From Notion to Product Launch with Maitri Shah and Gibson Chu

Sean Pritzkau: [00:00:00]   Hey there, welcome to episode 9 of We Can Do This: "From Notion to Product Launch" with Maitri Shah and Gibson Chu.  Now, this episode is going to be a little bit different than my other ones. I'll actually be talking with two co-founders. Now Maitri and Gibson together co-founded Do One Better, a platform to help change the way people think about the goods they consume and start conversations about how things are actually made, and who it impact  

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[00:00:30]And what I love about Matri and Gibson is that they both work in tech. Maitri is an engineer and designer who is currently working at NerdWallet as a full stack engineer.  And Gibson is a product manager at Groupon. And in a lot of ways, they have the technical skills that would be required to launch a platform, but they chose to launch their first iteration of this product on Notion. Now Notion is widely known as a note taking tool, something similar like Evernote, or maybe the notes app on your phone, right. And in this episode, we talk about how in their research phase, they actually identified that all of this information was already stored in their Notion workspace.

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[00:01:13]And they were actually able to take this database of information that they had and utilize another tool to actually make that the platform for their minimum viable product for Do One Better.

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[00:01:24]So I'm hoping maybe this episode can inspire you if you've had an idea for something and you're just like, it's going to take too much to work, I don't have the capability to make the actual thing, hopefully through my conversation with Gibson and Matri that this might spark an idea of maybe a simpler way that you could actually get your idea out into the world. So we'll actually talk in this episode about how they came up with the idea for Do One Better, how they conducted their research phase and gathering all this information, how they built their platform in Notion and the tools they used. And then we'll talk about how they brought this platform to market and they launched on a website called Product Hunt, and they'll talk about their whole process for that and how that went for them and what they learned. So this is going to be really interesting episode, my first episode, actually, with multiple people that I'm interviewing.

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[00:02:15] So really excited about that. So let's jump into this episode with Gibson and Maitri.

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[00:02:35]Sean Pritzkau: 

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[00:02:35] All right. Hey, welcome to the podcast today. I am here with Maitri Sha and Gibson Chu and together they founded Do One Better. Maitri is an engineer and designer currently working at NerdWallet as a full stack engineer on the partner integrations team. Gibson is currently a product manager at Groupon for the search and recommendations team.

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[00:02:57] And together, like I said, they founded Do One Better, a platform to help change the way people think about the goods they consume and start conversations about how things are actually made and who it impacts. So Maitri & Gibson, welcome to the podcast. 

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[00:03:11] Gibson Chu: 

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[00:03:11] Yeah, thanks for inviting us, Sean. 

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[00:03:13] Sean Pritzkau: 

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[00:03:13] Yeah. You two are actually the first interview I've had where we have multiple people on the podcast.

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[00:03:18] So this is going to be super fun, but yeah. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you both ended up meeting and collaborating together.

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[00:03:26] Maitri Shah: 

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[00:03:26] Okay. I can get us started. So, hi, I'm, Maitri a little bit about myself. So I've grown up in the Bay Area. I feel like my whole life I've been really driven to impact a lot of people. I grew up in a household where my parents have always recommended how important giving is and things like that.

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[00:03:43] So I knew that my entire life, I wanted to serve and help as many people as I could. And this carried with me until today. So throughout college, I was really heavily involved with design communities, entrepreneurship communities. I really loved building things around social good. And yeah, that's where I'm at today with Do One Better and what we're doing. 

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[00:04:05] Gibson Chu: 

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[00:04:05] Yeah, I had a good chance to meet Maitri back in college and we took a game theory class and econ together.  Well, what a struggle of a class, but it was a good time. And I had a really great opportunity to kind of just learn and become Maitri's friend. And I think we both clicked really well after the class that semester we still hung out and chatted and talked a lot after graduating.

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[00:04:28] We both, at least for me personally, I didn't really have maybe an opportunity to work and do something in social good as directly related to anything and the social impact space. And I think I wanted to find an outlet for that, but, you know, work has started and, you know, I was just still figuring out where I was and what I was trying to do with myself.

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[00:04:44] And I think, Maitri came to me, I think with the really exciting chance and opportunity. 

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[00:04:49] Sean Pritzkau: 

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[00:04:49] Cool. Oh, I love it. So for those listening, I discovered this project, that Gibson and Maitri work then, and they essentially took this from idea to collaborating together, to make this idea reality all the way to doing an official launch on this and launching on Product Hunt. So I'd love to kind of get a full picture of what this looked like for you two because I think there's a lot of people out there that have an idea and they typically disqualify themselves before they even get started because they get overwhelmed by the, the mere like idea of doing it right. And you two both saw it from idea to completion. So I think there's a lot that we can learn today and hearing about how you came up with this idea and what were like the steps you took to actually get started and see your idea come to fruition and make it a reality and begin marketing your idea and getting it out to the public. So yeah, if you want to tell us, I mean, I'm sure there's a story. Like what motivated you to start Do One Better?

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[00:05:47] Maitri Shah: 

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[00:05:47] Yeah, I can start from the beginning and give a little bit of context. So I mentioned that I grew up in a household that is really focused around impact and serving people. And so in addition to that, my parents are very health oriented and that's how I've grown up. Like my household basically vegan. My mom always explained to me what ingredients I should watch out for and how processed foods are bad for you and all these things.

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[00:06:10] And my whole life, I thought it was a huge drag and I thought it was very restrictive, but after I came back home years later, I revisited this concept. So last March came back home from school because COVID hit. And during last year's emphasis on like shopping from small businesses and the social justice movements that were happening,

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[00:06:31] I started to realize that my dollars were making a difference and that they do make a big difference. And so I did a lot of research and I wanted to support at least small businesses, but on the flip side, I also started to audit all the brands that I was using. And I realized that there were a lot of unethical practices that many of the big brands do and the ingredients that are in products, such as like hair care shampoo. So et cetera, they're not very good for you, your body or your environment. And so I was learning a lot. I would spend hours a week researching about what I was using. And I wanted to share this info because it really wasn't readily available.

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[00:07:10] I did a lot of research and I thought it was there to be shared. It would be selfish of me to keep all this knowledge to myself. So I started an Instagram page back in August of 2020, and would just do a deep dive on like a specific product, like shampoo or tea and just mentioned, like what ingredients to watch out for.

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[00:07:28] And each post would have like 10 Instagram slides. And so I realized after a couple months of doing that Instagram, wasn't the right platform for me. I'm not super into social media that much. And I found it difficult to share a lot of information. That's very dense on a platform like Instagram. And so. I reached out to Gibson shortly after, because I noticed that he was interested in this area.

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[00:07:52] Like we would talk about it sometimes. And I thought that he would be a good partner to reconnect and work on something like that. So we spent a lot of time, researching and iterating on what we should build and I'll let him kind of talk about all the brainstorming things that we did that led to what we have right now.

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[00:08:10] Gibson Chu: 

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[00:08:10] Yeah. I think that Maitri presented a good chance to kind of work in the sustainability /  accountability, ethical space that I wanted to be a part of. And I felt like I also wanted to do, I think, some more social good that was outside of what I was already working on. And so when Maitri came asking, if, you know, maybe we could work on a project together that would kind of move us towards building some of that might be more effective for different people in terms of sharing more of this information that I think she already started working on. This like database of knowledge, we first started like brainstorming a lot of different ways to kind of approach this because I know that she mentioned one of the things that is kind of hard to digest is the information in general, like Instagram is hard to kind of be able to take in all this information.

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[00:08:51] So we spent around a good month and a half really just interviewing a lot of different types of people. And so I think one of the things that I know you mentioned in your question, Right.

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[00:09:00] It was like, you know, how you kind of get that started. We found it really fulfilling to kind of ask and learn from all of the friends and other people that are in this to kind of see what's missing.

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[00:09:10] And so some of the main learnings we took away from that interview was that we didn't really find it easy to find one place to get a lot of transparent and digestible content, everything kind of goes behind like the supply chain for common goods. And you kind of have to spend a lot of time yourself to find the information like Maitri did.

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[00:09:28] And I think that was one of the things that, I mean, there was some good to that, right? Like you can use that to check and, you know, depend on your own resource because you can validate yourself, but it also makes it really hard. Everyone has the time to do that. And so we found that very similar, I think, with different brands and like kind of testing out different products, it's different for everybody and have like things like, you know, fair trade or B corporations to kind of maybe add some certification or labeling to that.

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[00:09:51]And so this kind of brought us to something like a newsletter where we found it to be a very easy medium to kind of share and highlight one item at a time similar to how nature did with the Instagram.

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[00:10:02] But you could really do a deep dive and also make it very easy and fun to read. We tried to make it  funny and digestible, and so it took a lot of research that was put together from interviewing different people but eventually came about to one final product where we would be able to share all that information in an easy format.

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[00:10:21] Sean Pritzkau: 

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[00:10:21] Yeah. Cool. And I know there's some people probably that are listening today and even hearing like a newsletter and thinking emails like this dead medium, but I think it is like the easiest way to communicate with an audience and get that initial list of people who are interested or even for the longterm.

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[00:10:36] I mean, some people might be familiar with the newsletter Morning Brew that was acquired this past year for a ridiculous amount of money. Right. And to think that someone like acquired an essentially an email list, right. Email newsletter. But yeah, so you, you collected this information, which is. So necessary.

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[00:10:53] I think information on Google's at our fingertips and that's great, but unless you have someone really to guide you through some of this information or do the research on your own, you really just have a lot of information and with little ability to synthesize that. So you were able to collect this information, do a lot of the legwork and then get something started like a newsletter.

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[00:11:14] So at this point, you two have both connected with one another and you've began to ask these questions. It sounds like conduct some interviews, collect information. Tell us a little bit about how you went from that stage to designing and developing this actual product.

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[00:11:28] Gibson Chu: 

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[00:11:28] Yeah, it took, I guess like a variety of different tools. I know that, you know, we started out initially using Notion to put together a lot of our thoughts and our research and a lot of the brainstorming. 

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[00:11:37] Maitri Shah: 

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[00:11:37] So we wanted to show that being sustainable and living ethically, it doesn't have to be expensive. We understand that, you know, People these days, like they don't have as much time and they don't want to spend five times as much. Right. So we're trying to save people time and money. And by offering this one-stop shop, we hope that it'll just be easier for when people decide to shop or like switch to another alternative.

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[00:12:02] And we want to do the heavy lifting for people so that they don't have to. And so when it came to designing and building the website, we. Decided to use super.so and Notion we just wanted to have a proof of concept to see if this is an idea that people were interested in and wanted to use before spending a lot of development time trying to code it ourselves.

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[00:12:22] And we both have full-time jobs and limited time after work. So it's like, how do we just get something out there as a proof of concept? Like it's not completely done, but we just want to see how people react to it and what feedback they have.

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[00:12:33] Sean Pritzkau: 

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[00:12:33] Amazing. And so that's one of the things that's really cool to hear you both talk about is you both work in tech and so you have like, The technical skills to really make a fully coded design

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[00:12:47] right. So I think that's pretty wild. Do you want to talk for those of us who are listening and don't know what Notion is for example, or we don't know what Super.So is, can you tell us a little bit about that? 

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[00:12:59] Gibson Chu: 

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[00:12:59] Yeah.

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[00:13:00] I can start. So notion is sort of like a place to be able to take notes and write information, and it's a different file storage system in a way compared to like Google Drive but easier. 

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[00:13:11] Sean Pritzkau: 

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[00:13:11] Yeah because some people might be familiar with like Evernote or like some of these other tools Notion really appears like a database. And so whenever I discover someone has like the information in like a spreadsheet or in something like that, it really could be that.

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[00:13:27] Beginning stage of a product, right? Because you can connect it to something like Super.so that really, it feels like magic to me. I've personally never used the used super for a project, but specifically for search. And it's just like so fast and speed is a huge thing for, for search and discoverability.

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[00:13:46] So that's, it's really cool.

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[00:13:48] Maitri Shah: 

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[00:13:48] And I think the reason that we use this no code tool, when it's the save both of us time. It would have taken us a lot longer to develop and build something and ship it, but also make a newsletter and do over 12 hours of research every week. And so just with all these factors I think time was the most important thing.

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[00:14:08] And yeah, that was one of the reasons that we decided to use a no code tool.

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[00:14:12] Sean Pritzkau: 

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[00:14:12] It's amazing specifically for people who are like yourselves have full-time jobs limited time specific. I mean, especially during a non a pandemic, right? Like where we would have like social lives and things on top of that too. Like the ability to spend like this much time on the project that at this point is in this idea stage, and you're just wanting to get it out.

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[00:14:33] This just makes it much more possible. And you know, you can take this and learn from it. Really any entrepreneurial effort, but specifically for people that are looking to do something that impacts people, the planet, our society at large, I think these ways of going about solving problems is really, really cool.

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[00:14:52] Okay. So. At this stage. Now you have like something to show people, right? You have this website and I understand that you launched on Product Hunt. Do you want to tell people a little bit about like your preparation and kind of like this execution of now that they have this product now I'm ready to like, get it out and share it with people.

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[00:15:09] And for, for those who don't know what Product Hunt is, do you want to describe that as well?

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[00:15:14] Maitri Shah: 

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[00:15:14] Sure. So if you're unfamiliar with Product Hunt it's basically. a website where you can discover products that people are building, whether it's side projects or sometimes even companies release features that they have built and released to the public on Product Hunt. So it's a really great way for your project to get featured by the tech community at large.

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[00:15:37] And. Yeah. If you go to the homepage, there'll be like the top 10 products of the day. You can upvote people can comment on your product and ask questions, but it's a really great way for a product to get exposure. So when we were launching on Product  Hunt it was really exciting. It was the first product that Gibson and I both launched on Product Hunt.

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[00:15:56] Specifically, there was a lot more prep work than we had anticipated as we were doing research into how to have a successful Product Hunt launch, given that. Unfortunately, not all products that are launched are going to be featured on the homepage. So we had to look up how to do that and how to get featured.

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[00:16:12] So we did a soft launch of the product itself. Early April to our community, our newsletter. We just said like, Hey, we launched our product. We would love for everyone here to check it out and give feedback. And then we continued to iterate on the product, even until like the like 3:00 AM the day before we were about to launch, like we were working on it and cleaning and refining, and we decided to launch on Earth Day, which we found was very fitting, especially for what we were building.

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[00:16:43] And yeah, I'll let Gibson discuss the chaos that was the day. Oh. And what we had to do. 

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[00:16:50] Gibson Chu: 

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[00:16:50] Yeah. And not to say that we didn't anticipate the amount of like community building that kind of had to go into this, but I definitely think we underestimated maybe the amount of time, it took to help ensure that everyone in the community knew about it. Make sure that, you know, anyone that would be interested or would want to know should know about it.

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[00:17:06]We sent like different calendar invites to our community and let them know about the launch. Like we built up a huge list of people that we reached out and we DM'd a lot of them, across social media. But I think that it actually went really well. I think that kind of happened along the way. The people that do follow Product Hunt and the small community we started with and we've grown, I think a lot since our original launch, and so I think that it given everything, we were pretty happy with the success that we had, but we do feel like we need to learn and, you know, take this lesson going forward.

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[00:17:34] As we continue to build on top of our product and add additional features, maybe reconsider like also approaching Product Hunt again, with another opportunity, to help build our community and market what you're trying to do, Product Hunt that might not be for everyone, given that again, this is geared slightly toward the tech community.

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[00:17:49] And so, this is something that we're still trying to learn, right.

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[00:17:51] Maitri Shah: 

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[00:17:51] Yeah. And one thing that I wanted to just add on is that in the beginning, we're just trying, you know, you, might've heard of the phrase, like do things that don't scale and everything that Gibson an I do right now it's very manual. It's very, time-consuming, it's like, it's a linear function of how much time we input and how much we get out of that.

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[00:18:09] But I think that's been really great in that we. Keep in touch with what we're building and the product and the people that read our newsletter. 

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[00:18:18] Sean Pritzkau: 

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[00:18:18] That's really good. And I really liked that kind of mindset you have of you're willing to put in the time because you're close to the product, you're close to the subject matter, and you know that it's gonna, it's really gonna make a difference in pay off. And I love that quote. It reminds me if Airbnb and there's stories of, you know, Brian Chesky going from like, Door to door to literally the Airbnb host home, right.

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[00:18:40] To, to really, you know, know their customer really well and make sure that they're going above and beyond and  understanding who they're reaching, who's using their product, who's using their tool. Right. So I think that's really cool. And I mean, this is really fresh for you, both because you just recently launched, but from this vantage point do you see anything in the future that you're looking forward to build and innovate on Do One Better?

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[00:19:04] Maitri Shah: 

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[00:19:04] Yeah. In the early days, which was like a couple months ago. When we were discussing like what we want this product or brand or whatever we ended up building to be we had a really long list of things that it could potentially be, but in the long-term we hope to become the brand of choice where people come to find a sustainable and ethical alternatives.

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[00:19:24] And we really hope to branch out into different forms, media, whether that's video or audio, continue writing the newsletters. And then we want to collaborate closely with brands and really emphasize transparency and backing our recommendations with facts and just make facts the center of everything.

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[00:19:44] But at the end of the day, we hope to help people like understand where their things come from. We hope that people will open their hearts to what's going on in the world and just be aware of what they're purchasing, because buying things off the shelf can be a very unconscious decision. And you don't really think about where your candy bar is coming from or what the ingredients on the back of it are.

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[00:20:06] And we hope to help people just like rethink what they're using and realize that it's also an individual responsibility. I know a lot of people will say that, you know, it's these big corporations who are contributing to these issues, but it's our dollars that are funding these corporations.

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[00:20:25] Right? So we hope to help people realize that. And with the knowledge that we're sharing and providing, we hope to inspire them to. Rethink their consumption habits and switch to a better alternative. And we want to make that as easy as possible. Like we will, we're handing it to you on a silver platter.

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[00:20:43] Like here's a website of alternatives, like check out any of these they're way better than what you're using right now.

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[00:20:49]Gibson Chu: 

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[00:20:49] I think to just add on, I know  both of us into community build that could use to give feedback. You know, as we start to move bit away and hopefully out of the COVID 19 era, we can better participate with people directly in in events with people.

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[00:21:05] I know that we really want to work with these brands and try new learn more about the companies and have chances to talk and share. I know a lot of the information that they've learned, especially that are really pushing for more stustainable and ethical living I know that, you know, with existing practices and certifications today with B Corp and fair trade, I think we want to hopefully build something that's similar to that with our own system to help better work with government businesses and consumers so that they know more transparently what's going on in the entire supply chain. 

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[00:21:35] Sean Pritzkau: 

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[00:21:35] Awesome. Well, it's so good. I really love what you both are doing. Especially like you said, like putting this on, on a silver platter. Cause I, I think about these things every day and if you live a fast paced lifestyle for better, for worse, and you're just busy and you make a lot of decisions, like really without thinking about it, a lot of times we go to the thing that's just like the closest or the first thing that comes to our mind.

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[00:21:58] And often that might not be the. The best option or the most, most ethical option. Right? So if someone is listening today and they're interested in checking out Do One Better, what's the best way to find you?

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[00:22:10]Gibson Chu: 

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[00:22:10] The easiest way to find us would it be to checkout our website at doonebetter.today and we write on our sub stack, doonebetter.substack.com and you  can always reach out and DM us on @doonebetter on Twitter or Instagram. And our email is doonebettertoday@gmail.com. So, you know, more always receive feedback recommendations for any brands that  and you know, we'd always like to know, you know, what, what are we missing what do you to talk I'm more than willing to hear all that feedback.

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[00:22:41]Sean Pritzkau: 

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[00:22:41] Well Gibson, Maitri it was really great chatting with you today and best of luck with the product and the platform. And who knows, maybe we'll have you on again, some other time to share about updates to this product or, you know, whatever might be next for you both. 

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[00:22:56]Gibson Chu: 

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[00:22:57] appreciate Sean. 

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[00:23:13]Sean Pritzkau: 

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[00:23:13] So that was really fun talking with both Gibson and Matri about Now, if you're curious about the tools that were mentioned, or we talked a bunch about Product Hunt.  I'll include all those links in the show notes. So you can look at Do One Better and explore the platform that they actually created and then some of the tools they use to actually create their minimum viable product.  I'll include the links for Notion, the links for Super.so. And I'll actually include some information about the Notion API, because that recently came out even after this conversation was recorded with Gibson Maitri. So there's a lot more capabilities through using Notion as a tool for your MVP.

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[00:23:56]Now I'm really excited for next week's episode with Katrina Kibben.  A lot of people listening to this podcast are either entrepreneurs or really running in organization or some sort of initiative.

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[00:24:07]And in most cases, The goal is to build something that goes beyond yourself right. Now in next week's episode with Katrina Kibben we talk about hiring. How do you find good talent? How do you write job descriptions that are actually going to get read by the people that you want? And then how do you actually get these people to apply? How do you actually gather qualified applicants? 

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[00:24:32] If you've ever tried to write a job position, or even the thought of it is kind of overwhelming itself, then episode is going to be for you. Now there's probably not a better person to talk about this topic. Katrina runs a company called Three Ears Media where their entire focus is around writing job descriptions.

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[00:24:53]Now I know that sounds wild, right? Like a business just about writing or rewriting job descriptions, not joking. You'll really love this episode because there's nobody in the world that knows more about writing job descriptions than Katrina. Now, thanks for tuning into this episode. If you haven't left a review for the podcast, yet, it would be amazing if you could jump on to Apple Podcasts or iTunes. And just to take a quick moment to leave an honest review about the show, really help grow the reach of the show. And I love reading them. Cause I love to hear what you all think about the podcast so far. So thanks for listening and I'll see you next week.

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