The Brandon Zhang Show

#046 "Fabrizio Rinaldi - Founder of Mailbrew on Balancing Design and Functionality"

Today, I am speaking with Fabrizio Rinaldi, the co-founder of Mailbrew and Typefully. Mailbrew is a product aiming to reduce our reliance on social feeds and curate a healthy information diet. Typefully creates a clean location for people to draft and write tweets. On today's episode, we cover Mailbrew's approach to growth marketing, Mailbrew's future roadmap, and how to maintain creativity as a founder. Links: Mailbrew [https://mailbrew.com/] Typefully [https://typefully.app/?ref=producthunt] Fabrizio's Writing [https://fabriziorinaldi.com/] Fabrizio's Twitter [https://twitter.com/linuz90] Contact Me: My Twitter [https://twitter.com/brandonthezhang] My Website [https://www.brandonzhang.com/] 5 Key Takeaways: 1. We're kind of building an anti feed in a way because we were trying to give people a better way to get content online. So following their favorite creators, thinkers, sources, websites, apps, all in one place. And indeed, it started as a simple daily email digest that you can build for yourself. 2. After almost a year now, since we launched it originally, it's become much more than that because you can like add blogs, more sources, your calendar events, even your stocks and crypto stuff like that. So it's becoming more personal. We want to make it even more comprehensive in the future so that people can use it to unplug from feeds and hopefully reduce their information overload. 3. We built a ton of optimized landing pages for made will tailor the different sources and content creators, and in different use cases for maybe also hundreds and soon, they will actually be 1000s of landing pages. 4. We decided to invest more in creating actual curation tools that we want to provide as there are many information curators that use our platform to share Brews with their audience. And another very important things that we want to do is enable API and custom sources as we want to empower these people to build on top of Millbrew to create sources. 5. Most of the time the most important thing you can do is to reduce confusion. So whatever you're doing, so it's not just design, you can apply this theme to many other fields. Writing for example comes to mind. If there's one thing that unsettles people, and then it can create discomfort, and also is the reason for many of the actions of people is reducing uncertainty

#045 "Eric Jorgenson - Building The Infrastructure Behind Online Education"

On today's episode I speak with Eric Jorgenson, the Product Strategy guy at Zaarly and the author of the Almanack of Naval. We spend time discussing the forms and importance of leverage, building the infrastructure around online education, and the most unexpected benefit of publishing his book. Links: Eric's Twitter [https://twitter.com/EricJorgenson]The Almanack of Naval [https://www.navalmanack.com/] Eric's Personal Website [https://www.ejorgenson.com/] Course Correctly [https://coursecorrectly.com/the-mission-of-course-correctly/] Contact Me: My Twitter [https://twitter.com/brandonthezhang] My Website [https://www.brandonzhang.com/] 5 Key Takeaways: 1. I think of mental models as just like a quick, memorable sort of metaphor for like a way that the world works. So it's kind of a mental toolkit, I guess, is like the way I would think of mental models. 2. I definitely have a focus on the idea of leverage, where you build specific knowledge, you take on accountability, and then you apply leverage through capital, labor or product. 3. I also know that there are people selling basically scams, as online courses and their landing pages pretty much all look alike. So I think there's, there's definitely some like credibility that can get built, which is like, I started Course Correctly. Course Correctly focuses on independent, unbiased, like thorough reviews of online courses. So I've actually, like, hired somebody who starts soon here, and we're gonna like, kind of double down on starting to build that much more aggressively. 4. I think there's really interesting stuff to do around curriculum, like treating every course, as a modular piece, and building curriculums and stories and career paths. So somebody who's coming in saying, like, you know, I'm 19, when I'm 25, I want to be like, a founder of a technology company. And I want it to be like a venture-backed, scalable thing. It's like, Okay, cool. Here are the courses that like we would all put together, we're gonna start, you know, it's maybe one year of full-time education, but then five years of part-time education. 5. It's easy to overlook the fact that like, even 100 people reading a blog post, like, while you just go about your day, or like, are asleep is a fucking miracle, right? Like that is an awesome miracle. And is 100 more people, like if we were in a room and you were going to get up in front of them and read this book, like, you'd be nervous.

#044 "Bilal Zaidi - Getting Early Traction for Creator Lab"

On today's episode I speak with Bilal Zaidi, an ex-Googler and the current founder of Creator Lab, a leading entrepreneurship podcast and digital marketing consultancy. Bilal has had over 15 years of experience helping startups and fortune 500 brands grow through marketing, partnerships and business developing, including 7 and a half years at Google and Youtube, 6 years on his own venture and 2 years at charity water. On today's episode, we talk about how he was able to get large guests like Gary Vee and Daymond John early in his podcast, the future of the creator economy and how he is hedging risk while transitioning to a full time creator. Links: Creator Lab [https://www.creatorlab.fm/] Bilal's Twitter Account [https://twitter.com/bzaidi]Creator Lab Youtube Channel [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3lSc9lP47q-_Wyp3LCWbYw] Contact Me: My Twitter [https://twitter.com/brandonthezhang] My Website [https://www.brandonzhang.com/] 5 Key Takeaways: 1. We're all getting used to seeing paid communities, substack paid newsletters, courses, etc. And more and more people are willing to spend money on those things. But there's gonna be a time where we're all sick of paid newsletters, probably, there's gonna be a time it might be 10 years from now. But you know, over time, things become saturated, the more people do it. So I think what's interesting is always, as the person who's an entrepreneur, whether as an individual creator, or like starting a bigger company, with employees and stuff like that, you always need to at least be experimenting with that 20% of trying new stuff. 2. What I do on the podcast is publicly talk about business level with the best entrepreneurs in the world. So wherever, whoever we're talking about how they grew to strategy, innovation, marketing, branding, all that sort of stuff, we cover all of it. So that is kind of my equivalent of working in public, people get to hear how I think, you know, and if you listen to the show we're talking about like real, tangible business conceptshow they invested millions of dollars in paid advertising, and how they were able to change that over time, or how did they hire their best people, etc, 3. I ended up selling that knowledge as a mini consultant, I was about 18 when I started doing that, and just going around, I was doing an internship and I would go knock on doors at lunchtime, because we were in this wholesale district in East London. And I would just like pitch these old-school business people like how to build a website. 4. When I left Google, it was actually started maybe two years before so in 2015. It actually coincides with the podcast because I was kind of in a pretty bad place. Like I'm quite careful to say the word depressed because I don't know if it was actually fully depressed or not, but I felt like I lacked any meaning of my work, I would go to work, I could do it really easily. I wasn't challenged, I didn't feel like I was reaching my potential. And my learning curve had essentially flattened. 5. The other big thing I mentioned are second-tier podcast platforms, so for me to be featured on Spotify, or iTunes, trust me, I've tried, right, like it's very difficult to do that. They're too busy. I looked at well, who the other players that they have millions of people, but I can actually do something with them. So one of them was tune in radio. I ended up like pitching them finding someone who worked there, having a call speak, you know, traditional sales, partnership stuff, tracking them down saying, "Hey, I'm a podcast, I've got an idea for you can we talk about it", and they put me in touch with someone. And then the punchline is I hosted an event at TuneIn radio, where I interviewed like Rahul Vora from Superhuman, Hiten Shah and a bunch of people.

#043 "Kevin Lee - Going from VC to CPG Founder"

On today's episode, I speak with Kevin Lee, the co-founder of Immi, a CPG food brand paying homage to their favorite childhood dishes but reimagining them to fit our modern diets. Immi just launched three different products in their first vertical, Ramen. Amidst the busy launch, Kevin took time to talk with us about the process of creating healthy ramen, early lessons as a founder, and the goal of getting Immi into every supermarket in the country. Links: Immi Website [https://immieats.com/] Kevin's Twitter [https://twitter.com/kevinleeme] CEO of a Massive Japanese Food Conglomerate Tastes Our Ramen [https://immieats.com/ceo-of-a-massive-japanese-food-conglomerate-tastes-our-ramen/] We Tasted 100+ Ingredients at North America’s Largest Ingredient Tradeshow [https://immieats.com/we-tasted-100-ingredients-at-north-americas-largest-ingredient-tradeshow/] Contact Me: My Twitter [https://twitter.com/brandonthezhang] My Website [https://www.brandonzhang.com/] 5 Key Takeaways: 1. We've seen that they've [older family members] just really developed more chronic health conditions because of their poor nutrition and unhealthy diets. And so my grandmother is pre-diabetic, both my parents take medication for high blood pressure, the same thing on K Chan [co-founders] family side. And so we started talking about combining our love of food, and health and nutrition to work on a better for you food brand and that was the original genesis behind the idea. 2. We actually started like, you know, how you might learn anything, which is we went on YouTube, and we literally watched videos of people and chefs making noodles in the kitchen, we watched like videos of manufacturing plants and how they would produce instant ramen. My co-founder actually would download research reports that were in like Chinese and Japanese and we would get them translated so that we could study how other people were approaching it. And it was It's funny because there was a high amount of ignorance and naivety going into this because we had no background. But I think it allowed us to operate from that, you know, that first principles approach of, Hey, we literally know nothing. So we know nothing, how might someone approach this from zero to one. 3. An important lesson that he really taught me was to have more confidence in these different things I was doing without expecting that they had to be the most professional or they followed a certain playbook. He just said, you know, carve your own path because that's the only way you succeed is you you have to make your own path. 4. One thing my coach taught me really is I think you have to remember that as a founder. You're trying to serve the needs of your users' and if they don't like your product, for one, it's like they took the time to send you that message, which means they weren't, they weren't passionate about it to begin with, you just kind of didn't meet their needs yet. And that's why they're unhappy. You should take that as a sense of, hey, it's better to have this kind of feedback, that no feedback at all, at least, it means that they were excited and expected something and now you just have to iterate until you meet their needs. 5. Our vision at me and we always say is, we chose these words, specifically is to enrich lives through the vibrant world of Asian American food. And we picked to enrich lives. Because enriching can mean you know, it can mean multiple things for us. It means enriching your health, right? So we care a lot about making sure that the food first and foremost is better for you. We care about enriching perspectives. So I think we talked about this, but when you eat another culture, food, all of a sudden, you're entering their world.

#042 "Carlos Villaumbrosia - Building the Online School for Product"

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia [https://www.linkedin.com/in/villaumbrosia/] is the Founder and CEO of Product School, the global leader in product management training with a community of over one million product professionals. Product School instructors are real-world Product Leaders working at top companies including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber, and Amazon. Links: Carlos's Twitter [https://twitter.com/villaumbrosia] Product School [https://productschool.com/] The Product School Podcast [https://t.co/4eVhnd3CKF?amp=1] The Product Book: How to Become a Great PM [https://productschool.com/the-product-book/] Contact Me: My Twitter [https://twitter.com/brandonthezhang] My Website [https://www.brandonzhang.com/] 5 Key Takeaways: 1. The idea of Product School probably first approached me when I was at business school in UC Berkeley. I met a lot of people from different backgrounds, such as management, consulting, or finance and more traditional business backgrounds that wanted to get their hands dirty, they wanted to be closer to the action, they wanted to work to build something bigger. 2. My experience in an engineering school and then going to Business School inspired me to eventually start a product School, which is a hybrid between those two, that gets the best of both worlds, and can help people learn product management in a much more efficient way. 3. I have 10 years of experience building data products. I started other companies before, and I've been lucky enough to work with incredible mentors throughout my career. So in a way, I feel like I learned a lot of things on the go, and there was no proper curriculum. So I was like, You know what? Yes, I have a big dream to make a global movement but I'm going to start by helping eight people get their first product management job. 4. I would say the secret sauce of Product School is that every single instructor that teaches here keeps a full time job at incredible companies such as Google, Facebook, Airbnb or Uber, we believe that best teachers are practitioners, they are not teachers, actually.