What was special about my summer at early-stage product fund Chapter One, was the opportunity to work with people who have experience building successful products. As a Designer in Residence at Chapter One, details here, I met and learned from founders creating the great products of tomorrow. It also meant working alongside one of the industry’s great product minds. Jeff Morris Jr, the founder of Chapter One, who was previously VP Product, Revenue at Tinder. Over the summer, I was able to hear some of the lessons from his time helping Tinder become the #1 top-grossing revenue app in the world.

Below are a few observations that stand out from this summer’s experience:

Creating products that capture attention

One unique way of thinking about product ideas is to think like a movie director. This is an approach I learned Jeff uses.

The first thing movie directors consider when coming up with a new movie idea is thinking about what the poster will look like. What imagery will capture people’s attention?

That same approach can be used when thinking about new products.

Great products all have a catchy name, a strong message people can immediately understand, and a captivating logo or image that generates emotion.

Over the summer we built Product Club, a product-focused startup accelerator. When building the website for the accelerator, we gave attention to aspects like the name, logo, and overall brand feeling. This helped the launch feel exciting while remaining professional. In the end, the website was featured on TechCrunch.

Overdelivering to customers

What differentiates Product Club from other accelerators is it completely overdelivers beyond what people might expect.

• Accelerators often accept 100’s of startups, while Product Club accepts 3.
• Accelerators often assign startups a mentor at random, while Product Club facilitates 1:1 sessions with 12 of the world’s most renowned product leaders.
• If that wasn’t enough, Product Club provides startups with dedicated on-staff designers for free.

Within a week of launching, over 500 startups applied.

The takeaway: people gravitate towards products that overdeliver.

Being open to crazy ideas

Many of today’s great companies were once overlooked. Companies like Airbnb, Snapchat, and Uber initially seemed “too crazy” to investors.

At Chapter One, the team keeps an open mind to all ideas. That’s because the best founders usually have some unique insight that most people don’t realize. Someone that has worked in sports medicine for 5 years likely has observed things an average person may not understand or know exists.

This approach likely comes from Jeff’s experience. When Jeff joined Tinder in 2015, online dating had a far greater stigma than it does today. For investors, Tinder’s success shows the value of keeping an open mind.

For startup founders, it shows the value of going deep on a topic.

With so much distraction today, it’s not that hard to learn more than 99% of the world on a given topic.

As long as the founders are talented, the team seemed to believe companies with “crazy” ideas should have the chance to prove themselves.

How startups begin

For one project this summer, we were seeking to understand how startups usually begin; so 8 startup founders were interviewed.

Speaking with founders, there was one surprising comment that consistently came up in every interview.

Each founder said the initial spark began when one friend presented an idea to another friend.

That’s contrary to the thought that startup ideas come from two people brainstorming together.

Instead, each founder had the same conclusion from their experience: “Ideas bring people together”. Without an initial idea, it’s difficult to get multiple people started.

The takeaway I got from this is if you want to start a startup, take the initiative to explore ideas yourself. That’ll make it easier to find the right people for the idea.

Evaluating startup ideas

In 2015, Jeff worked on three personal projects that all finished #1 on Product Hunt & was a finalist for Product Hunt “Maker of the Year”.

When building the first version of a consumer product he says: “Don’t overthink it”.

Once there’s an idea, spend a short time building it, release it, see how people react, then devote additional time to it as necessary.

Thinking back to how we created Product Club this summer, we started off with just an idea and built it in a few weeks. And already it’s become a startup accelerator that will likely exist for many, many years to come.

Give customers superpowers

When Jeff was at Tinder, his team would think about the product in terms of giving customers superpowers. The team discovered one way to monetize the product was to let paying customers break the rules of dating on Tinder.

They found customers were open to paying for access & exposure.

Pay for Access: Allowing customers to pay to go beyond the limits of regular gameplay.

Pay for Exposure: Allowing customers to pay for increased visibility.

For Tinder, an example of improving ‘Access’ was seeing who likes you with Tinder Gold. An example of improving ‘Exposure’ is Tinder Boost which shows your profile to more potential matches. Further detail about this concept can be found in this video.

The product we released this summer, Product Club, used both of these ideas. Access — to world-class product leaders and designers. Exposure — being 1 of 3 companies presenting at Demo Day in front of top funds and angel investors.

Building relationships with customers

As an early-stage product fund, Chapter One thinks about founders as its customers. There’s an intentional focus on helping founders.

This is one of my favorite notes written by Jeff describing Chapter One:

“It is important to remember that we are in the people flow business, not the deal flow business.

Do not chase deals that everyone else is chasing. Rather, spend your time creating meaningful relationships within engineering communities, design communities, and with other investors.

You will be far happier if you focus on creating authentic relationships. Most deals we do will not be successful. But if you focus on the people, your happiness won’t be dependent on any given deal.”

- Chapter One

Everything I learned this summer would not have been possible without the amazing team at Chapter One: Jeff, Gaby, and our inaugural Product Club class: Metafy, Spline, AgendaZap — thank you.

Daniel Heintzman
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