#319 — ⛑ Building Trust

Hey what's up everybody? This is Lola Ojabowale, founder of Lunch Pail Labs. Welcome back to Lunch Pail Daily, my personal audio diary on building and growing lunch pal Labs, which is a digital product studio, based out of Atlanta, Georgia. In today's episode, we're continuing in our series of how I'm building and growing integrations directory, and today's topic is going to jam all about reliability, outside of overwhelm with the database. 

Another common theme and feedback has been flavors of how do you know which of these is necessarily like trustworthy? Or will work for my use case or is reliable? And I threw up some question, a question to Twitter, got some responses around? Like, what are some of the decision factors around why you do or don't decide to use an integration API, all that and got some responses around cost and reliability and limits? And so also did some looking around just the internet of the way of directories, product recommendation letters, and the more new vague or nouveau term of boutique search engines? Which have what ways have they sort of teased out what should you try for x? How do you inspire that it's like reliable, and whether the solution might be worth trying for for them specifically. And I think a lot of this too, is the heart of curation. And a bit of this episode is also going to be a little bit of a rift on Lenny's newsletter, he had a recent post about how to build trust in a marketplace. I think a lot of this plate, a lot of those suggestions and tactics, I think apply very well to directories and other products. So Lenny's newsletter had several of I think it was like six different ways to inspire trust, it was reviews, verifying your supply, leaning on social proof, creating a perception of quality, providing a safety net delivering magic, and the free version of his newsletter, he only covers the first three. And so I'm mostly going to focus on those with a mix of what I saw looking at other successful directories or curators of information as products plying some of that to integrations directory. 

So starting with a really common tactic reviews, I think this is really well understood, and one of the biggest ones across directories, or their rebrand a la boutique search engines. But finding that reviews that can either be community or by the owner of the platform, why occurred wire cutter for example, they like hire independent researchers who like review the products that are in wire cutter that ultimately sold to New York Times probably one of the more famous examples of a boutique search engine or a curated product. Things testing started as a DTC brand discovery platform and the owner of things testing would test all of these DTC brands and give independent reviews are more people to give reviews for things testing. And then you have startup B, which is really new player in this space. But the founder has a lot of interesting ideas around boutique search engines, and they kind of have a group of curators. It's a subscription model, there's is a subscription model to receive the information. And they have a group of curators sort of curating the startup internet, if you will. So reviews there, they're good even in things that are products that are less about curation, or more about aggregation, ie, your Yelp, maybe your Zillow, maybe your Airbnb, where they're just literally the whole like supply and outside of just the leave out a lot of context, but actually having the text in the context of what led to that review. And Lenny mentions that this is table stakes. And I guess I tend to agree with him. So that feels like a natural evolution with integrations directory, we have these things, either I'm reviewing them and kind of giving some sense of how easy it is to use, how reliable it seems all of that for the platform, what the support is, like I might even have make a little list of things that are that are helpful. And then giving a rating so people can make some decisions of when a face with multiple similar solutions, which should they maybe lean toward

so but the thing that I like that thing testing and wire cutter does is they communicate that they're an independent review platform and they say pacifically don't monetize through ads and sponsorships. I think with New Age curated models, that's probably going to also become stable table stakes. People know not to necessarily trust, a review, if it's sponsored. 

The next one was around verifying your supply death think this is a really cool tactic is that makes sense in the context of marketplace. marketplaces, especially with humans, top towel, they verify who's on there, you're only going to get like the top talent for freelancers, Uber does background checks. And I can go on with different marketplaces of those sorts in terms of integrations directory, I think there is an angle that could be restricting integrations to X or Y quality parameter, whether it's only integrations that have been personally reviewed, or only integrations that are official and not third party or only integrations that have this speed metric, or reliability metric.

 But in the mirror article about the future of search. One thing that I really liked that the author called out was about Spotify. And there was a quote, and I'll put it in here how Spotify takes the entire universe in music, and then finds endless ways for folks to discover and search across their library, including a mix of manual creation and algorithm. And I think that's something that I'll probably lean toward, like I have a lot of supply that I can test different, especially in this testing mode of is curation, even the right thing that people care about, I think, arriving curation, but is review or my opinion or an opinion on these integrations, like something that people care about, I can test it small while still having a large base of generally, in their integrations. And I don't have to really change everything about the directory to say, Oh, I have 500. Let me brute force review all 500 and relaunch the directory. And then the last one I'll talk about is leaning on social proof. I think this is great for the veracity of the platform and the curator, it certainly helps to have social proof, I thought this would be like really interesting in terms of integration 's directory as like a form of social listening, some of the ways that I've been sourcing integrations is what integrations are being mentioned on Twitter, and what people have to say about it, and, or on forums, etc. So to have a Oh, what are people saying about this integration, but with some brute force experiments helped me realize that programmatically getting that would be actually quite difficult to make sure that everything was relevant to a review of the integration and not just like some random commentary. So but social proof of the platform in general, it is on my to do list to get some of the nice Twitter comments and DMS on integrations directory landing page, so folks know that Oh, like, folks had nice things to say about it. 

So with this little mini research in terms of next steps, for me, I think it's really going to be one finishing up the stay true directory. I think that one of the cool pieces in the future of search boutique article was around architecture and how we like display that information, which totally jive with all of the kind of discussions and thinking I've been doing about, oh, it doesn't need to be an air table list. So that is in process. Hopefully, we'll have that live by the end of the week or early next week, and then doing some more experiments on how do I enrich the data and information? Is there probably some review experiments? It's been so funny talking to people because I thought volume is what people are most interested in. But even when I mentioned like, oh, there's 500 now and there's a few 1000 in the queue. Folks, eyes just get really big, like, oh, that's just so much. So I think instead of just adding more and more and more, I will absolutely look at enriching What's there to see like, what are the dimensions testing? What are the dimensions that help people feel like it's really really valuable and then hopefully convert. So that's it for me today. I hope you all have the most wonderful one and I'll catch you later.