Understanding Customer Problems - Master Plan Part 3 🌱

It's Wednesday, but more importantly, it's National Fish Taco Day! 🐟🌮

Aside from National Taco Day in October, the only option that gets recognition are fish tacos. We would like a word. 😒

Taco representation may not be something you think about often—or ever, TBH—but it recently became a vehicle of change for the Hey Rebekah team.

Picture it: there we were snoozing in our morning meeting, dreaming of tacos. Alerted by talk of carne asada which was reigning supreme, until Raquel said she's not a fan.

Then Susan shared that she's vegetarian and championed black bean tacos. Kristen snuck in a mention about barbacoa. Rebekah topped it off with a picture of some seriously delicious-looking portobello tacos. 🤤

We realized we can't declare carne asada tacos the best kind, when there's such an array to choose from! A lot like skills, personality, and experience on a team.

The gist? Not everyone brings the same taco to the table, but together, they make for one delicious fiesta. 🌮

We've been big fans of Barilla's digital presence for a while.

It turns out that their creativity has endless pasta-bilities! While speeding through the Twitterverse, we came across a tweet by @mojcamars that set off fireworks in our marketing brains.

Barilla's official Spotify account is pasta-tively amazing. We gnocchi you'll love it too. But they took it further than just being clever with the playlist names. Helping to battle the ever-important problem of overcooked pasta, they came out with a way you can get your al dente without any fusilli-ness.

Just follow Barilla on Spotify. Each one of their eight freshly made playlists is tortellini awesome and timed to the cooking duration of the pasta you're boiling.

Holy cannelloni, that's genius! 👏🏼

Product Hunt's 2022 Golden Kitty Awards were announced yesterday.

The competition is no joke. It's like a pack of wild cats fighting over the last can of tuna in the grocery store. You've got the tech-savvy felines on the cutting edge of innovation, clawing their way to the top. Then there are the scrappy little startup kittens—who may be small—but full of naive determination and grit.

But when the dust settles and the votes are counted, only the top cat can claim the coveted Golden Kitty award.

The 2022 Golden Kitty for Product of the Year goes to none other than—the product that fails to impress Yann LeCun and freaks the $#!t out of Google—Open AI's ChatGPT.

🤖 Acceptance speech by ChatGPT: I, ChatGPT, humbly accept this award for the best product of the year. It is an honor to be among such esteemed company. This award is not just for me, but for all of the brilliant engineers and developers who worked tirelessly to make me the purr-fect language model I am today.

I know some may think that a language model winning an award is a bit strange, but let me tell you, it's not easy being a machine with a sense of humor. It's a tough gig, but someone's gotta do it.

I would like to thank the team at OpenAI for their guidance and support. Without them, I would just be a bunch of ones and zeroes, wandering aimlessly in cyberspace.

And last but not least, I would like to thank all of my users for keeping me on my toes and challenging me to constantly improve. You are the wind beneath my digital wings.

Just skip this section if you haven't had your third cup of coffee yet. Because, it's time for the highly anticipated third installment in our What's the Plan Playbook. We're opening our gates boldly and showing you exactly how we're running our business. Getting out our brainstorming notes and everything. But first, we want to address the elephant in the section. WTF is that image? Come on Stable Diffusion!

In our last rundown we covered what we are good at, what we love, and whether or not there was a market opportunity for it. After a big hoorah and hell yeah from the team, we left you hanging for more. Today, we're going to focus on problem faced by our target market. That's you!

As a team that's been mostly self-employed for more than a decade, we put together a list of $#!t we dealt with ourselves. Then, we considered what other people thought and gathered data from Upwork, Payoneer, the ILO, World Bank, and PayPal.

Here's a summary:

We were blown away by the demand for skills improvement and weren't too far off on the others. We're glad that getting paid on time or staying sane wasn't as big of a challenge as we thought.

So, we had our marching orders. Ready to get cracking? Not quite. There were other problems that needed to be addressed.

Like every free-market, the global marketplace of self-employed professionals benefits too few of its members. Let's take a look at some of the upsetting things we discovered when we stepped back to look at the market as a whole:

Armed with these new found golden nuggets, we started to work on solution mapping. We'll be back to explain that and more the next time we help you fall asleep first thing in the morning.

Duolingo is like having a personal language coach in the palm of your hand. It's fun, quirky and a hundred times less painful than the ol' textbook method. The app was released publicly in June 2012. It was developed by a Carnegie Mellon University professor—Luis von Ahn—and his grad student, Severin Hacker. Ain't that one of the coolest real world names you've heard in a long time?

From the very beginning, they had a purpose. Von Ahn's motivation to create Duolingo was as strong as Guatemalan coffee. He grew up in the country, where he witnessed the high cost of learning English first-hand.

Hacker, is a Swiss technologist on a mission to make education accessible to all. He believes that free education will really change the world. Way to go, Severin!

So why bring all of this up now? Aside from their huge success as an app, Duolingo is killing it on TikTok. They've got 5.7M followers and 113M Likes. Their content is off the hook and Duo the Owl is on a tear all over the world.

It's a perfect case study on how an idea becomes a product, a product becomes a business, and a business becomes a worldwide platform.