Latest / Founder Mode / Simple Design is Best with Austin Boer

Transcript

Simple Design is Best with Austin Boer · Founder Mode

0:00
We found everyone in the R slash dumb phone subreddit was like I
0:03
want a dumb phone but I need Uber.
0:05
I want a dumb phone but I need maps.
0:07
I want a dumb phone but I need my kids baby monitor app.
0:11
So they told you exactly what they want and all the other
0:14
minimal dumb phones are coming out and they're too restrictive.
0:32
You're listening to Founder mode.
0:34
Where we talk to builders and leaders shaping the next
0:37
generation of ideas. Today's episode is about
0:39
building the anti technology product.
0:42
Yeah, our guest today has built something that people know they
0:44
need but maybe they don't want. So I've been a lot better about
0:47
not answering every phone call. But in in all seriousness, the
0:50
smartphone is a problem like it's a real problem.
0:53
And your solution, which we've talked about before is like this
0:56
23 seven, I call it DND 'cause you have one hour a day, you
1:00
allow yourself 30. Minutes twice a day 30.
1:02
OK, so it's 30 minutes, but it's effectively 23 seven.
1:04
So like 20-3 hours a day your phone is.
1:06
Locked down, yeah. To the point where is it the
1:09
wife only they can get through who?
1:10
Can get through my wife, my daughter, and my mom.
1:12
Yeah, that I think that basically makes it a dumb phone,
1:16
'cause it's just then it's a phone.
1:18
They call you, they text you, you see that?
1:19
That's it. And then badges are the only way
1:22
that I know that somebody like pinged me on one of these like
1:24
secondary or tertiary sort of channels that I like to be this
1:27
ulti connected person. But now I've found like I can
1:30
just batch that in. It honestly stems back from the
1:32
like Tim Ferriss days with the four hour work week where he's
1:35
like, hey, if you just do e-mail four times a day, three times a
1:38
day, it actually is better for you and the other people because
1:41
they know you're going to get back better.
1:42
For your nervous system, yeah, Yeah.
1:44
What are those 230 minute blocks?
1:45
I actually think that's an important thing to know.
1:47
When are they? Yeah.
1:48
When are they? Yeah.
1:49
Bro, if I told you, then you'd know when to get through.
1:50
No. Yeah.
1:51
So one of them call you constantly.
1:54
That's fine. One of them is in 7:30 in the
1:56
morning, which I get up at 4:35 and get a few hours to get
1:59
booted up. Yeah, within 730, I go out and
2:02
have breakfast or like my like meal at that point.
2:04
So 7:30 is I can ship my phone and clear it.
2:07
And the other one's at 5:30 basically after I eat my final
2:10
meal, which is typically 2:00 or 3:00, but definitely done by 4.
2:13
So 530 gives me like one kind of shot and then you put the phone
2:16
away and then you can. And you don't.
2:18
You famously don't put the phone by you by the bed like it's not.
2:21
Correct. I charge my phone in a different
2:22
room, so same thing. So even if you wake up and
2:24
you're like restless at 2:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the
2:27
morning, Nope, phone's not even there to grab it because my
2:29
thing is like, I would grab it and just check one, one thing.
2:31
And you never just can check one thing.
2:33
And the discipline for all this system, though, I think is
2:35
really important. So what are we talking?
2:36
About today, yeah. So today is about building a
2:39
device that sort of takes care of that for you.
2:41
And Austin's a founder community builder who's really just
2:43
leading the charge to build like the perfect dumb phone.
2:47
Yeah, he's a part of a generation of founders who see
2:50
all of us getting sucked into our devices, maybe don't think
2:53
that's a good thing, and he's doing something about it.
2:56
Should we bring him out? Yeah, let's do it.
3:09
Austin and welcome to founder mode.
3:10
We've taken a unique path of blending leadership, community
3:13
building, entrepreneurship to create this kind of real world
3:16
systems that help people live, work and connect better.
3:19
And today we're really talking about what it means to lead with
3:22
purpose, how to build something from scratch, and how to keep
3:25
learning while you're. Building, Yeah, excited to be
3:27
here. Thanks for having.
3:28
Me. Yeah.
3:28
Austin, we're excited to have you.
3:30
You started leading organizations pretty early in
3:32
your career. That's awesome.
3:34
I didn't know before you we connected with you what Sleek
3:37
was. But you started this company,
3:40
you cofounded it that's focused on creating, I think, new
3:43
digital and real world experiences.
3:45
So what was the moment that you realized there was there?
3:48
There was something to. Yeah, So inhale, we, what we do
3:51
is we build an operating system that is designed for
3:54
communication utility only to help you still engage with your
3:59
life without pulling you away from it.
4:01
This started as one conversation back in 2019.
4:04
My buddy and I were both living in China and we saw how helpful
4:07
the phone was. We just wish it didn't have all
4:10
the distractions on it like it did.
4:12
And 2022 we found that nobody was still building something
4:16
with all the communication, all the utility of functionality, so
4:19
we decided to do it ourselves. Dude that's wild.
4:21
Wait, so like you've talked to like literally every user or
4:23
like a lot of the personas of each one?
4:25
For a while, up until probably last month, I spoke to every
4:29
single user and still when everyone makes a call or
4:32
everyone makes an order, I call them within 24 hours, thanking
4:35
them for their order, letting them know, getting their
4:38
background a little bit. What got them interested?
4:40
How did they hear about us? And then now if there's still
4:43
time, I like to do a further ICP interview if it's available.
4:46
Can you share the number, how many of those calls you've made
4:49
if you don't feel comfortable doing that, Maybe order of
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magnitude hundreds, thousands like where we at?
4:53
I've probably done over 200 ICP calls.
4:56
We haven't walked through an Excel sheet and it's already
4:59
through early stage testing. And now as we get closer to full
5:02
release, we're already seeing that ICP chain.
5:05
So initially it was people who are really desperate for a
5:08
problem with no distractions on it, and a lot of them have
5:11
bought 5 or 6 different phones trying to solve this issue.
5:15
But nothing's really fit the mark.
5:17
And now we're getting more people coming from the
5:19
smartphone side who wanted to try something that was able to
5:23
help them disconnect, but it didn't have enough technology.
5:26
But we do need the availability of standard QR codes.
5:29
We do need maps now. We do need to listen to music,
5:32
but we make that possible in a way that there's still no
5:34
distractions on the device. That's awesome, man.
5:37
Yeah. What do you think?
5:38
I was looking at the sites like you have batch 1, batch 9, like
5:40
there's different batches. Are you like doing like 10 at a
5:43
time and like ripping these or you've got 100 of these or 20 at
5:45
a time. What's the batch like look like?
5:47
And is it like some dude like banging out twenty of these by
5:50
hand or? Yeah, that's it's me.
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I'm putting them together, me and my Co founder.
5:54
This is full founder mode. So I'm like him and I are like
5:57
absolutely loving it. Now have some technical
6:00
questions because so much of what you see out there when you
6:03
talk about a new device, a new OS is people are just doing
6:06
Android forks and stuff. So tell me like, what have you
6:08
guys actually built from a software perspective?
6:10
What's yours and what are you just leveraging existing stuff
6:13
like I'm just curious kind of what is the this is smart
6:16
strategy to grab these refurb phones obviously.
6:18
So what else is in that stack right now?
6:19
Yeah. So we're built on a more private
6:21
and secure version of Android called Calyx.
6:24
We utilize them. They're privacy and security
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oriented. It's a little bit better for us
6:29
to come from that standpoint because when you scan QR codes,
6:32
when you open links, when you use two factor authentication or
6:36
some sort of approval process, you need that secure browser to
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make it work. Some sort of approval process,
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you need that secure browser to make it work.
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So we added that into the background of our phone.
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Like you, cuz I have somebody that like did work on Internet
6:49
and built some of these phones and then it's OK, Now you've
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taken a phone, I'm like all right, got it.
6:52
You're working on the hardware that you know, works, working
6:55
with an OS and you're like doing this glue, which is or.
6:58
But then it's like you said, if you delete too many things,
7:00
you're like, oh, it's gonna, it's raining.
7:02
I need to put the roof back on the House.
7:03
Like how much of that kind of stuff are you in that mode?
7:06
We're like, oh, QR codes are important.
7:08
People actually use them for things.
7:10
Yeah, you listen to all of these.
7:12
In these initial ICP interviews, you found initially what the
7:14
pain points were. And we discovered that we had
7:17
something to create going through Reddit so that after
7:20
that conversation in 2022, we drew up our own idea of a phone
7:24
on an index card. And This is why we're still
7:26
living in China. And we stumbled upon Reddit and
7:28
we found everyone in the R slash dumb phone subreddit was like, I
7:32
want a dumb phone but I need Uber.
7:34
I want a dumb phone but I need maps.
7:36
I want a dumb phone but I need my kids baby monitor app.
7:39
So they told you exactly what they want.
7:42
And all the other minimal dumb phones are coming out and
7:44
they're too restrictive. They're not giving the ability
7:47
to do any of that. And for us, we still use
7:49
technology as a tool and we want to be able to utilize that.
7:53
So for us, this 25 to 45 year old young professional right
7:58
now, those are our main ICP because those are the people who
8:01
are most desperate for something like this.
8:03
I'm pretty desperate for it. It's interesting.
8:05
I've been thinking a lot about this.
8:06
So Kevin handles this by being on permanent Do Not Disturb,
8:09
which I make fun of him for relentlessly because like your
8:11
important phone calls and things that just just don't.
8:14
Exactly. Important to him, it's only that
8:16
I love you older. For me, it's a slightly
8:19
different use case, but I feel like I am potentially your
8:21
customer and I, I wonder about the kind of thing you just
8:25
highlighted, which feels like the fatal flaw, which is that
8:28
nobody really wants just a dumb phone that does nothing because
8:33
at the end of the day, they're like, but I need this or I need
8:35
that. So it feels like a really hard
8:37
problem to solve. And I think your take is
8:40
interesting. I just, there's the app creep
8:43
that I imagine happens. We're just gonna add this app
8:45
and I'll add that and suddenly the dumb phone or the phone
8:47
that's not doing anything does everything again and I'm back
8:50
where I started. How do you guys think about
8:52
helping people? There's this brick thing that
8:54
people buy. This locks their phone.
8:56
What is your version of this that helps people get back to
8:59
the whole point of this? Because I feel like we've all
9:01
lost the sauce at this point with with just like absolute
9:04
attention overload. Yeah.
9:06
For us, we're very intentional by what we include inside of our
9:09
App Store. So initially, if you asked
9:11
everybody, a lot of them would say they want E readers,
9:13
language learning, a lot of those, yeah, they're inherently
9:16
good. But for us, our whole goal is to
9:18
find ways to get you off the device and we're using it.
9:21
If it's support to you in daily life and something like an E
9:24
rater or it keeps your intention on the screen, it's not
9:27
something we necessarily want to support because we want your
9:29
attention back in real life. It is hard and there is a lot of
9:32
questions and even within our community we see a lot of good
9:35
conversations about what should and shouldn't be allowed.
9:38
But we're trying to do what we can to be on the error side of
9:41
more restrictive because we do want to support you getting back
9:44
to real life rather than life on the screen.
9:46
And a common conversation is find a perfect dumb phone for
9:49
me. And it's like there's no one
9:51
perfect dumb phone. Like you said, your needs are
9:53
going to be very different than my needs than everybody else's
9:55
needs. So for us, the only way we can
9:58
survive is by getting as many different perspectives as
10:00
possible. And that's where us having
10:02
conversations with our users monthly is a real benefit
10:06
because now I know what's working, what's not working and
10:08
what we need to improve upon and virtually like what do we need
10:12
to cover or what's missing or what's going a little bit over
10:15
the edge and how do we course correct that you.
10:17
Think of that vision being and you keep saying monthly meet
10:20
with people. Is there like a community?
10:22
If you think of your users almost as like joining this
10:24
community and we're all going to wear the same jersey, use the
10:27
same phone and a little bit assimilate to this, sort of do
10:30
you think of it? That, yeah, we sell more than
10:31
just a phone. We're selling the real life
10:33
back, whether that's connections in one way or another.
10:35
And for us in our online community, we're trying to bring
10:38
people together who are all on this journey of trying to
10:41
achieve their goals. And our phones is the mean for
10:44
helping with that goal. And for us, that is a community
10:48
like a lot of minimal phones, it could be a very lonely
10:50
experience because you think you're in it alone.
10:52
And for us, we're trying to put them together and bring people
10:55
together and bring ideas together and make everyone feel
10:58
supported and a part of, OK, I'm not doing this alone.
11:00
There are people in this in my same shoes and so I can
11:03
conversate and talk about how different work grounds are
11:06
benefiting us or what we can do in lieu of one thing or another.
11:10
If you had to pick a word or a couple words, just describe your
11:13
community or sort of the top level thing that you're
11:16
encouraging the product to be built for, but also the people
11:18
like what would you? What word or two words would
11:21
you? That ours is do cool stuff and
11:24
that's because your cool is going to be different than my
11:26
cool. And for us living life and
11:29
whether it's mountain biking, underwater basket weaving or
11:31
hanging out with Capy bears, that's cool in your own realm.
11:34
And we just want to help enable people to remember what that
11:37
stuff is like again. And that's why for us, going out
11:39
and Co hosting different in person events or showing people
11:43
what life is like off the phone again is such a benefit because
11:45
it is easy to addiction hop right?
11:47
We can just give somebody the solution and they just get on
11:50
their computer and spend all that time on their computer.
11:52
Or you can show what people is like beyond the screen and what
11:56
they can do and engage and bring their ideas back and either get
11:59
them back doing hobbies that they enjoyed when they were
12:02
younger or for Gen. Z like getting them out and just
12:04
doing hobbies that's off of technology.
12:06
I love that. And that's something the other
12:08
day that just this keeps coming up in this conversation for me.
12:11
When we dream, we never dream of our you never see your phone in
12:15
your dreams. Think about it for a second like
12:17
you didn't. You've never been like, oh, I'm
12:19
looking at my phone in this dream.
12:21
You're just not. And so there's this idea that
12:23
these are just interfering. That's interfering basically.
12:26
And so I'm thinking more about what is the next generation of
12:30
this. Look, there's a lot happening
12:32
with wearables and AR and voice as the new kind of human
12:36
computer interface. Like imagine you guys are very
12:38
focused on let's just get people off their phones.
12:41
Let's have it be a means to an end as opposed to the end
12:43
itself, which I like a lot as your vision.
12:46
But would I imagine you're also thinking about what does that
12:48
future look like postponed because it's coming pretty
12:51
quickly. And for you guys, what are you
12:52
watching? What are you paying attention
12:54
to? Where is this going?
12:55
Fast forward to 2030. I can't imagine I'm holding a
12:58
phone. So what does that world look
12:59
like? Yeah, For us, it's still using,
13:01
utilizing that new wearable or different technology, still at
13:05
the utmost support for the end user.
13:07
How do you use that as a tool rather than end all be all?
13:10
Because we got away from the phones because it turned into
13:13
from a tool to a full-fledged entertainment device.
13:16
And for us, we're trying to bring back that tool aspect now,
13:19
whether it's the phone, whether it's a watch, whether it's
13:22
glasses, whether it's a PIN, we don't know.
13:25
So we're going to bring that technology and utilize it to the
13:27
best of its ability by just listening to the market and the
13:30
times because it is changing very quickly.
13:33
And we see now like phones are still there, like people have
13:36
tried watches, people have dabbled in glasses and it's
13:39
always come back to the phone, never really went away from the
13:41
phone. So we'll just have to see what
13:43
the market looks like. But for us, our goal is to use
13:47
technology as a tool, no matter what the ad venue it is or it
13:50
goes through. I think we have.
13:51
Ordering yeah and I don't mean you to take this the wrong way
13:54
but it's it reminds me the early days of the App Store and
13:57
basically Steve Jobs is like no porn on the App Store and you're
14:01
taking this role that's like for me sitting across listening
14:04
you'd be like that's not a good app but that one is it's who
14:07
made you the boss of what apps I could have on my phone like if
14:09
you get into this pretty dicey territory of is this a published
14:14
framework you're using like how are you doing this in a way
14:17
where like every time you make a decision to allow or not allow
14:20
an app like it's it is validated by this this rigorous process
14:24
you've developed it's. It's bad apps.
14:27
Good question. We do.
14:28
We're already have some heuristics, so if there's and
14:30
infinite scroll on it, we're never going to include it on the
14:32
phone. If there is, if it helps you
14:34
achieve some sort of technological need in daylight,
14:36
we're going to look at it and see if we can adjust it.
14:39
We are working now on one of our buddies.
14:41
He just graduated with his PhD in machine learning and working
14:45
on some way to measure the distractibility of apps for that
14:49
reason. So we can go and like look, not
14:51
only do we think it breaks, some of these heuristics also breaks
14:54
by size score, which are 60. That's that's there you go.
14:57
Hey, if you use it. Don't forget about me.
15:00
Marketing guide, but then. At the same time, the reason why
15:03
you need somebody else to make the decisions because as soon as
15:06
we are in the deciding pool, we're going to breakthrough it.
15:08
That's why a lot of these time living softwares don't work
15:11
because you just put in your password and get around it or
15:14
you just download or you just uninstall the MDM software
15:17
that's going through this app or you tap the brick.
15:20
We are in the if we are in the driver's seat, we're going to
15:22
choose the path of least resistance.
15:24
You need somebody else to make that decision for you, to set
15:27
you up for success. Yeah, makes sense.
15:30
One last thing before, before we let you go.
15:32
This is super helpful, Austin, what's your, what's your next
15:36
move like? How do you guys go from OK,
15:38
we're like tinkering. We've got these refurb devices,
15:41
we've got this privacy security focused version of Android we're
15:44
building on top of. We have a heuristic for how we
15:47
allow apps. We're interviewing every single
15:48
person that gets the device, like when does it go from that
15:51
to V1 or whatever you want to call it?
15:53
The actual product, that's your phone, your hardware.
15:57
Maybe that's not where you're going with this, but tell me
15:58
what the next phase of this looks like for.
16:00
You guys, I think it's just more optionality.
16:02
You want to give people the option to buy a brand new device
16:05
if they want it on a newer Pixel or a newer device and give them
16:08
that option. If they want something that's a
16:10
little bit more price sensitive, give them that option.
16:13
But don't make digital minimalism a luxury.
16:16
And I think that's what some of these other companies are doing.
16:18
It's like we're going to put a fat price tag on this.
16:20
It's going to be expensive and it's going to be worth it.
16:23
And you know, some for some people it is that is great, not
16:26
practical for everybody. It wasn't practical for myself.
16:29
So you want to make it to where digital minimalism isn't a
16:31
luxury anymore time. It shouldn't be a commodity.
16:34
It should be something that's available for everybody, not a
16:37
luxury. And I think that a lot of people
16:39
are getting away from that, that thought as well.
16:42
So getting towards full release, at least where the operating
16:45
system is out with any critical bugs, there's always going to be
16:48
something small and they're actually shooting for that for
16:50
the by the end of the year. It would be nice to have our own
16:53
device, sure, but I also don't have $1,000,000 laying around to
16:56
drop on hardware. So it's a whole other ball game
16:59
once you get the hardware. And for us, maybe you could get
17:02
a grant. Yeah.
17:03
So for us, it's just listening to people and listening and
17:05
having contingencies. So if one door closes, do we
17:08
have a way and a path forward? We do think 567 steps ahead, but
17:13
we've also gotten this far by just looking at our feet and
17:16
getting to the next step. Austin so good.
17:18
Where can people find you online and get one of these devices if
17:21
they're interested? Yeah, check us on our website.
17:23
It's Sleek dot IOSLEKE dot IO. Feel free to reach out to me,
17:28
Austin at Sleek if you have any questions.
17:30
I'm happy to answer anything. That's incredible.
17:33
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for being here.
17:34
Austin. Any socials that you want to
17:36
promote or any offers you want to give to the Founder Mode
17:38
audience? Yeah, so go ahead.
17:39
And there's a we have an offer of Founders 5 on our website.
17:42
If you do want to get a device, we'll give you a little bit of a
17:45
discount. If you're on Instagram, check us
17:47
out on Sleek Mobile. Yeah, we're on all the other
17:50
socials as well. Awesome.
17:52
Thank you so much for being here, Austin.
17:53
We appreciate you. That was super thoughtful,
17:55
grounded, and just like a totally fresh take on to carry
17:59
that device in your pocket every day.
18:01
Yeah. Thank you.
18:02
Thanks for the time. And dude, that was great, man.
18:05
I was surprised with a bunch of things there in terms of just
18:09
thinking about technically how to build a product where
18:11
typically you look back, people that have kind of kicked off
18:14
these, I'm going to go build a phone project even that are
18:16
people that are pedigreed from Google or Apple.
18:19
And yeah, they raise a ton of money and it takes years to do
18:22
it. The fact that he came up with
18:23
this hack. Super scrappy, yeah.
18:25
We like that's very founder mode.
18:27
I just as we he was talking, it's like, oh man, like
18:30
definitely doing it the founder mode way, like very lean
18:32
startup, really just like getting in there talking to
18:34
every customer. Come on, Hey, come on.
18:36
A props for that. That's people don't do that.
18:39
So I think it was solid overall. What were your Big 5 takeaways,
18:42
Kevin? Yeah, so the top five, really
18:44
this product insight comes from this direct repeated
18:47
conversations, literally calling every user.
18:49
People really want simplicity, but only if the core sort of
18:54
modern utilities don't work. They don't want to fully go back
18:56
to the 1920s or 1930s. They want to still have some bit
19:00
of future heuristics to really say what beats those ad hoc
19:05
decisions when defining like what your product is like, what
19:08
are you looking for to pick that's in or out?
19:10
Where's that line? And then leverage this sort of
19:12
existing infrastructure to just move quicker.
19:14
We talked about reusing pixels and picking up an OS that's
19:18
already out there and just customizing it.
19:20
And then finally, make a solution accessible, right?
19:22
Avoid turning your mission into a luxury.
19:25
Yeah, I liked it. I liked it, Kevin.
19:26
So if this conversation gave you a new perspective on what to
19:30
build that isn't a distraction machine, share it with someone
19:33
building something meaningful. Yeah, and if you haven't
19:36
already, subscribe to Founder Mode.
19:37
Throw us, throw us a comment, share it with somebody.
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It helps us bring stories like this to founders everywhere.
19:43
That's all for today. Just remember, build what people
19:46
will actually use, cut what they won't, and stay close enough to
19:50
your users to know the difference.