Builders Weekly | 2/17/23

AI chatbots and design tools, a bad onboarding experience, and a cold email that might actually work.

👋 Hey, I’m Ben! I write weekly about how to grow products and companies. I go deep on growth strategies, how to build products users love, and what actionable lessons can be learned from what best-in-class companies are doing and industry experts are saying.

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Happy Friday, squad!

Great news - it’s actually Friday this time! I hope you’ve all had a great week. I’m back with another edition of Builders Weekly where I’ll share a few of the things that got me thinking this past week and how I think they can help you build better products.

What I’ve got for you this week…

• AI chatbots

• An AI design tool that could change the game

• How *not* to do onboarding

• A cold email I might actually respond to

Let’s dive in!

🤖 AI Chatbots are pretty powerful

Lenny Rachitsky and Dan Shipper recently wrote an article describing how they created a “Lenny chatbot” and how you could create your own version of this. It’s particularly cool because, when built this way, the chatbot has all of the context from Lenny’s previous work to answer any questions asked of it. This means that the bot is able to respond exactly how Lenny would and even quote data points cited in articles he has written.

Companies can (and will) train similar chatbots based on their support articles. They’ll do the same for their technical documentation. The list goes on. People will find hundreds of creative use cases for this technology.

We are early, the possibilities are endless, and I can’t put it any better than Dan did himself…

Every newsletter, book, blog, and podcast that’s used as evergreen reference information by its audience can now be repackaged as a chatbot. 

What will you build?

🎨 An AI design tool

Galileo AI is an exciting new AI design tool that creates easily-editable UI designs from a simple text description. Think Dall·E 2 or Midjourney but for building application UI designs that are then editable in Figma. They’re currently in early access mode, so make sure to get on their waitlist.

It won’t be long until you’ll be able to generate high-fidelity designs and bring them to life all with AI. The barriers to entry for building products are quickly falling, and I for one am very excited about it.

🎧 Sony headphones onboarding experience

@levelsio @levelsio

me trying to use my @Sony headphones

Popular Indie Maker @levelsio tweeted a screen recording of this horrendous onboarding experience he encountered with a pair of Sony' headphones he purchased.

Flows like this are a great example of why user feedback is so important. This flow may have a high completion rate, but if so it’s only because it’s a barrier to entry to a product you’ve already paid hundreds of dollars for.

No user would go through this and be like, “yeah, that was a great experience!”.

🏈 A clever sales email I might actually respond to

The best way to get attention is to be different. My email and LinkedIn inboxes are filled with various sales pitches. Most of them are generic and uninspiring. The one Dan highlights below caught my attention, though. It’s a very clever way to get someone to engage with your cold email. It breaks the normal sales mold, feels human, and creates a fun wager. Would you reply?

Dan Pantelo | Creative Testing @danpantelo

Honestly, I kinda love this. Is this corny or creative?

That’s all I’ve got for you this week. See you again soon!

-Ben

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