing from over 300 domain name extensions. Find your next catchy domain name at hover.com/uibreakfast.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here.Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here’s how.

Jane Portman of Userlist joins Julia and Adam to share her expertise with onboarding. Why guided tours don't work, the legacy of Clippy, and drip campaigns that are more personal and considerate. @MuseAppHQ hello@museapp.com Show notes Jane Portman @uibreakfast User Onboarding: The Ultimate Guide for SaaS Founders Userlist Benedikt Deicke Intercom lifecycle messaging Claire Suellentrop, Forget The Funnel UI Breakfast podcast tooltips Inspire, Not Instruct aha moment Clue out-of-box-experience (OOBE) Samuel Hulick, UserOnboard, podcast interview Clippy call to action Val Geisler drip campaign tech touch A/B test or split test Max Seelemann

Jane Portman of Userlist joins Julia and Adam to share her expertise with onboarding. Why guided tours don't work, the legacy of Clippy, and drip campaigns that are more personal and considerate. @MuseAppHQ hello@museapp.com Show notes Jane Portman @uibreakfast User Onboarding: The Ultimate Guide for SaaS Founders Userlist Benedikt Deicke Intercom lifecycle messaging Claire Suellentrop, Forget The Funnel UI Breakfast podcast tooltips Inspire, Not Instruct aha moment Clue out-of-box-experience (OOBE) Samuel Hulick, UserOnboard, podcast interview Clippy call to action Val Geisler drip campaign tech touch A/B test or split test Max Seelemann

Originally from Russia, Jane Portman gained experience as a creative director for an agency. She has been involved in tech as a designer for 16 years, occupying different design jobs. In fact, product work and design is her hobby! Jane is Married, with 3 kids, and shares entrepreneurial love with her husband. Having a college degree in applied information technology to the legal side of business, she has a solid foundation baseline for understanding the tech world. A few years ago, Jane was selling her first SaaS product, and moved forward recruited some co-founders to work on a new idea - around a problem she was having with automated email, and in app messaging. This is the creation story of Userlist. Links * https://userlist.com/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/uibreakfast/ * https://uibreakfast.com/ * https://dribbble.com/portmanstudio Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts ( https://ratethispodcast.com/codestory ) Amazing tools we use: * If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm ( https://transistor.fm/?via=code-story ) * Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast ( https://squadcast.fm/?ref=noahlabhart ). * Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain ( https://clipgain.io/?utm_campaign=clipgain&utm_medium=episode&utm_source=codestory ) , sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE Credits: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts ( https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/code-story/id1466861744 ) , Spotify ( https://open.spotify.com/show/0f5HGQ2EPd63H83gqAifXp ) , Pocket Casts ( https://pca.st/Z1k7 ) , Google Play ( https://play.google.com/music/listen?pcampaignid=MKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16&t=Code_Story&view=%2Fps%2FIcdmshauh7jgmkjmh6iu3wd4oya ) , Breaker ( https://www.breaker.audio/code-story ) , Youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgjZsiUDp-oKY_ffHc5AUpQ ) , or the podcasting app of your choice. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

In his second appearance on the show (he first appeared on Episode 367), we chat with Benedikt Deicke from Userlist. Along with his co-founder, Jane Portman, they are building an easy to use customer messaging tool catered specifically towards SaaS companies. In this show, we talk about some of the challenges in building a product […]        

A few months ago, Userlist introduced the $9/month starter plan. The plan allows SaaS founders to enjoy Userlist’s full set of features until they are able to hit the first 100 customers milestone. We talked to Userlist co-founder Jane Portman to know the rationale behind the offering. Aside from co-founding Userlist, Jane is also a UI/UX consultant and the host of UI Breakfast Podcast. In this episode, Jane shared how they arrived at the decision to offer $9/month, why they opted not to offer freemium, and why it makes perfect sense. Show Notes [01:50] What Userlist is and how it started [02:13] What their edge is [04:38 Reason they added the $9/mo starter plan [07:11] How they intend to move forward [09:28] Why they decided on $9  [11:59] Why they didn’t limit specific features for the $9 plan [16:08] The thought process behind their video [19:05] The core idea for a good UI [20:46] What they have in the works to help users install the Userlist app [23:02] One of the reasons they ask for the credit card upfront [24:36] Any experiments they have planned that they’re excited about [25:35] Her one advice to founders [26:40] Where people can find out more about her and Userlist About Jane Portman Jane Portman is a UI/UX consultant and she specializes in web application design. She is also the founder of UI Breakfast and the co-founder of Userlist. Userlist is designed as an alternative to bulky enterprise messaging tools. At Userlist, Jane’s primary objective is to provide impeccable UX and help users become exceptional at customer messaging. Since 2014, Jane has also been hosting UI Breakfast Podcast where she talks to industry experts about UI/UX design, marketing, products, and many more. Links Jane Portman’s Post on Indie HackerUserlist WebsiteSpecial 30% offer (first 3 months) for Product-Led listenersTinySeed Website Profile UI Breakfast WebsiteUI Breakfast PodcastUI Breakfast Mailing ListJane Portman on TwitterJane Portman's Email Address: jane@uibreakfast.com

Sales demos are a great opportunity to get to know your customers. The person on the other end is interested in your product, looking for a solution to a problem, and likely have some pain points with their current solutions. That's why Jane Portman, co-founder of Userlist, uses demos as an opportunity to connect with potential customers, keep pain points top of mind, and learn how to make her product even better. She chatted with Erin and JH about why she's doing customer research and sales demos at the same time, how constantly talking to customers helps her develop a better product, and how she came up with the podcast name UI Breakfast. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/awkwardsilences/message

Why do some online communities thrive, and the others fizzle out? What is the secret sauce? Our guest today is the awesome Courtland Allen, the founder of Indie Hackers. You'll learn how to start a community from scratch, choose the right format, handle the mechanics, make it safe, and much more.Podcast feed: subscribe to https://feeds.simplecast.com/4MvgQ73R in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play Music.Show NotesIndie Hackers — the famous online community we're talking aboutThe 37 signals Manifesto — Basecamp's original site from 1999Acquired by Stripe! — a blog post from 2017 about IH acquired by StripeSlack, Telegram, WhatsApp — good platforms for starting a community as a chatroomDiscourse — popular forum softwareNomad List, Hacker News, DEV — popular communities that inspired IHThe Slow, Deliberate Process of Making a SaaS Business Work with Jane Portman of Userlist — Jane's interview on Indie HackersThe Indie Hackers PodcastStart Here — a guide for new users at Indie HackersFollow Courtland on Twitter: @csallenToday's SponsorThis episode is brought to you by Nusii — proposal software made easy for creatives. Do you get stressed every time a new lead hits your inbox? Nusii was built to help you create, send, track and manage your proposals in one easy-to-use app. Forget about searching for your best content, and following up with clients to sign on the dotted line. Visit nusii.com/uibreakfast for a 30% discount on your first 3 months.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here. Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.

The most effective onboarding emails are event-triggered and not time-triggered any more. You want your customers to receive emails that they actually want to read instead of an irrelevant set of emails that will end up in the junk folder. In this hands-on interview, Jane Portman, Co-founder at Userlist is sharing the most important events based on which we should trigger onboarding emails to our customers. She is providing real examples and a more practical than theoretical approach on how to set them up yourself. Key takeaways: - What's the difference between properties and events - Which are the events and properties you should track - Which are the use cases that you should fire an event-triggered email to support onboarding The interviewee: Jane Portman is a UI/UX consultant specializing in web application design, co-founder of Userlist and host of UI Breakfast Podcast. At Userlist, Jane's goal is to provide flawless UX and help users be awesome at their customer messaging. The interviewer: Aggelos Mouzakitis is the founder of Growth Sandwich. He created Growth Sandwich, back in 2017 with a sole vision: to help promising early-stage teams get their products to market in a solid manner. He has worked or trained more than 500 marketers and founders on how to get to the market with the right mix of tactics and a product that drives engagement and happiness. About Growth Sandwich: Growth Sandwich is the first European Product-led Go-to-Market Strategy agency. We specialise in helping SaaS products and businesses that operate in the subscription economy. Our approach is 100% customer-centric and we help post-Product/Market fit companies establish a repeatable selling motion and recurring revenues.

In the previous interview with Jane, she shared with us the most important events we need to take into consideration when emailing our customers. But what exactly should we send? In this interview with Jane Portman, Co-founder at Userlist, we are digging deeper into exactly what you need to send, what specific campaigns you need to have running. Key takeaways: - What to send, when to send it and how does this need to look - How to segment your campaigns according to users' product maturity - How to convert more free users with the right timely emails The interviewee: Jane Portman is a UI/UX consultant specializing in web application design, co-founder of Userlist and host of UI Breakfast Podcast. At Userlist, Jane's goal is to provide flawless UX and help users be awesome at their customer messaging. The interviewer: Aggelos Mouzakitis is the founder of Growth Sandwich. He created Growth Sandwich, back in 2017 with a sole vision: to help promising early-stage teams get their products to market in a solid manner. He has worked or trained more than 500 marketers and founders on how to get to the market with the right mix of tactics and a product that drives engagement and happiness. About Growth Sandwich: Growth Sandwich is the first European Product-led Go-to-Market Strategy agency. We specialise in helping SaaS products and businesses that operate in the subscription economy. Our approach is 100% customer-centric and we help post-Product/Market fit companies establish a repeatable selling motion and recurring revenues.

Jane Portman (@uibreakfast) is no stranger to making money online. Not only has she run a successful consultancy for nearly a decade, but she's also published 4 books and become a leading authority on UX and product design. So when Jane decided to start a SaaS company—Userlist— she was surprised to learn just slow and difficult the process can be. In this episode, Jane and I discuss the variables that makes companies faster or slower to grow, the importance of nailing your customer messaging so people understand what it is that you do, and her tips for how other founders can stick through the tough times to turn their side projects into successful SaaS businesses.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/145-jane-portman-of-userlist

Show Notes In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob talks with Jane Portman of Userlist. They discuss the struggles of growing slowly, gaining traction in the crowded space, and some of the lessons learned from her first SaaS app. Items mentioned in this episode: Userlist UI Breakfast Podcast Transcript Rob: In […]       

What do you do if your customers just don't "get" your product? My guest today is Jane Portman, UI design expert, and co-founder of Userlist.io. We talked about why Userlist initial positioning didn't work, and the ten steps Jane and the Userlist team took to develop a new product positioning. From recruiting customers, to running customer interviews, and discovering the patterns and themes amongst qualitative data.

In this episode, Adam talks to Benedikt Deicke about building Userlist.io, a new email automation product for SaaS businesses that he recently launched with his co-founder Jane Portman. Topics include: The risks and technical challenges of building client-side API integrations and why Benedikt decided to focus on a server-side integration for launch Building Userlist with Ember instead of trendier tools like React How the Ember app authenticates with the Rails API Strategies for keeping email deliverability high for Userlist's customers How Benedikt built Userlist's complex segmentation engine by creating a custom AST structure and compiling it to SQL How the automation and email scheduling system works Sponsors: Cloudinary, sign up and get 300,000 images/videos, 10GB of storage and 20GB of monthly bandwidth for free DigitalOcean, get your free $50 credit at do.co/fullstack Links: Userlist.io Slow and Steady, Benedikt's podcast Prosemirror Ember Ruby on Rails Sidekiq Sparkpost

While Ben’s on vacation, Derrick welcomes another podcast host who can commiserate with him about email automation. Jane Portman is a UI/UX expert and consultant who hosts the UI Breakfast Podcast and co-founded Userlist.io. She describes what it takes to create a customer messaging tool. Today’s Topics Include: Product Priorities: Slow, steady, and quality Lifestyle Business: Overall goal is to replace consulting with SaaS recurring revenue Challenges: Limited development time and resources; slow growth rate to adopt mission-critical product To Build, or Not to Build: Avoid feature creep by focusing on what to add or improve Playbook Post: 10 steps to successfully position a product Launch Process: People are waiting for the right time for the right tool for their business Customer Conversations: Pre-product interviews about problem to be solved; followed by product demos to grant access to beta version for feedback Finding Customers: Landing page, updates, stories, sign-ups, mailing list, and more We’re out of Beta! Simple and straight-forward product launch plan and strategy Generic Illustrations: Product design trend that has to end Email Experiences: Educate people on how to ethically use email to serve their business Links and resources: User Onboarding: The Ultimate Guide for SaaS Founders (https://userlist.com/user-onboarding/) UI Breakfast Podcast (https://uibreakfast.com) Userlist.io (http://userlist.io/) UI Breakfast on Twitter (https://twitter.com/uibreakfast) Userlist.io on Twitter (https://www.twitter.com/Userlistio) Behind the Scenes of Our Upcoming Public Launch (https://userlist.io/launch-strategy/) How We Used April Dunford’s 10-Step Method to Overhaul Positioning at Userlist (https://userlist.io/positioning-overhaul/) AoP Episode 91: Feeling Superhuman with Rahul Vohra (https://artofproductpodcast.com/episode-91) Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/) Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/) Drip (https://www.drip.com/) MailChimp (https://mailchimp.com/) Humans of Flat Design on Twitter (https://twitter.com/humansofflat?lang=en)  Paul Jarvis (https://pjrvs.com/) MicroConf (https://www.microconf.com/) Art of Product on Twitter (https://twitter.com/artofproductpod) Derrick Reimer (http://www.derrickreimer.com) Website Derrick Reimer on Twitter (https://twitter.com/derrickreimer) Ben Orenstein (http://www.benorenstein.com/) Website Ben Orenstein on Twitter (https://twitter.com/r00k?lang=en) Tuple (https://tuple.app/) Tuple’s Pair Programming Guide (https://tuple.app/pair-programming-guide) StaticKit (https://www.statickit.com/) Level (https://level.app/) Level Retrospective (https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/17/im-walking-away-from-the-product-i-spent-a-year-building.html) Level Manifesto (https://level.app/manifesto)

We’re joined today by Jane Portman an expert in UI/UX and co-founder of Userlist.io. Today we talk to Jane about her entrepreneurial journey from consulting to productized services to SaaS, we discuss her new Saas product Userlist.io, and we take a deep dive into a recent repositioning exercise that she and her partners undertook at […]

Today Craig has on Jane Portman and Benedikt Deicke, the team from Userlist.io. Userlist is a lightweight customer communication tool for SaaS applications, and in this episode Craig, Benedikt and Jane dig into many aspects of email onboarding for SaaS. Specifically they talk about: Why custom events are better than tags Where and when in-app […]

Today I'm speaking with Jane Portman. Jane is a UI/UX consultant in web application design, host of the very popular UI Breakfast Podcast, and co-founder of Userlist, a behavior-based email automation tool for Saas companies. We tackle a couple of interesting topics around UI design for early-stage startups: How good is "good enough" for launch? Can you get value from an off-the-shelf UI kit? And what can Gall's Law teach you about designing an MVP ... or better yet, a Minimum Loveable Product?

UI expert and designer Jane Portman joins us to discuss productized consulting and how freelancers can implements this successfully in their business.

Jane Portman, founder of UI Breakfast, is an amazing UI/UX consultant who loves helping entrepreneurs perfect their SaaS systems online and on mobile. She’s also an ace at productizing her skills. Productized consulting is a way to simplify your services and your rates in order to better serve your clients by offering them in neat, pre-priced packages. Jane is on this episode of the Freelance Transformation podcast all the way from Russia! To discuss how productizing her own skillset helped her build her business and reach out to the kinds of clients she truly loves working with. https://freelancetransformation.com/episode154

Jane Portman joins me to talk about her new book, Your Productized Consulting Guide.

Jane Portman began her entrepreneurial journey as a freelance designer on oDesk (which is now called Upwork). She struggled to find good clients who were willing to pay reasonable rates for her services. Fast forward a few short years, Jane is now a household name in the user experience industry. She has written several books […] The post How Productized Consulting Can Level Up Your Business with Jane Portman appeared first on Boutique Growth.

Past FT guests, such as Philip Morgan, Jane Portman, and Jonathan Stark, have written and self-published books as a very effective way to establish their authority in their field and as a means to attract their ideal clients. Chandler Bolt is the founder of Self Publishing School and teaches students how to write and self-publish their first book. Chandler shares why a book is a feasible endeavor with a lot of benefits, his process for writing a book, how to get a book published, and critical tips on how to get listed and found on Amazon. https://freelancetransformation.com/episode102

In this episode, Ian and Andrey talk to Jane Portman about her company, UI Breakfast, her new book for SaaS founders, building a business, and UI/UX for SaaS web applications.

In this episode, Ian and Andrey talk to Jane Portman about her company, UI Breakfast, her new book for SaaS founders, building a business, and UI/UX for SaaS web applications. The UI Audit – Jane’s new book UI Breakfast – Jane’s company Thanks to Linode for sponsoring this episode. Sign up today and get $20 off. Discuss […] The post Bootstrapped, Episode 71,”Jane Portman from UI Breakfast” appeared first on Bootstrapped.fm.

Today I am interviewing Jane Portman. Jane is from Russia, and she used to work with me on Planscope which I just sold. She is an amazing designer who is very focused on the design and the copy. I recently redesigned Double Your Freelancing. Which is appropriate for today, because Jane’s expertise is building really great user experiences. Jane is an amazing UI designer and business consultant. Jane has been designing for over 10 years. She worked for a large agency in Russia. She is also a mom, and now works full time in the US as a consultant. She wanted to build authority, so she started writing books and implemented a lot of my advice for consultants. She is currently focused on helping SaaS founders to build simple products that make money.

Welcome to the new season of UI Breakfast Podcast featuring Christopher Hawkins! He's been running his own awesome podcast for many years, wrote a book on podcasting, and is working on his own SaaS product. Today Christopher shares his product story and the lessons he learned along the way. Show Notes Chasing Product — Christopher's podcast Episode 32: Designing for Startups w/Jane Portman — two of us talking at Christopher's podcast a few months ago SmallSpec — Christopher's SaaS product (in development) Record & Release — Christopher's book on podcasting (use code UIBREAKFAST to get $10 off) Follow Christopher Hawkins on Twitter Sign up for Christopher's newsletter

Jane Portman is the founder of uibreakfast.com. She is the author of The UI Audit and has developed a course with the same name for SaaS Founders, developers and UI/UX designers and consultants.  She started doing design work in high school, came up through the agency system, and then after having children, started doing consulting. In this broadcast, Jane Portman and I talk about: What makes good user interface The best ways to choose colors and fonts, as well as the benefits of templates The advantages of creating products based on audience research How she has been able to reach her target consumers The process of setting prices and knowing whether to offer a book or a course The process of moving from consultation to information product production The importance of focusing on your audience, coming up with simple solutions to one of their problems How to find Jane Portman online: Website: uibreakfast.com Twitter: @uibreakfast If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave a review on iTunes here. Thanks so much in advance for your support. The post ITT 080: How to Put Your Audience First with Jane Portman appeared first on Tom Morkes.

In this episode we talk with Kai Davis about strategic copywriting. Choosing the right words to describe your product is so incredibly important, maybe even more important than the product itself! You'll learn how to go out in the wild and pick the right language, and how to write a perfect sales page. Show Notes Just F... Ship It by Amy Hoy with Alex Hillman, where they teach to make products crispy, not soggy Amy Hoy talking about Sales Safari at La Conf Paris 2013 Getting Started with Fancy Hands by Kai Davis The Traffic Manual by Kai Davis Traffic Powerup by Kai Davis The best book on writing long-form sales copy: The Brain Audit by Sean D'Souza Good example of intricate premium language & positioning: Bounce Exchange Good example of a smart naming pattern: Double Your Dating by David DeAngelo The UI Audit by Jane Portman

This Episode Sponsored By: 90-Day Product Goal Framework Are you tired of failing to meet long term goals as a product creator? Now there’s a system to help keep you on track and on task as you launch your own products – more details In this episode, Jane Portman of UIBreakfast.com talks about how she Read More The post Episode 32: Designing for Startups w/Jane Portman appeared first on Chasing Product.

This Episode Sponsored By: 90-Day Product Goal Framework Are you tired of failing to meet long term goals as a product creator? Now there’s a system to help keep you on track and on task as you launch your own products – more details In this episode, Jane Portman of UIBreakfast.com talks about how she Read More The post Episode 32: Designing for Startups w/Jane Portman appeared first on Chasing Product.

Diesmal sprechen wir mit Jane Portman über ihr neues Buch und darüber E-Books zu schreiben und zu vermarkten. Show Notes Janes Website Jane bei Twitter Janes erstes Buch: Mastering App Presentation Janes neues Buch: The UI Audit The 1 Hour UI Audit Course Airstory The post Folge 47: Interview mit Jane Portman appeared first on Nebenberuf Startup.

Jane Portman, creator of UI Breakfast and author of The UI Audit, talked with us about common mistakes founders make when they approach design and feature integration with their app. She knows most early-stage and bootstrapped companies can’t afford a ded Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I cannot overemphasize the first run experience, that’s when you have the most energy and the most enthusiasm and momentum coming from the user. 00:00:14 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, and I’m here today with my colleague Julia Rogats. 00:00:28 - Speaker 3: Hi, Adam, nice to be back. 00:00:30 - Speaker 2: And a guest, Jane Portman of User List. 00:00:33 - Speaker 1: Hi, Adam. Hi Julia. 00:00:34 - Speaker 2: And Jane, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background and what you’re working on at user list. 00:00:39 - Speaker 1: Well, thanks for having me today. My pleasure to share a little story. User list is a tool for sending activation on boarding, life cycle, email and other kinds of messages to Sassy. Users, so we work specifically with SASS founders and provide great tools for them to run their SAS companies. And uh user onboarding that we have as a topic today is so hard for us because that’s like the primary application for our tools. So we’re sort of on a mission to try and help founders establish their better onboarding practices. 00:01:13 - Speaker 2: And just because I always like to unpack abbreviation, SAS stands for software as a service, so this typically would be web applications, often ones that are sold to businesses rather than either consumer applications or mobile apps or iOS apps such as Ms. Yes, that’s correct. What was your journey? What brought you to be passionate about this area or be working on this particular company? 00:01:38 - Speaker 1: So if we go back in time a little bit, this is my 2nd SAS product and I’m running this one together with my amazing technical co-founder, Benedict Die. He’s a real engineering wizard, like I would never pursue this conflict of a product without him. When I was doing my first product, which was a little productivity app that didn’t go anywhere because it was not as crucial to the business, it didn’t like have a major mission, it didn’t have a good audience, and also while I was running it, there was no great tool that I could use for life cycle messaging, for user onboarding, etc. except for Intercom. Which back then wasn’t even pretty, to be honest, so it was super expensive, not very attractive, and it was not targeting small founders like myself. So a couple years later, It was pretty obvious what to build because I was very sure that Sa founders need help in that area and I recruited two more people, Benedict and we had a marketing co-founder, Claire Suentrop. She later on decided to stay as an advisor. She works on a popular marketing project, Forget the Funnel and Elevate these days. So that’s the story of fuselist and before that, I’m a UIUX consultant by trade. For the last 8 years, I’ve been working online with international clients and running my personal brand, UI Breakfast, and I also do UI Breakfast podcast, which is a nice design show. So that’s been out for a while as well. 00:03:08 - Speaker 2: And notably, we’ll have a crossover episode there. Mark, Mark’s going on with you at some point. 00:03:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m so excited to have him soon. So that show is sort of catering to my design interest and user list is something that we’re all passionate about is helping fellow founders pursuing that like bootstrapper dreams, slow and steady, kind of not funded, but self-funded growth. 00:03:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, having the pain yourself, that is having previously done a business and see where this is needed, that’s certainly one of the best ways to drive you to create a great product, I think. And you already kind of teed up our topic here, which is on boarding. You actually suggested this one, but it ended up being serendipitously apropos because Yuli was actually deep in the project at the time. We’ve, we’ve since released it, but deep in the project of redoing our onboarding, which we’ve done several times and is a challenge for various reasons we’ll get into later on. But before we do that, let’s start with the fundamentals. Can you tell us what is on boarding and why does it matter? 00:04:11 - Speaker 1: Well, firsthand congrats on your recent launch. That’s a big one. Also very exciting. Well, going back to user onboarding, that’s the process that software people use to receiving value from their product. And this can mean different things in people’s heads because we often associate this with like tool tips or guided tours, so very like specific interventions, but it should. be perceived as a more abstract thing, sort of a larger situation in life that the person is in and how you can help them using different kinds of tools, interventions and no little things to achieve value using your product and your product plays a little role there because they usually don’t strive to be good users of your product, but they’re striving for achieving something else which is much, much bigger and important for them. 00:05:00 - Speaker 2: You wrote this piece that we referenced a little bit titled Inspire, not Instruct that focuses more on the helping people understand what I usually talk about the aha moment or the understanding how something can fit into their life or help them in some way or solve their problem rather than the nuts and bolts minutia of how exactly do I use this. 00:05:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s kind of meta because user list is a tool for user on boarding, but it’s also quite a big challenge for us to onboard our own users. Once one of our users uh wrote back and said that they loved what they saw inside the app on the first run experience, and basically what we have is a single welcome video that does have not a single instructions inside it. And our goal is to sort of set up the tone and then we just rely on their own skills to continue with the journey, because different software applications have different levels of complexity and ours is definitely not on the easier side of the spectrum. It has a lot of elements for the user to become successful, they have to complete the integration, they have to actually write the emails. Of course we do have like templates and everything else we can, but. You can take the horse to water, but you can’t make them drink if they’re not inspired, so we really strive for this inspiration component more than trying to like instruct them, um, towards performing certain steps. 00:06:23 - Speaker 2: And I suspect there’s particular challenges when you get into B2B, as they call it business to business stuff, as well as very technical products. We ran into that with Hiroku and it’d be interesting to compare that to the maybe the mobile app world a little bit later on, but you know I was curious to get your take on onboarding here. And again, this has some nice historical touch points for us. And that we met at a company called Clue, a reproductive health tracker, and while we were both there, you were leading a project to build the out of box experience or the UI, it’s kind of the cute acronym there, which you said maybe UB and onboarding aren’t quite the same thing, but in any case, I’d love to hear how you think about this now being a veteran of having built multiple first run experiences for apps. 00:07:08 - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. The way that I understand the UBI or the out of box experience is basically The way that the user sets up a piece of software, in many cases, this is, you know, if you’re installing something first, this would be part of the UBI. If we remember like for Windows users, I think this is still a thing where you have to double click on a thing and then you get the dialogue, where do you want to install the tool. So this would all be part of an Ubi. Obviously, in the app world, you just download an app from the app store and then you open it, and then what happens in those first couple of minutes, I would say, is the out of box experience. And so in the example of clue, there was actually different guided steps to make you see the app with some initial data, so it would ask you how old you were. If you remember when your last period was, if you know roughly how long your period is, and based on the data that you input there, you will then end up at basically the app’s main screen that already has a little bit of data filled in. So this was both a way to kind of get to know the user and get information from them that are relevant for the app to work correctly and also avoid then bringing them to an empty start screen, basically, because if you have an app that’s fundamentally about data input, The first thing that you see being an empty screen is kind of uninspiring, of course. And so to compare this with the new experience, I think what we’re trying to do with the onboarding here is to both inspire them to realize what the product is about and how it could fit into their lives, but then obviously also teach them how the app works and Muse, as we all know, is kind of a, a pro tool that does things quite differently from other apps. So some of the gestures are fairly hard to discover on their own, which is I think why it is important to teach the user a little bit on how to use the app without overwhelming them with too many things all at once. But at the same time also show them a little bit of content, motivate them to get some of their own content in. And so based on all of these incentives, we we’ve tried to put together a little on boarding, which I think we will get into this later. That hopefully brings all of these components together. 00:09:23 - Speaker 1: I’m super curious to hear what you decided on that because you have so many hidden things in news and um that really requires some instructions. So what is the form and shape that you decided to go with? 00:09:36 - Speaker 3: Well, we’ve historically been through a couple different steps here. I think the very first version when we were still in beta was basically just an empty board with 2 or 3 cards on them, and one of them, I think was a pretty long text describing what news is about. And obviously that was neither teaching the user anything nor being particularly inspiring because the last thing that people want to do. When they first opened an app is read a huge block of text. So that was discarded fairly soon. 00:10:03 - Speaker 2: In our defense, I’ll jump in and say that the earliest onboarding was actually that we didn’t let anyone try the app unless one of us was sitting right there to help them. Onboarding was what you might call white glove or high touch, which often goes with, yeah, high-end kind of enterprise sales type products, but also I don’t know, maybe someone like superhuman has kind of popularized this a little bit, at least in the tech world’s imagination. But yeah, we would just sit there either in person in some cases or over video chat and either first give them a demo, try to show them what they can do with it once they get better at it, but then once they’re in it, kind of direct them around a little bit and then, you know, that obviously wasn’t very scalable, but it was a good place to start where we combined the usability test with a user interview with an onboarding was kind of all one thing that was just done completely outside the software. 00:10:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s right. So I think the thing that we did after this was to focus more on the inspiring part, so to really show people what you could do with Muse, what a muse board looks like when it’s filled with rich types of content. So we actually had a fairly extensive bundle of like pre-made onboarding content. I think it was one main board and then maybe 5 other different boards and different topics inside there. With some, you know, hand drawings or sketches on there, different types of links, PDFs, basically every content type that’s supported in use was in there, but there was no instruction at all on how to use the app. So people were kind of left to just explore on their own, which I think worked well in some regards, but I think one thing we also learned there is to just throw a bunch of random content at the user. Without any context on why this is important or why they would care about it seemed a little bit weird to users as well. Like they come in wanting to do a certain thing and if they then find a board that outlines, you know, notes on a book that someone wants to write that maybe doesn’t align at all with what they’re interested in. And so where we went from there, I think it was to try a little bit more of a learning the muse interactions based on a stack of cards that was in your inbox, like right when you launched the app, that was basically just a blank board and I think something like 12 or 15 cards that are arranged in a little stack in your inbox. This is where your content lands when you bring anything into Muse. And that definitely had a little bit of a threshold for users in terms of figuring out what to do with that stack of cards. I think for some people, and even if I remember correctly during one of the app reviews, this was actually reported as a bug, like there’s a bunch of cards or like a bunch of little things hanging off the side of the screen, and we don’t know what to do with it. 00:12:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, in the ideal world it was sort of. And they would tempt the user to grab it and drag it out and it’s a way to kind of draw you into that interaction without explicitly saying it. And I think that did work in a lot of cases. I ran some usability tests where I saw people be kind of puzzled what’s going on with these things on the side, and when they pull it out, they have kind of an aha moment and a sense of delight at having kind of figured something out, but just as often as not, it was uh what’s going on here, this app looks broken. 00:13:21 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I, I definitely think the moment of like when you do figure out what to do with it and then you realize, OK, you can drag these things around. There are a couple, just, you know, I, I think it was like a gardening project, so we had like a set of cards that had some inspiring images, and then a little bit of text explaining what Muse is and what you can do with it. It also pointed you to a little panel that you can open from the main menu that we call it, I think just a learn panel. That had some of the main interactions of the app explained just with some icons, and it seems like most people figured out how to use that and then notably a while later we actually introduced our handbook, I think there was an entire podcast episode on this, but we really went through lengths of recording videos of basically every interaction and everything that you can do inside the app. And put it on a website. So linking to this also from the main app helps. So if people really get stuck or they’re curious to learn more or to figure out how everything works, they can go and look at the handbook. Basically, the new onboarding that we designed based on the pain points that we saw with the random stack of cards in the inbox is a bit of a combination of everything we did before, combined with like a quest-based system. So our main incentive here was to motivate users to figure out the app while Using the app without necessarily forcing them to do something in a certain order, or I think we all know these types of onboarding tutorials where you first open an app and they, they really don’t let you do anything but click on the thing where the error points and you feel a little bit like a child that is taken through like an obstacle course and There’s basically no freedom to just explore on your own. 00:15:08 - Speaker 2: Jane, I think your article talks about this, right, like the tool tips and the guided tours and basically says that stuff doesn’t work. 00:15:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and also there is this famous person in the industry of user and boarding, Samuel Heli, and he wrote a book that I’ve read like ages ago, that was kind of laid the foundations for my own thinking and we recently had a conversation with Samuel and yes, he confirms like up to date. This does not really produce great results because everybody wants to have an autonomous experience. They want to explore things on their own at their own pace, while tool tips like enforce working within the UI at some predefined scenario, and this is just not a great practice. 00:15:50 - Speaker 2: Just as an aside, it must be fun to to read a book that had a big impact on your career and what you’re working on and then get to interview the author later on. 00:15:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and we’ve been friends with Samuel for many years as well, so we have this kind of multifaceted relationship, uh, him influencing my thinking because he’s the UX consultant who only does onboarding for the last decade or so. It’s interesting how life has unfolded that these days we’re also establishing ourselves as an authority and user on boarding because we have a tool for it. And like, I don’t want to personally compete with Samuel’s thinking by any means, and neither do I want to reproduce his ideas, but it’s so amazing to be thinking in the same direction, sort of. 00:16:33 - Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah, well, give me the link to that book, as well as the episode after and I’ll put it in the show notes for the. 00:16:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, he’s been super famous for these onboarding tear downs, and he has plenty of mobile experiences as well. So we just do web apps and he does all those consumer apps that have interesting first run experiences for end users. 00:16:55 - Speaker 2: Now Yuli, I think you’re about to start talking about how we landed on the onboarding we have now, maybe called the quest style. I’ll use this opportunity to tell a little anecdote from my own history, which is that many years ago I worked on this kind of a side project, some online multiplayer games. It kind of early days of the internet in the 90s and ended up doing an onboarding. I wouldn’t have called it that then. I didn’t know that term, but that first run experience to help someone learn the game. And the one I was inspired by was, or there was another game similar kind of one of these kind of D&D style online multiplayer games. And in this particular game, you had a magic sword that you started out with when you began the game. And I thought it was very clever because the sword would just talk to you and tell you what it thought you should do. So it would say, OK, maybe you should go over here now, maybe you should try talking to this person. Maybe you should pick up this object and we kind of take you through a bit of a, of a sort of a step by step tutorial. But the great thing was it was just saying that you could do whatever you wanted and you could just ignore it. And in fact, if you got annoyed and tired of it talking, you could just drop the sword and walk off. and basically just throw it away. So it was a really nice way to both give that guidance for someone that wants it, but then not. Take away in any way the user’s sense of agency or freedom. 00:18:13 - Speaker 3: Nice. I think that reminds me a little bit of the little animated paperclip character in early versions of Microsoft Word. I don’t know if they still do this, but I have a very strong memories of like my young teenage years having this little paper clip set off to the side and telling me things that in most cases, I didn’t really want to know. But sometimes also just helpful tool tips, but I think you also could, if you get an out, you could just remove it completely from your view, I think. 00:18:40 - Speaker 2: Well, notably there, I believe this fellow’s name is Clippy and has become a punching bag for sort of dumbing down professional products in the software industry. So while on one hand, I think maybe had some good intentions in many ways represents for a lot of people what’s actually wrong with tutorials and software on boarding. 00:19:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree. 00:19:03 - Speaker 1: It could also take forms of different animals in addition to the paper clip. I recall. 00:19:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the amount of work they put into making that thing be really distracting was quite outstanding, I have to say. 00:19:19 - Speaker 1: We’ve just talked about how important it is to keep the user autonomous in their journey, but on the other hand, as a UIUX person, I cannot overemphasize that the first run experience, that’s when you have the most energy and the most enthusiasm and momentum coming from the user, so. Those like first few steps that you make really mandatory, yes, sure, you have to make them shorter so that they can then autonomously explore the app. But on the other hand, you shouldn’t really neglect that energy that’s coming with it, and if those steps are pretty fine that you might still want to take advantage of that momentum that the user has that very moment. So it’s not always that you just leave them hanging. Sometimes you really have to enforce something. 00:20:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think we struck a fairly good balance with the new onboarding and new. So what happens now when you open the app for the first time and you made it past authenticating yourself, you get onto basically a root board that has a couple cards on it. One is another empty board, one is a text card, and then there’s another little text card on the side that just gives you a very brief intro about what news is and why you should care about it. And then the other text card is basically already a mini tutorial or suggestion. It just says take this card and zoom into the empty board next to it and then drop the card there. And notably, this is one of our, I would say, most complex or surprising interactions. We often get people to write in feedback that they can’t figure out how to move a card between a board and Based on this, it actually seemed like a lot of users really couldn’t figure this out, so we decided to make this sort of key interaction to be the first thing that we’re trying to teach users. In a way, also because we think that it gives users a good idea about how new is different from other tools. It immediately teaches you this, you know, you can use both hands. It’s not all just use your finger to do something. You can use one hand to pick up a card and then you can use the other hand to do something else. So teaching people how we’re doing things a little bit differently from other apps was quite key to us here. And then once you completed this first task, basically, We guide you to open a little panel that then has a list of other interactions that you can do in Muse, and they’re laid out as a sort of checklist, but you’re also free to just close that panel and explore on your own. And the next time you come back, you can come back to it and open it again. So it’s not like it forces you to do these things and do them in a particular In order, but it does sort of give you a rough set of what basic interactions are possible in the app, and it entices you to explore them a little bit. And if you get stuck on any of them, you can actually, and this is where we’re making use of the handbook and all those video content that we created to really teach you in a visual way how the app works. If you get stuck anywhere, you can tap a little button for each of the tasks, and it actually drops some cards into your inbox. When you drag them out, you’ll see that they’re like a little instructional card that explains how a certain thing works. And then also a card that plays the video. So a video of demonstrating, basically, you see two hands on an iPad actually doing the thing. So this way, we’re really trying to explain to people the things that are possible in the app. And then also motivating them to add a little bit of content of their own and to basically start exploring how the app feels when they use it for a real project. 00:22:50 - Speaker 2: I’ll say that the use of the two-handed card carrier that put a card into a board as the very first thing was a really great insight by you in terms of it’s this thing that not a lot of people figure out how to do because it is different. They expect that, oh, maybe I should be able to drag a card with one finger and kind of drop it on a board and it’ll go inside there, but that’s Muse has a. Different model and using both hands to do this complex gesture is not what they expect. But we also see that when we show that to people in many cases just through our support channels they write in and ask how to do this and we explain it somehow or send a video or something and then they have this, oh, that’s amazing. I love this. It feels interesting. It turns on a light bulb a little bit. So maybe to Jane’s earlier point of they have this energy right at that moment to try to kind of challenge themselves a little bit or try something a little different. And it’s something that’s hard to figure out on your own, but if we guide them to doing it, and then maybe you have a not only a little light bulb about here’s how I do this specific thing, but a light bulb of, like you said, this app works differently. I can use both my hands. I should be prepared for a slightly different experience. 00:23:56 - Speaker 1: Um, buckle in. For a different experience. I’m curious, you have such amazing videos with this over the desk camera and the hands using the iPad and everything. How did you produce those? Are there any secrets because like you can’t really do that on your own, to have some magnificent video editor hand or any other secrets? 00:24:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s our colleague Mark. So he set up a little home recording studio, which is not too fancy. I think it’s sort of a boom arm that holds everything’s recorded with an iPhone camera, which of course are amazing these days. They do, you know, 4K 60 frames per second. And then the lighting turns out to be a really key thing so getting some lights on all sides so the shadows aren’t too heavy. We talked about this a little bit in another podcast episode that I can link back to, but basically kind of came down to a combination of these a few pieces of equipment using the iPhone. Camera and then what for me was a surprise, which is filming a screen seems weird to me, but actually it works really well because the high quality of cameras these days combined with the brightness and pixel density of the iPad screen means basically looks great. 00:25:08 - Speaker 1: So it’s an actual screen recording, that’s quite amazing. I thought it’s a combination of some magic editing. As they do. 00:25:16 - Speaker 2: Right. I’ve seen, um, I read a post somewhere someone doing this for I think an iPhone demo video where they essentially did like a green screen or a chroma key on the phone screen, and then they record the hands doing the motions and then they record a screen recording and composite them, and that would be nuts for us to do. I mean, even aside from that we’re a small team and just don’t have the resources for that kind of thing. It’s also that we have these really complex interactions and trying to replicate them twice once for screen recording and once for like recording the hands would be tricky, but yeah, weirdly enough, just filming an iPad screen works fine and actually I’m pretty sure that’s what Apple does for a lot of their videos too, so I guess it works. 00:25:51 - Speaker 1: Do you have any other tips for the video content during onboarding, like from my experience, keeping those short is very useful, but also a big challenge because the shorter you want to be that the harder it is to record a good one. Because I’m the one on the team who does all of this stuff and it’s amazing how much infrastructure there is in a software application that does not relate to software that’s got to be done, like the docs, the videos and everything. 00:26:17 - Speaker 2: That is a really great point. 00:26:18 - Speaker 1: So what are your tips for the videos? 00:26:20 - Speaker 2: Well, we, you know, maybe we did it easy because we’re in some ways, it’s a very simple format, right, just hands and an iPad on. and these things are often 5 seconds long or something. What do you do in your videos and actually maybe that’s a lead in. I was going to ask you more about this whole other world of B2B apps and the fact that I think onboarding is not just what’s in the software, but it’s also email exchanges, maybe there’s a sales component or demos, obviously videos, which could be on your YouTube channel or whatever. I’d love to hear the larger picture of what that whole experience is for your customers. 00:26:54 - Speaker 1: I think experience for our customers is one thing, is what we offer, but there is this whole spectrum of different interventions that you can apply to try and affect people’s behavior to some success or maybe to no success. It really depends. We only cover as a tool, we only offer email as the most classic and powerful way of getting in touch with the people, and we also offer. In app notifications, which are like a little chat bubbles, but without the chat that appear in the corner of the app that you can use to supply some helpful information. But there is also such a wide range of tools, and I don’t mean tools like autopilot or chameleon or a dozen other tools that offer guide through tours and things like that, but you can also offer demo calls such as white glove on boarding, as you mentioned before. You can invite people to. book with you at certain stages of the app, you can, you can make fun of a little bit. 00:28:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, super cheesy, but it actually does work, you know, it’s a little more scalable than a one on one thing, but you get on a video call and you can kind of walk through. Some script, but then you can also answer people’s questions, that sort of thing can work really well for the right kind of product. 00:28:16 - Speaker 1: You can do office hours, you can do an online community where people try and even help each other, but I would never recommend that at a small scale because it takes so much energy to support that. But if you have that, there’s this people out there who seem to be, you know, revived by communications with others like we’re not among those, so. Having multiple customer conversations in a forum that would like drain our productivity to zero and we’ll never get things done, so maybe later when we have like a community manager or someone, and also the docs, videos, everything that’s in this materials ecosystem that you can produce and help the people. There’s this delicate play of the formats and different calls to actions that are all around the place in the emails and inside the app. For example, in Muse, if you have a handbook, how do you help people open it? How do you leverage this uh different experience, you have the app and you have the browser, how do you not lose attraction? It can be really, really different for multiple products. So you put together this delicate play, and then it’s usually traditional to have email as sort of the main thread. where you pile up those interventions and offer different kinds of help along the cycle. And, uh, there might be opinions. For example, there’s this wonderful email expert called Val Geisler, and she’s amazing. She has wonderful email on boarding tear downs, but she says that whatever you undertake that makes you send less email is not great. Well, we might be missing out on that, but we do think that less stuff is actually better. And the best email is that the one that’s not sent, so we highly encourage our customers to use behavior data to actually filter out some of the communications that are already irrelevant, like if the future is used, there is no need to promote it anymore. In the ideal world, the user will just like figure out themselves and not have to do anything. So yeah, it’s so interesting, it’s so specific to a particular product. 00:30:21 - Speaker 2: The email one is, I think, worth drilling in on a little bit there. I mean, you mentioned it as being kind of the standard or the center point for the back and forth. I think that’s really true in B2B enterprise stuff, which is where I spent a lot of. My career, it is unusual, perhaps even non-existent for consumer applications. In fact, we’re in an age now where I know younger people that just don’t have email, right? That’s just not part of their world. And in any case, the way that for example, the App Store and so forth is set up really doesn’t encourage that sort of thing. We discovered that same you discovered pretty early on that this was a really important Channel for our target audience because our target audience tends to be kind of thoughtful reader types. They like reading and writing long form things and so we made the perhaps controversial choice to ask for an email right off the bat. We don’t ask for a name or anything else like that, but we want to be able to have that direct communication channel and if you send feedback from the app, that comes from your email address so we can reply to it. And we don’t use it for a lot. We don’t do any kind of like drip campaigns and stuff like that. I know that sort of thing is very standard when you sign up for Notion, you get a series of emails saying, here’s some information for, you know, your next step in using the app or whatever. But yeah, it seems to me like email, at least certainly for us, and definitely the more B2B world is a key piece. How do you think about or or how do you approach this whole world of, I don’t know, drip campaigns and follow-ups and that sort of stuff. 00:31:46 - Speaker 1: Your app is really at that price point when you’ve got to have a more serious relationship with the people about their billing, about their content, and you really have to use email, at least a little bit to make sure that this relationship and that this content is intact if they lose like their device or something like that, isn’t that true? 00:32:08 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. Even aside from the practicalities of the reset, I think. Being kind of a spectrum where on one far extreme you have consumer products which are big scale, you download from the app store. There’s not really much of a relationship. It wouldn’t be practical for an application maker that has millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users to have personal relationships with their users. They just can’t do that and the users probably don’t want that either. And then on the other extreme, you might have the classic, you know, multimillion dollar top of the market enterprise sales where it’s, you know, you have a personal relationship with your salesperson, you go out for steak dinners, they come to your, you know, your wedding or whatever, that like really, really deep long term. And then of course there’s a bunch of stuff in the middle. I think for Muse we kind of discovered that we ended up maybe kind of in the middle, little closer to the lightweight side, but having that email so we can build a personal connection when you send a message with a question, you get an answer from some me or you there or someone else on the team. You build up that relationship over time and it builds trust in the product and maybe makes you more inclined to part with money or believe in the product both now and in the future. 00:33:18 - Speaker 1: That reminds me of a phrase that I really like and there’s high touch, there is low touch, and there is tech touch. Which means that you can imitate the high touch relationship, but it’s scale, because you have like thousands of downloads and you can’t really honestly offer your hand to everyone, but you can offer your help using automated means and then some of the people will use it to generate genuine relationships. 00:33:44 - Speaker 2: I’m a little bit, and again, I’m curious to hear what you think about sort of the drip campaign method. I’m a little skeptical of some of that myself when I get those follow-up emails from a product I just signed up for. I don’t really tend to read them that much, but maybe a version of the tech touch or at scale thing is something like our email newsletter, which now goes out to thousands of people, and I write this in my voice. It comes from my email address, and when you reply, that reply comes to me, and depending on the the issue, we get more or less responses, but I respond to every single one of them. And I really enjoy making that connection with our audience and with our users. We’ll see how that scales over time already with this recent launch, we found ourselves pretty buried under the communication, but that’s important to us is to feel connected to the folks that we’re helping or trying to help our product. 00:34:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, as makers of the tool that does that, we’re under no false impression that this is a magic bullet to nudge people with email, but it’s still the most reliable channel, so you can use this to make super personable. And then maybe that will result in some real life communication and that’s as much as you can do. If you don’t have any other channels, you can’t really call them well, unless you ask for a phone number, which also is an option, but that’s as much as you can do as a founder to get in touch with them. 00:35:04 - Speaker 2: Julie, I know you’ve done a lot of kind of usability tests and in particular kind of there’s the ad hoc form of usability test with, you know, grab a person that’s nearby, a romantic partner, a roommate, a family member, as well as maybe the slightly more structured, try to reach out to people you know are in your target audience, but you don’t know personally. How do you think about that as fitting in with and and particularly for this recent Muse on boarding? And we’re a little bit restricted in the in-person usability test these days, but what’s your approach there? 00:35:35 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the sort of ad hocability tests where you actually watch a person use the app for the first time. are super helpful and super insightful because I think you often tend to have the user stumble over certain things and then eventually they’ll figure it out, which is probably fine, but to actually identify those initial hurdles, it’s quite hard to do that just by looking at maybe, you know, aggregate analytics data or something like this. So actually physically watching someone use your app, get really stuck or frustrated with something, then figure something out, having the aha moment. is always super insightful and it’s also always a little bit painful because of course, you know, if this is a piece of software that you look at every day because you’re developing it, you develop a certain blindness to certain things. So seeing someone get confused by something that you just take for granted is, yeah, is obviously always a little bit surprising. But it is super important to do these tests and to take your learnings from there. So we did this a little bit with the current onboarding and definitely restructured a few things that some of the wording wasn’t quite understandable to people, but where we were maybe using some internal words that for us is super clear what they. but the user who sees the app for the first time is not quite clear on that terminology. So this is always a good sort of feedback check if people actually understand the way you communicate. And then on the bigger scale, I think what we’re trying with this new on boarding as well is to actually try to measure. The success of how well users are onboarded, and I think that the task list that we came up with basically lends itself really well to this. So whenever the user completes a task in the list, we send like an event to our servers and based on that can calculate a sort of onboarding score that each user has. So how many of the basic interactions have they performed at least once. And then based on this, you could imagine doing some IB tests, maybe you reshuffle things, you slightly change the wording on a couple of items, and then you can compare the score of that version versus the other version and see if, you know, those small tweaks really make a difference in the long run. 00:37:49 - Speaker 1: Were there any surprising discoveries that you’ve learned using these AB tests? 00:37:54 - Speaker 3: I think one of them is still the basic interaction of picking up a card and then dropping it into a board after you zoomed into it is still not clicking with quite everyone, even though we feel like we’re explaining it the best that we can. And maybe that means that it’s still just too weird and people just aren’t used to doing these things, or maybe it means that we have to think about explaining it better again. Or maybe it also means that the interaction just should be changed and maybe we should come up with a different way of doing this. So definitely by looking at the data we have now, there’s quite a few things that we want to try to tweak and potentially do differently. So it’s quite helpful to have that information. 00:38:32 - Speaker 2: Also noted on the split test front, I think we, you, I should say ran the initially ran the previous onboarding, which was this deck of cards garden thing kind of alongside the new on boarding and so then we could just compare how far looked at those aggregate analytics to just see in general the people that in this group got this far and the people in this group got this far, and I think that’s a, we don’t have a necessarily a lot of split test work on. Our team, we’ve done a little on the website here and there just to try some small ideas, but this is a practice that I know a lot of Silicon Valley firms speaking to a product manager from Pinterest some time back that said they had a really good practice that they never rolled anything out without kind of a 90/10 split test, that even the new thing would be up alongside the old thing for a week, and they could look at some of their core metrics and just sort of, first of all, make sure nothing regressed, but also have a pretty specific idea of well. is we’re rolling out this new thing. It’s not just that we like it better, or it looks better or it feels better to us intuitively, but that we can actually show the way that it affects our core business and it’s probably not quite the way that Muse would go about things, but that approach of trying to be a little bit rigorous in, OK, we want to help people be more successful. Does this help people be more successful and that that’s not just based on our intuition or even these anecdotal reports, but it can be based on data to some extent. 00:39:58 - Speaker 1: You just touched upon a pretty important topic that how do you transform like one-off efforts on improving your onboarding into some organizational practices that help you be consistent at improving that. And two things that are super easy to do is one assigning a. On boarding champion in your company who will take care of this thing in your app, and they would vote for it in the internal meetings and things like that. Another one is regularly, maybe once a month or once every quarter, going through the entire boarding experience of your app, including the payment. The sign up and everything and everything changes so fast, you just gonna have absolutely fresh mind every time and you’re gonna have some surprising discoveries. 00:40:46 - Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. I think you feel like you designed a good onboarding experience and now you can go off, develop new features for your app, but you have to continuously keep in mind as you’re adding new features or as you’re changing things that that might affect how the user goes through the. the first time, like maybe you need to promote those new features, you need to make it part of the onboarding. I think for us now is the case that every time we add a new interaction or a new feature into the app, we basically have to record a new video for the handbook, which made it extra important to make the lighting situation and the videos cropping and everything easily reproducible because we don’t want then the new video to look completely different from the old one. But yeah, I definitely agree to what you’re saying, to always keep this in mind and to regularly revisit it and see if it needs to be adapted to how your app evolved since. 00:41:33 - Speaker 1: I once interviewed Max Zillemann of Ulysses, and I know you’ve mentioned Ulysses a bit on the show, and they have so much of this infrastructure in different languages that introducing new features and producing materials to support that in like dozens of languages. It’s an enormous part of what they do as a company, like you can’t overlook that by any means. 00:41:55 - Speaker 2: And once you start to localize, you make the cost of every change higher, and you’re adding on to your earlier point, I think, which is that the onboarding tends to get less tension just because it’s naturally in front of not only your team members, but also your longtime users. Because of course, they go through it at the beginning and not so even if you’re in good touch with, you know, we tend to have the best relationships and the most ongoing communication with our customers, those are sort of by definition, people have already not only successfully onboarded but found value for the app in their lives enough that they’re going to pay for it. And so as a result, the onboarding experience is something that we just personally see less of, and you can go back to run through it. And and realize ways that it’s come out of date or there’s rough edges or something’s changed in a new version of the operating system that makes something funny about, you know, the screen where you type in your access code or what have you. So creating some kind of organizational practice to make sure that stuff gets attention because that is your first impression and that is the place that’s the sort of the moment you can convert someone into a Someone that’s gonna use and love the product, or they kind of shrug their shoulders and say, huh, I don’t see what the big deal is and never come back. 00:43:10 - Speaker 1: And it’s so much economically viable to invest in that because sales and marketing costs are enormous compared to the cost of these little interventions that you can add to like dramatically increase the activation rate and just make better use of your marketing money. It’s scale with every single user, virtually any improvement is a great improvement. 00:43:33 - Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, I think that’s one thing we were kind of trying to achieve with this new onboarding is that we have lots of users coming into the app and of course, naturally people will always turn for one reason or the other, like maybe they just realized the product isn’t for them. But we really wanted to eliminate the risk of using someone just because they can’t figure out how the product works. So once you kind of went through the app a little bit, you tried out a few things and you then realized, yeah, I don’t really know what to do with this. That just maybe means that the product is not a good fit for you. But if you actually do have the motivation and that there is a way that it fits into your life, but you can’t figure out the most basic things, and we saw this by users emailing into support by like, how do I delete something or how do I erase something. And so really putting some focus on teaching them the basics so that they then based on that can decide whether or not this product is a good product for them was quite important to us. 00:44:27 - Speaker 2: Looking forward to the future a little bit, we’re seeing lots changing, including, for example, the importance of video content, but Jane, with your eye on and your specialization on the onboarding space, what do you see as potentially being improvements through technology or practices to onboarding for the future? 00:44:47 - Speaker 1: Well, we’ve been pretty mature in terms of the tool set that people can use, but it’s great that organizations in general are starting to realize the importance of user onboarding and just investing resources in that more and more, and even smaller founders can now afford certain tools that were previously just for enterprise companies. And that’s an amazing trend because previously it felt like this ecosystem of marketing and growth hacking and everything, it was really mature, but what happened after I sign up was a little bit kind of vague and not touched upon. And these days we can observe a wonderful trend of this product led trend word, product led growth and things like that, which essentially means just looking at what’s inside your product and what’s better for the user. So that’s definitely a wonderful trend. 00:45:35 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a great point. The cultural awareness, whether that’s within a particular company or in the whole industry, you know, we saw that happen in this huge way with design, for example, it’s not that design didn’t exist before, but it came to be something that probably originally pioneered by Apple, but now it’s in the zeitgeist where people say, OK, we should be thinking about design as a first class thing and I think onboarding is not something that has that same. Awareness as this is a critical piece of any product that you’ve ever build. It’s a huge opportunity both for your product and for your marketing, and it deserves its own attention and name and people to think about it like you said earlier, like the assigning an owner on your team, so that aside from any technological improvements, the culture shift seems likely to only produce better onboarding experiences in the future. 00:46:26 - Speaker 1: And I think that 2020 has already taught us a lot is thinking about sensitive moments about how that intervention that you’re applying can be relevant to the user at this particular moment, uh, because a lot of things have been going on and your drip campaign is definitely not at the top of their priority list, like reading through that. And it feels like there is no hack of just sending more email. Now you have to be really thoughtful and considerate and maybe send less but be more personal and sensitive to all these things and we’ve had a lot of big lessons this year about that. 00:47:03 - Speaker 2: Excellent. Well, yeah, thoughtful, considerate and personal, those head on 3 of our values here on the Muse team and I think that. And I think that furthermore, you’re right, in 2020 specifically just because of the state of the world and society and so forth, those things are perhaps especially important, but I think they’re important all the time and if we can get more in the habit of our products and our companies and the way that we engage with customers and potential customers as being a little more personal, a little more tuned in, I think that’s a win across the board. Absolutely. Well, with that, I’ll just say that if any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at museApp.com by email. We’d love to hear your comments and of course ideas for future episodes. Jane, thanks for coming on, for pioneering slash advocating for better onboarding through your work at user list and where can folks find you online? 00:48:00 - Speaker 1: It’s definitely user list.com as our primary internet touch point, and we are at the moment working on a comprehensive on boarding guide, which puts together all the resources and what we want our customers and our audience to know for the right mindset about user onboarding and that’s gonna be up very shortly, should be live by the time this is out, and it’s available at userless.com/user onboarding. 00:48:27 - Speaker 2: You heard it here first, folks, breaking news. Alright, thank you both for taking the time today. 00:48:33 - Speaker 1: Great pleasure. 00:48:34 - Speaker 3: Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having us, pleasure. 00:48:36 - Speaker 2: And we’ll see you around. Bye.