John De Goes’ blog

Over the past 15–20 years, we have witnessed the evolution of mass consumption digital products and the development of business models that made them sustainable.

Gmail launched in beta in 2004 and remained as such until 2009, back in those naive days of “don’t be evil.” Similarly, Twitter launched in 2006, running without a monetization model until 2011.

What came next would change all our lives.

Google was the first to figure out that, by adding advertising to their products, it could make money without charging the users for access to digital products, a wonderful idea inspired by the radio and television industries. Applying this business model to digital products created large amounts of free benefits for the average internaut, while opening a new avenue for businesses to make money (then charging them). A laudable effort indeed.

Yet, even though Google’s initial intentions were to avoid the “evil” practices used by previously dominant technology companies like Microsoft, the power Google was gaining soon became evident. Over time, Google focused on becoming the best advertisement channel in the game, an effort quickly emulated by others, such as the newborns Facebook and Twitter.

In order to scale revenue growth, these young digital companies scaled up their advertising revenue by making these ads more valuable, by collecting increasingly large volumes of data from their userbases, and using this data to target the ads for maximum effect.

We Need a Business Model to Serve Humans

Harvesting immense amounts of user data has since become the standard for consumer digital products and this model birthed some incredible new products, which are embedded in our daily lives. AI-powered personal assistants, including Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana, are running in all of our devices, while recommendation engines power everything we do online, from social media to e-commerce, to the point where many take these suggestions for granted.

Those are merely a couple of examples of how this business model has dominated and driven the consumer software industry for 15 years and counting. Alas, if this model brings so many free benefits to people, and creates revenue for the builders and shareholders, then what is so wrong with the model?

Frankly, many, many factors.

First and foremost, the immense amount of user data current digital products collect has sparked a massive global conversation around privacy — people are now asking themselves how much do these platforms know about them and their findings often scare them. Now the conversation is shifting: is it worth giving this much personal information to Big Tech corporations for the benefits their products offer? And if not, is there even a choice?

The conversation is just beginning and it poses a huge threat to this attention-hungry business model.

On the other hand, we have seen how the beloved recommendation engines can be used to manipulate the masses and create echo chambers that foster deeply ingrained polarization. Serious accusations of election interference have been leveled at these systems for half a decade, which should be enough to pursue an alternative approach.

Furthermore, we have seen major platforms punish creators for not abiding by advertiser-friendly guidelines, often with murky and inconsistent enforcement.

In the end, this business model, which nearly everyone knows and is accustomed to, limits the capacity for builders to develop new products that won’t please the market trends and prevents creators from exploiting their full opportunities by forcing them to please algorithmic gods so have their content monetized and promoted.

At Sapien, we decided to create something different and empower creators to push the boundaries of their own imaginations. For us, it was clear that if we wanted to achieve these ambitious goals, we first needed to break the chains of targeted advertising and the attention economy, the chains that now shackle the major platforms. By shunning them, we can avoid transferring wealth and power to those who already have plenty and give it to the people.

The solution, the viable alternative approach is to build a truly decentralized platform, with a token that promotes a healthy valuation of content and communities across the platform’s membership, all paying small transaction fees to participate in the virtual economy so we can keep building the platform.

We can truly say that at Sapien, in order for us to make a cent from our members, someone needs to be having fun, enjoying themselves with the content and interactions they find on the platform. There’s no other way we can turn a profit and that pushes us to build the best possible platform for creators and their communities: all of them humans.

Once we found that recipe, our journey to build Sapien began. Now we are taking it one step further, but that’s a conversation for later on.

Building a Humans-First Product Development Process, Step by Step

We recognize the humanity of, well, humanity and we want to build a digital social community platform on that core principle. So, let’s dive into how we’ve built a product development process that puts humans first.

Hypothesis

Oh, the spark of a new idea is a beautiful thing, and it’s also the first step into creating a new product. All products start with at least one great idea. Create something new, improve an experience, change the world…

Great ideas sound ambitious, bold, adventurous, but what we need is for them to sound specific, accurate, and measurable. That’s where crafting solid hypotheses comes in handy.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a hypothesis can be defined as “A tentative assumption made in order to draw out and test its logical or empirical consequences.”

More plainly, you assume you have a solution and put it to a test. Creating a hypothesis is basically explaining your assumption with a format: “I believe if I did XXX, the final result would be YYY.”

Any idea can be shaped as a hypothesis. For example: “By creating digital representations of human social groups, users will be drawn into experiences that already exist in their mental models, creating an intuitive environment that fosters meaningful conversations, content creation, and a healthy creator economy.”

Now we have something to work with!

Observation

Now we have our Hypothesis, and in it, we find “digital representations of social groups,” so we need to figure out how humans socialize in order to create a digital representation of those processes. I know what you are thinking: We are all humans, we know how we socialize. And you are right to some extent, but it goes beyond that.

If you really want to cover the human experience, you need to deeply understand it. That means breaking the boundaries of your personal context and studying how humans interact with each other, regardless of geography, time, society, power, age, physical limitation, ethnicity, language, economy, politics, technology, and any other environmental variable that could have an impact on the final outcome.

Of course, you can start by studying yourself, your surroundings, your family, your social circles, your society. If you have defined a specific target audience, you could focus on studying their behavior to tailor a solution for them. For us, at Sapien, the objective is to create spaces for all humans, so we decided to study us from the beginning.

Humans are, and always have been social beings. From the beginning of the species, humans have grouped in order to cover each other’s weaknesses while collectively benefiting from individual strengths. Whenever two or more humans agree to create a collective, we start to create a framework of beliefs that provides us with a common language and rules to live by.

These groups of humans are called tribes and have existed since the beginning of our species’ existence; they are still present in modern societies, in many forms.

Now that we know that, we know we need to build tribes, and mimic their processes into digital functionalities.

Conceptualization

So, we are building tribes, but to what end? Our hypothesis has the answer to that: “creating an intuitive environment that fosters meaningful conversations, content creation, and a healthy creator economy.”

So the next step is to identify how tribes accomplish our shared goals, and enable the same behavior using digital tools.

Conversations happen in different environments: social gatherings, around fires that benefit all tribe members by providing warmth and usually fostering storytelling. So, we need to build something that resembles a social gathering where everyone comes together looking for warmth and finds other tribe members eager to share their tales.

This is the moment where you can generate useful artifacts, such as user journey maps, to better describe the user experience you are looking for. It will be helpful in the future. Create the experience first and use features to enable behavior.

Description

Once you have the concept grounded, you need to make it available to all team members involved. In order to get there, you need to create proper software requirement specifications, design requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, use cases, and all possible artifacts each team member requires to better understand what they need to build, why they’re building it, and who will use it.

Creating these documents is a fine art, and requires good communication with your team members, to better understand what they need in order to accomplish their goals. At Sapien, we use user stories, design specifications, and acceptance criteria, which are then processed by the Engineering team into tasks.

Each team is different, each product has different needs. Choose any proven starting point, and start building your own path.

Selection

The selection process is key for success. We all wish we could build everything we want from the beginning, but most teams can’t and, even if they could, it would not be the best way to go. The healthier path you can follow is to select from the features you have described, a finite group to become the first version, this is your minimum viable product, your MVP.

Once again, your hypothesis is key for selecting the MVP, since you will have to test it, then you need to build the functionalities that will validate or reject the assumption contained in it. Also, at this point, you want all team members involved in this decision, and if you want a truly human approach, you will share with all of them the hypothesis and the results of your observation and conceptualization processes, so all are on the same page.

There are many ways to select a MVP. At Sapien, we use Lean Inception and Story Mapping for ours, but there is no limit to what you can apply on your team.

Validation

Validation is a monster with many heads. In this case, we’ll talk about pre-release validation. You want to have some level of validation even before you build the product itself, which will help you make adjustments to the product features and learn more about your product-market fit.

In our case, we build prototypes. First, however, we select the user journeys that are key for our experience. Once those prototypes are built, you need a funnel for user validation, where you get people interested in testing your product and giving you feedback, helping you sculpt out what people love about what you’ve built.

When you find the right people to help you validate, show them or let them use the prototypes and create questionnaires to measure their reactions to the product and its functionalities. This will give you enough information to move forward.

Construction

Now you have a roadmap, so let’s build it! Each product team has its own approach to the software development lifecycle; there are many valid angles, so feel free to choose whatever is best for your team.

At Sapien we believe in agile methodologies and in highly aligned, highly autonomous teams; we are building our own Sapien agile framework every day and I’ll share more about this in the future.

Consolidation

Yes, you built it and launched it, congratulations! After popping the champagne, get back to work.

Now you have in hand the most delicate part of the process. After launch, the product is exposed to end-users and you have the opportunity to study their behavior and interactions with your product. Analytics will give you all sorts of insights about your audience and your built-in metrics will tell you which functionalities are being used the most, which are not appealing to users, and which need to go.

Use your data, and find solutions to problems. Interview users, become a power user yourself. After enough data is collected, get back to creating a new hypothesis and start all over again. Good thing you have a lot of work you can recycle for next iterations, good luck!

Why We Use a Humans-First Approach

The business model you choose for your product will have a large impact on its final form. Once you select how your revenue is generated, then you will try to be as efficient as possible in doing so.

That means, all your strategy will inevitably circle around how to make more profit, that’s just how businesses work. If you choose to generate revenue by selling your user’s data (or ads based on that data), you will focus on collecting as much data as possible, organizing it, and making it attractive to potential buyers or advertisers.

On the other hand, if you choose to directly charge people for using your product, then you’ll find yourself looking for the best ways you can to attract more people to your platform and lead them to spend as much as possible. Then you will become obsessed with how much revenue you can guarantee and how satisfied you can make your customers.

With Sapien’s business model, we only make a profit if our users are having fun. It’s as simple as that. We are obsessed with creating the best possible social experiences, empowering creators, satisfying users’ needs, listening to what our audience wants, and validating that our solutions have a place in someone’s heart.

Not being constrained by what the old guard wants to do, but instead tasking ourselves with satisfying the needs of humans, opens a whole new world of innovation and creativity we explore every day. It makes it fun to re-invent existing experiences with a completely new perspective: putting humans first. No business, no advertisers, no government… Just humans. It forces us to think about how any given experience could be better if someone wasn’t benefiting from it. It is fun, challenging, and energizing.

I’ll give you an opportunity to jump in the Sapien Product Team’s heads for a minute: imagine your morning orange juice and think about the farmer growing the oranges, the government agency assuring quality, the colorful packaging, the truck delivering it to the store, your local grocery store with shelf-stockers and cashiers. All the links in that chain are profiting from your orange juice, thus having an impact on your experience when purchasing, storing, and consuming your orange juice.

Now break that chain, forget about all of those links. Close your eyes and think about your perfect morning orange juice…how would you bring it home, how would it be served, the smell, the flavor, the temperature.

That’s what we do at Sapien every day, we think about the best experiences you have, and come up with digital versions we can build, free from any constraints and designed to serve humans.