Nick Basile

Don't have any mistakes in them! I get so many that misspell my name or leave it blank 😆

Ideally, I reach out directly to the people who have the problem my product is solving. Once some of them have used it and get value from the experience, I'll ask them to share it with other people like them. This usually can bootstrap our initial outreach.

I run a digital agency (https://www.markhamsq.com/) and we run into this challenge all of the time 😅 It's really hard for businesses to get a sense of the quality of a design service and how it will drive results for them. To mitigate this for them, we typically run trial sprints so they can see our work in action with a lower commitment than a full project. This also helps us get a sense of...

I wrote up our approach here! https://digitalproductbasics.com...

Instagram has performed a bit better for us, but they're both pretty good!

Velocity of learning – how quickly you're learning from your experiments and building on them.

We've definitely seen more engagement with our entertainment content.

My expectations are pretty low right now 😅 most SMBs still haven't taken full advantage of the internet or existing software tools. So, I don't see them rushing to adopt AI any time soon. Of course, there will be some future looking SMBs that will adopt AI and enjoy a competitive advantage for a while. For those orgs, I think we'll see a number of creative applications of AI that'll impact...

I was building a product for college students once, so I went to my local university campus with a big sign that said free donuts and started handing them out. Then, I pitched a bunch of them on my product 😆 It was actually pretty effective and we got a ton of great feedback!

Testimonials! It's really helpful to include their name, role & company (more useful for B2B), and a photo of them.

We build MVPs to validate a solution for a problem that a given group of people is experiencing. So, to build an MVP, we must first have a group of people and they must have a problem. If we find ourselves with an MVP, but we don't know a group of people experiencing the problem it intends to solve, then we've likely built something that will be really hard to get initial users for because...

Depends on the size of the MVP 😅 I've shipped some in an afternoon, others have taken 9 months. Generally though, I try to ship something as quickly as possible. If I haven't shipped after a month or two, I'll reassess my assumptions to see if I can rescope the project and get it launched.

I like learning hard skills, but I think soft skills are more valuable. It doesn't matter how much you know if you can't communicate it to anyone 😄

I generally follow this three step process: 1. Figure out our primary goal: how much money do we need to make to breakeven & make a profit in a year? Now, don’t get me wrong, there are other worthy goals for us to pursue as well. Taking care of our team, helping the planet, giving to the community – things we should definitely strive to do. But… if we aren’t making money, then we can’t do...

By the nature of their relationship, testers are critiquing the work of the developers and pointing out flaws and issues. So, there's always a level of tension here. The best way to avoid this is to work with developers to understand that QA isn't about putting down their work, it's about making the experience better for users. Yes, that sounds obvious when said, but it's so easy to lose sight...

I always feel like this is simple in theory and hard in practice 😅 What's work well for me is setting really clear goals that we want to achieve as a team, like reach x number of users by y date. Then, I'll work with the team to figure out how we're going to make that happen. Sometimes, they'll come up with a great idea that we all align around and other times I'll provide more structure...

These are some of my current faves: - https://runway.com/ - https://digitalproductbasics.com/ - https://www.dive.club/

This article has been my go-to reference for pitches as well as most other decks: https://medium.com/the-mission/t... I basically follow the formula provided there and add my own context in a Notion/Word doc, then I design it in Figma. Then, I start pitching and adjusting with feedback. I also create two different decks: one for live presentations with more visuals and another for async...

With the products I've been working on lately, we typically build our own onboarding flows. So, the actual experience is written in code. That said, we have a few tools we use to measure performance and for improving the experience. - Loom: we use Loom to record instructional or welcome videos. They feel a little more personal than just text and we can usually show more concepts faster. -...

Talking to users/running user interviews is the gold standard for getting genuine user feedback. But, even doing that can result in findings that don't match a user's actual experience. What I've found is that whenever I ask for direct feedback from users they are socially conditioned to sugarcoat their experience because they don't want to hurt my feelings. To avoid this issue, I try to...