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Building a product for a broad target market is hard. Even harder if your competitors are entrenched corporations. Even harder than that? Having a few dozen employees while competitors employ thousands.
This week’s guest, Koyfin’s Rob Koyfman, does it anyway—and succeeds at it.
Listen to find out how Koyfin — a trading analysis platform adopted by professional traders and individuals — builds an intuitive, yet feature-rich product to make comprehensive financial data easily digestible.
We cover:
* The beginnings of Koyfin: How Rob's perspective on user-friendly interfaces and professional-grade investment tools sparked Koyfin.
* The product’s superpower: How Koyfin built a functional and intuitive charting system from scratch and turned it into the most popular feature (even with white label solutions available).
* Breaking the mold: Most startup founders hyper-focus on one tiny market. Find out why Rob believes in making advanced financial tools accessible to professional and individual investors.
* Balancing features and user experience: It’s the curse of every complex product: Adding features makes products theoretically more useful, but often practically harder to use. Rob shares how to add new features without compromising usability.
* Customizability: One-size-fits-all works for simple products targeted at small user groups. But more complex products can adapt to the user. Rob shares how Koyfin enables users to customize their experience to best serve their needs.
* Funding: Why Koyfin started out bootstrapped, but took on funding later.
Listen today to discover Rob Koyfman’s wisdom—and follow along for more insights straight from the industry's pioneers on Happy Paths.
Bio
Rob Koyfman is the founder and CEO of Koyfin, which provides simple and efficient tools for financial advisors to research stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds and follow market trends.
His career began at Goldman Sachs Investment Research in 2002. He later became the Head of Macro and Thematic Trading Strategy at Citigroup and served as a Strategist at Caxton Associates, Lyxor Asset Management, and Tekne Capital.
Koyfin was founded in 2016, born from Rob's dissatisfaction with the complicated and expensive analytical tools that many investors found challenging to use. When not engaged in his work, Rob enjoys running and spending quality time with his young son.
Rob Koyfman
- Website (https://www.koyfin.com/)
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/koyfman)
James Evans
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-evans-7086b3126/)
CommandBar
- Follow CommandBar (https://www.commandbar.com/) on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/commandbar/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/CommandBar). -
On this episode of Happy Paths: Dani Grant from Jam.Dev, a bug reporting tool that’s used by over 30,000 people and that you’ve probably seen on Twitter.
We cover:
The origins of Jam: how Dani’s time at Cloudflare shaped her thinking on how to build a small, nimble team.
* Jam’s superpower: a software development lifecycle that keeps them dogfooding and shipping fast
* Thriving remote: Clever tactics for building vibrant culture (like a genius Slack channel called #whatscooking)
* Tactics: How Jam punches above its weight as a small team – from support to marketing
Bio
Dani Grant is the CEO of Jam, a dev tools startup helping 30K+ improve their bug reporting process, backed by executives from Apple, GitHub, and Pager Duty, and VCs such as Village Global (LPs include Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos). Before Jam, Dani was an early product manager at Cloudflare, where she worked on core developer products such as 1.1.1.1 (now used by 10 million+ people). She also worked as a VC at Union Square Ventures.
Dani Grant
- Website (https://jam.dev/)
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/thedanigrant)
James Evans
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-evans-7086b3126/)
CommandBar
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It might be hard to believe, but smartphone notifications are a fairly new phenomenon, at least as we know them today, constant notifications for every app on your phone unless you turn them off.
When iOS and Android first became popular, you'd really only get three types of regular notifications: a new email, a new voicemail, or a missed phone call. With the invention of push notifications, mobile apps gained a new way of sending information directly to users.
One of the categories where push notifications are most used and overused is news —every day, all the time. Suddenly, you can get breaking news updates pushed straight to your phone every hour of the day.
For this episode, James talked with Matt Galligan. Matt was the Co-founder and CEO of Circa, which was the first mainstream news app to approach news delivery in a fundamentally mobile-first way. They talked about what being mobile-first means, some of their highest-leveraged design decisions within Circa, how it was received among mainstream media, as well as its legacy in online journalism.
Bio
Matt Galligan is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco and is the CEO and Co-founder of Circa. He co-founded the company alongside Ben Huh in 2011.
A native of central Illinois, Galligan has worked at Monster Commerce and AOL Inc., and at Socialthing!, SimpleGEO, and TechStars, a seed-venture capital pool.
Links
Farewell to Circa News (https://medium.com/circa/farewell-to-circa-news-7d002150f74b)
Matt Galligan
- Website (https://galligan.xyz/)
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/mg)
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattgalligan/)
James Evans
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-evans-7086b3126/)
CommandBar
- Follow CommandBar (https://www.commandbar.com/) on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/commandbar/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/CommandBar). -
Project management is one of the largest categories in all of software. From side hustles to huge multinational corporations, teams of all sizes use project management tools to plan and execute their work. And the number of tools in the market for project management is as diverse as the people that use them: Jira, Monday.com, Asana, ClickUp, and many others. Each brings its own unique spin on how to break down work and track progress.
But one tool, perhaps more than any other, has influenced how other project management tools work. And that's Trello.
For this episode, James talked to Justin Gallagher, who worked on Trello for more than ten years, starting with its founding as a hackathon project and running through its meteoric growth and eventual acquisition by Atlassian. They talk about Trello's origin story, the opinionated way Trello encouraged people to break down their work, and the product's impact on future generations of project management tools.
Bio
Justin Gallagher helped design and build the very first version of Trello and launched the product at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011. He now oversees the Product and Design teams for Trello. Outside of work, Justin likes to tromp around the woods north of New York City and climb rocks.
Links
Justin Gallagher
- Website (http://justingallagher.com/)
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/justingallagher)
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinjgallagher/)
James Evans
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-evans-7086b3126/)
CommandBar
- Follow CommandBar (https://www.commandbar.com/) on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/commandbar/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/CommandBar). -
Augmented reality combines computer-generated virtual elements with the real world. Unlike virtual reality, AR enhances a person's perception of the real world instead of replacing it entirely. Snap, the company behind Snapchat, recognized the potential of AR early on.
In 2015, they released Lenses, which have been one of the most popular features of the product ever since. In their S-1 document from 2017, they described themselves as a camera company, not a social company or a software company. And their continued investment in AR experiences makes Snapchat probably the most used AR-centric product ever.
Today, James chats with Stephanie Engle, a Product Design Lead at Snap who focuses on many of their AR products, including Shopping Lenses, which shipped at the end of 2022.
Bio
Stephanie Engle is a designer at Snap, where she is working on AR, cameras, and toys.
Prior to working at Snap, she was a Product Designer at Facebook, the first Product Designer at Cruise, and an Experience Designer at Airbnb.
Links
The Art of Unshipping | CommandBar Blog (https://www.commandbar.com/blog/the-art-of-unshipping)
Stephanie Engle
- Website (https://www.soengle.com/)
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/Soengle)
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-engle-41bba745/)
James Evans
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-evans-7086b3126/)
CommandBar
- Follow CommandBar (https://www.commandbar.com/) on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/commandbar/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/CommandBar). -
Every software company needs to announce new features…and some of us pay more attention to these announcements than others. Sometimes, a feature announcement catches our attention, and it's often because of a well-designed graphic.
Diógenes Brito has first-hand knowledge about this as the Head of Product and Design at Air. He's well-known for his work as a product designer at Slack, where he added a brown skin tone to one of the company's biggest product feature rollouts at the time.
In this episode, James interviews Dió about how these rollouts can have subtle, sometimes unintended implications beyond just the specific feature and product they showcase and unpacks how it's influenced product marketing since.
Bio
Diógenes Brito is a self and Stanford-taught designer and engineer with a focus on digital interaction design and user-centered experience design. He has over 9 years of experience designing and developing websites, as well as a wealth of experience in IT and physical product design (modeling, manufacturing, etc.). His main strength is multi-disciplinary and collaborative design thinking, adding strength to a team to make it greater than the sum of its parts.
Links
Diógenes Brito
"Just A Brown Hand" (http://uxdiogenes.com/writing/just-a-brown-hand)
"Not Just A Brown Hand, Apparently" (http://uxdiogenes.com/writing/not-just-a-brown-hand-apparently)
Website (http://uxdiogenes.com/)
Twitter (https://twitter.com/uxdiogenes)
LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/diogenesbrito/)
Dribbble (https://dribbble.com/uxdiogenes)
James Evans
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-evans-7086b3126/)
CommandBar
- Follow CommandBar (https://www.commandbar.com/) on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/commandbar/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/CommandBar). -
Twitter wasn't the first company to get traction with a social audio product, but it quickly became a leader in the space, in no small part thanks to the work of Maya Gold Patterson, who was the Lead Product Designer for Twitter Spaces through its launch and early growth.
In this episode, James talks with Maya about her experience helping build Twitter Spaces, how to learn from competitors' launches, how companies with large reach can still ship experiments thoughtfully, and how specific design decisions the Twitter Spaces team made took advantage of the Twitter platform to grow beyond other social audio apps.
Bio
Maya Gold Patterson is the VP of design at Riverside.fm, an online recording platform for content creation. Before taking on her current role, she spent three years working at Twitter as a product designer, where she most notably helped build Twitter Spaces.
Maya earned a degree in psychology at Washington University in St. Louis before discovering UX design as her true passion. Before working at Twitter and Riverside, she worked on product design at Meta’s Facebook for two years. Patterson said Dantley Davis, a notable product and design executive who led design teams at Netflix, Meta, Twitter, and now Nike, discovered her work after she began writing about her design experiences. He recruited her from Chicago to go work in Silicon Valley, and her design career skyrocketed from there.
Links
Maya Gold Patterson
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/mayagpatterson)
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayp/)
- Spaces Beta Public Figma File (https://www.figma.com/file/RS6tHqgyYiWfT8YF4SU8Za/Spaces)
James Evans
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-evans-7086b3126/)
CommandBar
- Follow CommandBar (https://www.commandbar.com/) on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/commandbar/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/CommandBar). -
What do TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have in common? It's the hashtag: invented by a man of the internet, Chris Messina. Throughout his career, Chris has worked on movements online and offline that have helped define social media and social technology broadly. If you've used Firefox, attended a BarCamp event, or even checked in at a co-working space, then you're more than familiar with Chris' widespread impact.
James sat down with Chris to learn more about the hashtag and to see how a simple feature proposed via a tweet evolved social media basically everywhere on the internet.
Bio
Chris Messina has spent a decade working on social technologies, designing products and experiences, working with startups, and changing the world by giving away many of his creations, including the hashtag.
His skillset is broad, anchored in product and user experience design. He has created movements online and off, and has acted as an effective agent of change in large and small organizations.
In 2004, he helped organize the grassroots movement that propelled Mozilla Firefox to its first 100 million downloads. In 2005, he co-organized the first BarCamp and then popularized the unconference event model to over 350 cities around the world. In 2006, he opened the first dedicated coworking space in San Francisco, giving rise to a global movement. Then in 2007, he brought the idea for the hashtag to Twitter, changing social media forever and galvanizing social revolutions across the globe.
During his time at Google as a Developer Advocate, he lead the creation of Google Developers as a brand and central hub for all of Google’s developer tools, services, and documentation. Later, as a UX designer on the Google+ team, he redesigned the Google Profile, unifying 46 discrete representations of a person across the company's various products. He also lead the efforts to design Google+’s publisher platform offerings, including the +1 button and other embeddable publisher widgets.
He has spoken at conferences like SXSW, Web 2.0 Expo, Google I/O, and Microsoft's Future Decoded, and has frequently been quoted in media outlets like The New York Times, Business Week, LA Times, Washington Post, and Wired.
Links
Chris Messina
- Website (https://chrismessina.me/)
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/chrismessina)
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/factoryjoe/)
- Mastodon (https://mastodon.xyz/@chrismessina)
James Evans
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-evans-7086b3126/)
CommandBar
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Email has been around for decades, and many people now spend hours reading, writing, and replying to emails every day. Since being founded in 2014, Superhuman has become the most revered email client in existence for people who write a lot of email. There are so many useful chapters from the Superhuman story.
James sat down with Gaurav Vohra, who has led product and growth as part of Superhuman's founding team, to chat about these war stories.
Bio
Gaurav Vohra is the Head of Analytics at Superhuman. Prior to joining Superhuman, Gaurav spent six years at Oliver Wyman, where they built software and played the roles of manager, engineer, analyst, and consultant.
Gaurav has significant experience in data analytics and software engineering. Gaurav has led projects for a number of major companies, including an online travel company, a global financial institution, and a travel startup. Gaurav has also built software for a European retailer and an iPad application for a CEO.
Gaurav is a skilled database architect and tuner. Gaurav has experience with a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, including JS, HTML, CSS, SQL, Python, Bootstrap, Knockout, and Node. Gaurav is also experienced with Git and automated testing.
Gaurav Vohra completed their MA in Economics at the University of Cambridge and their Masters in Arts at King Edward's School in Birmingham.
Links
Superhuman (https://superhuman.com/)
August 2016 Superhuman changelog entry (https://new.superhuman.com/superhuman-command-29123)
Gaurav Vohra
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/gauravvohra1)
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/gvohra/)
James Evans
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-evans-7086b3126/)
CommandBar
- Follow CommandBar (https://www.commandbar.com/) on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/commandbar/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/CommandBar). -
Gmail is one of the most used pieces of software ever, with 1.8 billion users today. In many ways, Gmail defined modern email, transitioning us from the "You've Got Mail" era into the present. Pretty much everyone has used Gmail or another email client that's been inspired by Gmail.
James talks with Gmail's creator, Paul Buchheit, to learn more about how what he built came to be the juggernaut of the email world.
Bio
Paul Buchheit is an American computer engineer, entrepreneur, angel investor, and philanthropist who is best recognized as Google’s 23rd employee and the creator of Gmail. He “hacked” and refined his earlier prototype web-based email system keeping in mind larger storage and better search capabilities as key features. He also wanted the product to be accessible to as many people as possible and, as such, had suggested an ad-supported model, which prompted the creation of Google AdSense. He had suggested the company’s motto, “Don't be evil,” which some maintain was first coined by engineer Amit Patel in 1999, and came up with the “did you mean?” feature to eliminate spelling mistakes in Google searches. After leaving Google, he co-created the real-time social media feed aggregator FriendFeed, which was later sold to Facebook. He is currently a partner at the investment firm Y Combinator and has invested in over 83 startups through angel investments.
Links
Paul Buchheit
- Website (http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/)
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/paultoo)
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-buchheit-744250a/)
James Evans
- LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-evans-7086b3126/)
CommandBar
- Follow CommandBar (https://www.commandbar.com/) on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/commandbar/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/CommandBar). -
Happy Paths, a series from CommandBar, explores the human process behind some of the most well-known software of the internet era. In each episode, host James Evans dives deep on one iconic product or feature — like Gmail, the hashtag, or Twitter Spaces — with the people who built them. We will pull back the curtain on the little details of how they were made, giving context for our audience on who uses these products, as well as providing practical learnings for other product practitioners.
