发明 AI 辅助工作的未来

我们有机会去发明人们与软件交互的未来，以及他们如何与这些 AI 事物协同工作。通过捕捉会议，你处于组织中几乎所有其他事情的上游。公司里发生的大部分重要背景信息都在会议中。我们一直认为这就像是我们进入这个领域的一块敲门砖。你打算把产品带向何方？什么样的交互模式能让他们做到 10 倍效率？这需要原型设计、探索和大量的弯路。作为设计师，你如何规划这条路径，同时避免走得太偏？如果你是一名早期设计师，你必须能够同时扮演两种角色，并知道何时运用哪种技能。欢迎来到 Dive Club。我是 Red，这里是设计师永不停歇学习的地方。本周的嘉宾是 Sam Stephenson，Granola 的联合创始人兼设计师。Granola 很快就成了我工作流程中的必备工具，也是当今最热门的新初创公司之一。所以，我们将深入了解他们旅程的完整背景故事，包括他们如何找到正确的问题集，如何穿越想法迷宫，并最终用 AI 打造出一款出色的产品。那么，让我们直接开始，看看他们的故事是如何开始的。

We get to kind of invent the future of how people interact with software and how they kind of work alongside this AI stuff. By capturing the meeting, you're upstream of almost everything else that happens in an org. So much of the most important context of what's going on in a company is in the meetings. And we always thought of this as kind of like it's our foot in the door to be able to play in this space. Where do you take the product from here? What's the interaction pattern that lets them do 10x more? And that's going to take prototyping and exploration and a bunch of wrong turns. How do you even think about carving that path as a designer where you don't want to go too far in one direction? If you're an early stage designer, you've got to be able to kind of wear both hats and know when to deploy which skill. Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Red and this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Sam Stephenson, who's the co-founder and designer of Granola, which has pretty quickly become a staple of my workflow and is easily one of today's hottest new startups. So, we're going to get the full backstory of their journey, including how they figured out the right set of problems to solve, everything that it took to navigate the idea maze, and ultimately create a great product with AI. So, let's dive right in to figure out how their story started.

我辞了职，然后搞了一些副业。Chris 也辞了职，想看看接下来做什么。我们是在那段时间的中途认识的，之前并不认识，然后我们开始一起玩，基本上就是一起捣鼓各自的副业项目，这样做了几个月。当时我在做一个自己的笔记应用，一个通用型的笔记应用。Chris 呢，我觉得他发现了 GPT3。这很难让人回到那个时间点，但那是 ChatGPT 之前。我觉得他的想法是，这将会改变技术的一切，但如何应用它、用例是什么、我们如何与这个新事物交互，这些都不明显。所以他只是做一些小东西，去试探一下语言模型可能实现什么。我们确实钻了一些牛角尖。我们讨论过如何改变，比如构建一种新的笔记应用，或者一种思维工具类的产品，成为你的第二大脑，我们可以通过 AI 自动组织一切来实现。我们有过几次这样的对话，然后很快意识到这是一个陷阱，我觉得我以前在做产品时肯定也掉进去过，而且我认为这是产品构建者中常见的问题：试图自上而下地设计一个漂亮的系统，规定软件应该如何工作、你应该如何使用它，这真的很诱人。但我觉得有用的东西不是这样构建的。有用的东西是通过找到某人工作流程中的痛点，找到他们做不了或做不好的地方，然后专注于那个点，构建一个东西来帮助他们把那一件事做得更好，然后你可以构建下一个、再下一个，最终你会到达一个更广阔的领域。但我想，经过几次对话后，我们意识到我们掉进了陷阱，需要退一步。

I quit my job and was like messing around with side projects. Chris had quit his job to figure out what to do next as well. We met like halfway through that so we didn't know each other and then we started uh hanging out and basically just jamming on our own side projects together and we had a period of a few months just doing that. I think at the time I was building my own note-taking app like a general purpose kind of note-taking app. Chris was like, I think had discovered GPT3. This was it's like hard to put yourself back in that time, but this was like pre- chat GPT. I think his thinking was like this, you know, this is going to change everything in technology and and uh and like but it's not obvious how to apply it, like what the use cases are going to be and how we're going to interact with this new thing. Um, so he was kind of just like building little things to kind of poke and prod at what might be possible with with LMS. We kind of went down a few rabbit holes, I guess. Like we we talked about how could we kind of change like build a a new kind of note-taking app or like a tools for thought type product that um would be the kind of your second brain and we could do that kind of all automatically through AI organizing everything. And we had a couple of those conversations and then we very quickly realized that this was like a it's like a trap that I think I've definitely been in before building products and I think it's a common one among like product builders where like uh it's real tempting to try and like design this this beautiful system from the top down of like how how a piece of software should work and how you should use it. It's real seductive, you know, and but I think that's not how like useful things actually get built. they get like useful things get built by like figuring out point in someone's workflow where they're struggling with a thing or whether they're they're not able to do it and just focusing on that and trying to like build a thing to to help them do you know do just one thing better and then you can build the next one and the next one and and eventually you get somewhere you know broader than that but yeah I think it took a couple of conversations and then we realized like ah we've fallen into the trap we need to take a step back

我想在那个时候，我们刻意决定放下工具，暂时不构建任何东西，而是去和人交谈。我们知道我们想在 AI 工作工具领域工作或构建产品。所以我们给自己定了一个非常粗略的目标：和十几二十个人聊聊他们的工作，看看他们的一天。看看他们一天中哪些地方很糟糕，哪些事情占用了不该占用的时间，哪些事情你后悔花了时间，哪些事情你希望少做。就是那种感觉，像是在人们的一天中寻找问题。

I think at that point We deliberately decided we're going to like down tools and not build anything for a little bit and we're just going to talk to people. We knew we wanted to work in or build in the kind of AI work tools space. So we kind of started with a super highle brief to ourselves. It was just like let's talk to a dozen two dozen people about their work you know and just like look at their day. Look at you know what sucks about your day. What what takes up time where it shouldn't do? What stuff do you regret having spent time on? What would you like to do less of? That kind of thing. just kind of fishing for problems I guess in in people's days.

一旦你确定了问题的大致范围，你们进行了哪些初步实验？总的来说，在早期你们是如何从人们那里学习的？

Once you'd identified that ballpark of problems, what were some of those initial experiments that you were running? And in general, what were you doing to learn from people in those early days?

我作为一名设计师，做用户研究已经很久了，通过反复试验我发现，观察人们实际做什么，与仅仅询问他们认为自己做什么，会得到截然不同的结果。我们很快注意到，在与人谈论他们的工作时，人们口头描述的东西往往是非常美好的画面，与他们真实的工作生活相去甚远。我们发现一个非常有用的方法是，我们会和某人坐在一起，看着他们的日历，然后让他们逐项回顾，比如“好的，昨天 9 点，告诉我你在做什么，然后 9:15、9:30、9:45”，实际上把对话锚定在真实的事情上，这样他们就不能事后合理化自己的时间安排，这帮助我们获得了更真实的洞察，了解他们的工作生活是什么样的。一个反复出现的常见问题是：“我记笔记很糟糕，所以我不知道会议后该做什么。我忘记了自己承诺过的事情。这造成了很大的压力。”

I've been a designer and doing user research for a long time and have found through trial and error that like observing what people actually do gives you very different results to just asking people like what they think they do. I think we noticed pretty quickly talking to people about their work that people like the things people would verbalize were often kind of like very rosy pictures of what what their real work life is like. One thing we found super helpful was like we would sit with someone and like look at their calendar and then get them to basically go like blowby-blow be like cool like it's 9:00 yesterday tell me what you were doing and then 9:15 9:30 9:45 and actually grounding the conversation in the real thing where they couldn't like postrationalize what they were doing with their time helped us get much more realistic I think kind of insight into what their work life was like and one common thing that came up again and again was like I suck at taking notes and therefore I don't know what I'm supposed to do after the meeting. I lose track of the things I promised. That causes a lot of stress.

当我们观察人们实际如何记笔记时，基本上有两种模式。第一种是你在通话中疯狂地转录所有内容。我就是这样。这真的是一个分裂，每个类别里都有很多人。另一种是几乎不记笔记的人。他们只记一两个小涂鸦，通常是一些后来毫无意义的东西。就像一段随机的胡言乱语，当时对他们有意义，但一小时后你再看，就像纸上的垃圾。

When we looked at how people actually took notes, basically like you get you get two modes. Mode one is you are like furiously transcribing everything that's been said on the call. Um that's me. Yeah, it's a it's it's it's a real split, you know, there's a lot of a lot in each bucket. And um the flip side of that was people who barely take any notes. They take like one or two little scribbles often things that like don't make sense later. You know, it's like a random piece of gibberish which meant something to them at the time but didn't you know you could look at it like an hour later and it looks like junk on a piece of paper.

另一个有趣的事情是，AI 笔记工具在当时已经出现了一段时间，我们采访过的很多人尝试过它们。每个尝试过的人都被这个想法迷住了，但在实践中发现它并没有那么有用。很多人只是让它在通话中运行，但之后再也不回去看那些内容。当我们追问原因时，发现转录实际上并不是一个非常有用的会议产物。它们太详细了。

I guess another thing that was in the mix which was interesting was AI notetakers had already kind of been on the scene for a while at this point and a lot of the people we talked to who had tried them. Everyone we spoke to who tried them had kind of been enamored with the idea of it but then in practice just hadn't found it that useful. Lots of folks would just kind of leave it running on the call but then never go back to stuff afterwards. When we interrogated why a bit on that like I think things that came up were transcripts are not actually a very useful artifact from a meeting. They're too detailed.

我倾向于把它看作通话的原始素材，实际上我不认为会议结束后你还应该去看它。它太嘈杂了。而这些工具把转录文本当作主要界面，至少当时是这样。基本上，我们收到的反馈是，其中 90% 的内容对我没用。我真正想要的只是我说过要做的那两三件事，或者我需要从这次会议中带走的东西，我只想能记住它们。所以，人们发现很难记笔记。这些工具并没有为他们解决问题。感觉我们可以在这方面做点什么，比如有空间去构建更好的东西。

I kind of like to think of it like the raw material of a call and it's not actually something I think that you should be looking at really after the meeting's over. It's too full of noise. And these tools present the transcript as kind of the main interface, or at least they did at the time. Basically, the feedback we got was that like 90% of it isn't useful to me. What I really just want is like the two or three things that I said I would do or that I need to take away from this meeting and I just want to be able to remember that. So, you know, people were finding it hard to write notes. These tools weren't solving the problem for them. And it felt like, you know, we could do something with that, like there was a space to build something better there.

快速插播一条消息，然后我们回到正题。你知道我一直在讲我怎么用 Genway 做 AI 研究吗？嗯，有件令人惊讶的事正在发生。简单说一下背景，我用 Genway 有两种方式。一种是情境访谈。我告诉 AI 我想了解什么，它会和每个人进行动态对话。第二种是可用性测试。我上传一个 Figma 原型，他们的 AI 智能体帮我与世界各地的人进行测试。我是说，你应该看看那些追问的质量，相当惊人。但令人惊讶的是，在访谈结束时，大多数人表示他们更愿意向 AI 智能体敞开心扉，而不是真人。这又是我对这个产品着迷的一个原因。如果你想试试，甚至有一个专为 Dive Club 听众准备的秘密页面，可以免费获得 2 个月的使用权和 10 个招募名额。只需访问 dive.club/genway。就是 G N W A Y。Raycast 有一个新公告，但可能不是你想象的那样。他们与 Terminal 合作推出了 Flow Coffee，并发布了一个漂亮的幕后视频。我抢到了一袋，不仅仅是因为我喜欢咖啡，而且 Terminal 的网站显然很美。整件事反映了 Raycast 作为一家公司所关心和代表的东西。他们对质量和做出自己引以为豪的事物的承诺远远超出了生产力范畴，这让我为支持他们而感到自豪。所以，一定要看看新的 Terminal 合作款。你可以在 dive.club/coff 了解更多。好了，现在回到节目。

Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. So, you know how I've been talking about how I use Genway to do research with AI? Well, something surprising is happening. And just for context, I use Genway in two different ways. One is contextual interviews. So I prompt the AI with what I'm hoping to learn and it has a dynamic conversation with each person. And the second is usability testing. So I upload a Figma prototype and their AI agent helps me test them with people all over the world. I mean, you should see the quality of the follow-up questions. It's pretty crazy. But here's the surprising part. At the end of the interview, most people say they're more comfortable opening up to an AI agent than a real human. And it's just another reason why I'm hooked on the product. If you want to try it out, there's even a secret landing page just for dive club listeners, which gets you 2 months free and 10 credits to recruit people. Just head to dive.club/genway. That's G N W A Y. Raycast has a new announcement, but it's not what you'd expect. It's a partnership with Terminal to create a Flow Coffee, and they released this beautiful behind-the-scenes video to go with it. And I scooped a bag, but not just because I love coffee, and obviously the Terminal website is beautiful. The whole thing is a window into what Raycast cares about and stands for as a company. And their commitment to quality and making things that they're proud of goes way beyond productivity, and it makes me proud to support them as a company. So, definitely check out the new Terminal Collab. You can learn more at dive.club/coff. Okay, now on to the episode.

有没有一个明确的时刻，你意识到，好吧，我们找到方向了？

Was there a clear moment where you realized like, okay, we're on to something here.

说实话，我觉得清楚的时候要晚得多，我不知道。我想在那个时候，我们还在尝试这个、尝试那个。

The clear I think a lot later honestly like I don't know. I think at this point we were still in just like let's try this, let's try that.

大概跟我聊聊你当时尝试的不同事情吧，比如你做了哪些实验？

Probably talk to me a little bit about what are some of the different things that you were trying then like what were those experiments that you were running?

我们试过，早期尝试的一件事是一个非常简单的交互：你输入一个关于过去 30 秒内所说内容的词，这个工具会在后台运行转录，当你输入那个词时，它能把它扩展成一个要点，一个有用的片段。那个原型就只是这样。它就像一个网页 UI，没有数据库，没有存储。你一次只能做一个。只是为了测试这种交互：写点东西，按 Tab，让它自动补全一个句子。那感觉很有希望，而且那个方向让我们想继续推进。我们还试过其他一些，更像是会议中可点击的按钮，比如标记这一刻，或者那是一个行动项，或者那是一个我想引用的东西。我想未来我们可能会以某种形式重新考虑其中一些。但至少在当时，我们没能让它感觉毫不费力。你必须记得工具在那里，还要移动鼠标去点击按钮，所有这些都会让你脱离会议，这不是我们想要的。是的，就是这类事情。我们刻意只尝试单个交互，而不担心基础设施或整个产品。我想我们的想法是，如果我们能把这个单一交互做好，那么也许可以围绕它构建一个产品，但就是这个单一交互，必须感觉毫不费力。

We tried, I guess one thing we tried early on was like a very simple interaction where you would type a word about something that was said in the last 30 seconds or whatever and this tool would have the transcript running in the background and so when you type that word it could kind of flesh that out into a bullet, into a useful piece. That prototype was literally just that. It was like a web UI with no database behind it, no storage. You could only do one of these at a time. It was just to try out the interaction of like write a thing, hit tab, get it to autocomplete a sentence. That felt promising, you know, and that one felt pushing on further. We tried a bunch of other ones that were more like buttons you could hit during a meeting like just like bookmark this moment or like that was an action item or that was a quote that I want to get kind of thing. We might come back to them, I think, in some form some of them in the future. But like at least at the time we kind of failed to make it feel like a really effortless thing. You have to kind of remember that the tool is there and you got to move your mouse and go click the button and all of that takes you out of the meeting which is not what we want to do. Yeah, it was things like that. It was like deliberately just trying out individual interactions without worrying about the infrastructure or the whole product around it. We kind of I guess the thinking was like if we can nail this one thing then we can probably build a product around it but it's just the one thing it's got to feel really effortless.

知道你们最终的结果，再听到你们从这么多不同角度同时进行探索，这很酷。有没有明确的转折点，或者某个时刻你有了某种洞察，让你走上正轨，最终形成了我们今天看到的产品？

It's cool knowing where you arrived and then hearing all of the different explorations where you really were attacking this from so many different angles all at once. Were there clear like tipping points or maybe a moment where you had some kind of an insight that put you on the right track which ultimately manifested as the product that we see today.

我想我们一边构建这些原型，一边展示给人们看，他们的反应很大程度上决定了我们认为什么有趣。例如，书签和收藏功能当时对我们来说是个好主意。我们把它放在人们面前，让他们在会议中使用，但大多数人基本上都忘了，或者他们觉得这是个好主意，但只用了一次，结果实际上并不那么有用。我提到的第一个原型最终更有生命力，我们沿着它走了更长时间。那是一个真正让人们一看就懂的东西。就像瞬间的“哦，对，就应该这样”，完全说得通。

I guess we would be showing these prototypes to people kind of as we built them and people's reaction to them was like a lot of what we used to decide what was interesting or not. Like for example, the bookmarking and favoring stuff felt like a good idea to us at the time. We put it in front of people and ask them to do a meeting with it and they would mostly just forget honestly or they would think it was a good idea but then they would hit it just once and then the result wouldn't actually be that useful. The one I the first one I mentioned that ended up having more legs and we kind of ran with that for a bit longer and that was like a real people got it when you looked at it. It was like an instant like oh yeah that's how it should be like that just you know that makes total sense.

你指的是那种自动补全，那么你们是如何在此基础上构建的呢？

You're talking about kind of like the autocomplete once you're auto so how'd you build off of that?

我们基本上构建了一个概念验证产品，围绕那个交互。基本上是最小可行产品，你可以用它进行实际会议并获取会议笔记。那是在 2022 年圣诞节前后。我记得坐在我家餐桌旁构建这个，它是一个单页网页应用，富文本编辑器，我们只有这一个交互：它在后台转录，你输入一个词，按 Tab，它就会自动补全一个句子。你可以把它想象成 GitHub Copilot 之类的东西，但需要你更多引导，比如你写下你想要的内容主题。这个应用真的很简陋，并不复杂。没有数据库，所以没有长期记忆。你必须把笔记复制粘贴到 Notion 或 Notes 或其他你想保存的地方。没有用户账户。转录完全通过电脑扬声器完成，所以你不能用耳机。

We basically built like a proof of concept product I guess at that point like around that interaction. Basically the minimum thing you could use to do an actual meeting with and use it to get meeting notes. This was over like Christmas 2022. I remember sitting at the dining table of my family's house building this and it was like a single page web app I guess, rich text editor and we just had this one interaction where you would it would transcribe in the background you would type a word hit tab and it would autocomplete a sentence. You can think of it like a GitHub Copilot or something but with a bit more nudging from you like you write the word that you want the thing to be about. It was really dumb like the app. It wasn't really unsophisticated. There was no database behind it. So, no long-term memory for the app. You had to copy paste your notes out of it into Notion or Notes or wherever you wanted to keep it afterwards. There's no user accounts. The transcription was all done through the speakers of your computer. So, you couldn't use headphones.

你得让声音出来再回去才能转录。那个问题其实存在了很久，我们大概有六个月没修。真是个大工程。

You had to just let the sound come out and back in again to be transcribed. That one stuck around for a long time actually. We didn't fix that for like six months. It was a mission.

你从什么时候开始觉得这是一个可以融资、真正去做的创业项目？

At what point did you start thinking of this as a startup that you were going to raise money for and really go after?

我在副项目阶段待了更久。我觉得 Chris 是铁了心想找下一个创业方向，而我很乐意捣鼓点东西，做个酷玩意儿，有人喜欢就好。转折点应该是 Cleo——我们认识了他，他和 Chris 断断续续聊了几个月，一直到那年圣诞节前。大概一月份我们跟他聊了一次，给他看了我们做的东西。他挺感兴趣的——倒不是说特别喜欢这个想法，但我觉得从我们当时的状态到现在的进展，轨迹看起来很有希望。那时候他基本就说：‘我可能加入。如果你们考虑融资，算我一个。’我不知道 Chris 怎么想，但对我来说，那是个真实的时刻，感觉像是一个转折点。我从来没有过别人这样支持我，相信我能做出点名堂。

I was in side project land for longer. I think Chris was kind of set on trying to figure out what his next startup would be. I was happy tinkering and making a thing that was cool and people liked. I think the tipping point was Cleo, who we got to know, had been chatting with Chris on and off for a few months before Christmas that year. I think we had a conversation with him in January where we showed him what we built. He was into it—or I don't think he was into this idea particularly, but I think the trajectory was starting to look promising from where we'd come to where we were now. At that point he basically said, 'I might be in. If you guys are thinking about raising, then count me in.' I don't know what it was like for Chris, but for me that was real, that felt like a moment. I've never had somebody express backing for me like that and believe that you could get somewhere good with it.

我想那会重塑你对这件事可能变成什么样的想法。

I'd imagine that reshapes even what you're thinking of in terms of what this could become at that point.

是的。那个月我做了很多自我反思，想清楚该怎么安排时间。我当时还同时做着两三个其他项目，决定放弃它们、全身心投入这件事，是一个过程。现在听起来显然是个好主意，但当时我真的不确定该怎么做。

Yeah. I had a lot of soul-searching that month on what I was going to do with my time. I was kind of two-timing or three-timing with other projects as well, and deciding to let those go so I could just be all in on this was a process. It sounds like an obviously good idea now, but back then I was really not sure what to do.

现在这个产品很多地方对我来说都很直观，这也是我觉得它很棒的原因。但即使在我们之前的简短讨论中，走到这一步也是一条曲折的路。所以我很想了解这条曲折的路，因为你们达到了这种有依据的简洁。你们在圣诞节有了那个时刻。大多数人熟悉的 Granola 是一个精致的 Mac 应用，开箱即用，有漂亮的引导流程。帮我们填补一下这个差距吧。在你下定决心全力投入之后，你们是怎么真正设计产品的？

A lot of the product feels obvious to me right now, which is why I think it's so good. But even in our short discussions before this, it's been a winding path to get to this point. So a big part of the conversation I really want to understand is the winding path, because you have reached this place of informed simplicity. You have this moment on Christmas. Most people are familiar with Granola as this polished Mac app that's ready to go out of the box with beautiful onboarding. Help us bridge that gap a little bit. What were you doing to really design the product after you made this mental switch to go all in?

一开始，我们只是把应用数字版发给朋友，说‘嘿，试试这个，告诉我们你的想法。’但从中收获甚微。我们很快意识到，人们通常太忙了，没空试一个东西。而且我们当时的工具也很烂。我们可以通过观察别人使用来获得有用的洞察，但你必须打个电话或者给他们一个理由去试，否则他们不值得花时间。不过，确实有几个人很早就说：‘我相信你们，我从现在开始所有会议都用 Granola。’特别是我们的一个投资人 Michael，他就是这样的，而且他坚持下来了。据我所知，他之后的每一次会议都用 Granola。这帮助太大了，因为一开始它几乎没法用。我敢说 Michael 的 AirPods 都积灰了。他是一个真正的投资人，创业公司向他推销，他需要做出价值数百万美元的决定，而他用的就是我们这个烂工具来做决定。我们非常感激他坚持了下来。但真正有帮助的是，他会向我们抱怨，而且是真的抱怨——比如‘伙计们，我需要这个功能，但它做不到我需要的事。’所以反馈的质量比那些空想‘什么可能很酷’的人高得多。然后我们尝试了很多东西，很多不同的交互方式。我之前提到的 Tab 自动补全功能——我们花了很长时间想让它工作。背后的想法很诱人：基本上你可以实时做笔记，和 AI 实时协作。这感觉很科幻，甚至比现在的 Granola 还酷。但当我们观察人们使用时，问题很快就出现了。我们不断听到：‘每次 Granola 写笔记，我都得检查它写了什么。我不相信它写得好，除非我看过。而一旦我看笔记，我就脱离了会议，不再专注于对话了。’而 Granola 的初衷正是让你更专注于对话，而不是更不专注。我们尝试了很多办法来缓解这个问题。我们把笔记写得更短，改成引用而不是总结性的要点。我们给了你更多控制，比如召唤一个待办事项的方式。就是想方设法缩小你脑子里想的内容和 AI 写在纸上的内容之间的差距。但不知道怎么回事，我们始终没做到。我觉得，只要你想的和 AI 生成的有差距，如果你不能实时修改，就会很沮丧，而且你总会忍不住去看屏幕上的内容。

At first, we just started sending the app digitally to people, like our friends, and being like, 'Hey, try this out and tell us what you think.' And we really didn't get much from that. I think very quickly we realized that people are usually too busy to try a thing. Also, the tool we had sucked at the time. We could get useful insight from watching people use it, but you had to be on a call or give them a reason to try it. Otherwise, it wasn't worth their time. To caveat that, we did have a couple of people who very early on were like, 'I believe in you guys. I'm going to use Granola from now for all of my meetings.' Michael, one of our investors in particular, was like this, and he stuck to it. As far as I can tell, every one of his meetings since then, he's used Granola. That was so helpful, because it was kind of unusable at the beginning. I'd say Michael's AirPods were gathering dust. He's a real investor, startups are pitching him, he's got to make decisions worth millions of dollars, and he's using our shitty tool to make those decisions. We owe a lot to him for sticking with it. But what really helped was that he would complain at us, and it was real complaining—like, 'Guys, I need this and it's not doing the thing I need it to do.' So the quality of the feedback was so much higher than someone pontificating about what they think might be cool. Then we were just trying a lot of stuff, trying a lot of different interactions. The tab autocomplete thing I talked about before—we tried a long time to make that work. The idea behind it felt very seductive: basically you could do all your note-taking in real time and be kind of real-time partnering with the AI. It felt very sci-fi. It still feels cooler than using Granola today. But the more we watched people using it, problems came up very quickly. We kept hearing things like, 'Every time Granola writes a note, I need to check what it said. I don't trust that it's going to be good until I've looked at it. And as soon as I look at the note, I'm out of the meeting and I'm not present in the conversation anymore.' That's the whole point of Granola—you should be more present in the conversation because you're using it, not less. We tried lots of things to mitigate this. We made the notes way shorter. We turned them into quotes rather than summarized bullet points. We gave you more control, like ways to summon an action item. Just ways to narrow the gap between what you had in your head and what the AI produced on the paper. But I don't know, we never really got there. As soon as there is a gap between what you want and what the AI produces, it's frustrating if you can't change it in real time, and you can't help but gravitate towards looking at that on the screen.

放弃一个你很可能已经投入了几个月感情的想法，是什么感觉？

What was it like letting go of an idea that you probably established a bit of an emotional attachment to over the months?

很难。我们很长时间都没放弃。我们做的只是不断添加更多功能。应用一开始很简单，但基本上每个实验我们都加进去，而且很少删东西。所以到了某个时候——我记不清是几个月后了——我们就觉得：‘好吧，这个实时功能不太确定，咱们换个思路吧。’

It was tough. We didn't let go of it for a long time. What we did was we just added more stuff. The app started out simple, but basically every experiment we tried we just added it and added it into the app, and we didn't often take things away. So at some point, I can't remember how many months in it was, but we were like, 'Cool, this real-time thing is not sure. Let's try a different approach.'

我们试试看，把你写在某一列的内容都拿出来，然后回放。那时候界面里有很多列，我们把所有你写的笔记都收集起来，在通话结束后单独生成一份摘要。看看效果如何。如果大家喜欢，就会用摘要功能；如果不喜欢，可能还会继续用实时记录。我不知道这是不是一种好的尝试方法，只是不断添加功能。这让产品变得极其复杂，很难上手。你废弃掉的交互和界面设计，比现在上线的东西多得多。我本来也知道这一点，但听你说了之后，才意识到我确实低估了你尝试和实验的规模。我该把所有东西都汇总到一个 Figma 板子上。能看到所有迭代过程一定很酷。

Let's just try taking whatever you wrote from one column and like it back. Back then there were many columns in the UI, and we take all the notes you wrote and put them in a summary separately after the call. Let's see what happens. If people like it, they'll use the summary thing; if they don't, maybe they'll keep using the real-time thing. I don't know if it was a great methodology for trying out ideas, just adding and adding. It made the product horrifically complex looking and really hard to get to grips with. The pile of interactions and UI that you've discarded is so much bigger than what is in production today. I knew that, but listening to you talk, it's clear I really underestimated just how much you've experimented and tried. I need to aggregate it all in one big Figma board or something. It would be cool to see all the iterations.

我想聊聊你过去的经历，因为你提到你一直在实验和从事笔记、思维工具、第二大脑这个领域。那么这段经历是如何影响你对 Granola 的设计思路的？

I want to talk a little bit about your past experience because you mentioned that you were experimenting and working in this note-taking, tools for thought, second brain space. So how did that experience influence the way that you thought about the design for Granola?

在 Granola 之前，我在好几家创业公司做过设计师，我一直对这个领域很感兴趣，自己也捣鼓过笔记应用。有一个叫 Workflowy 的工具已经存在很多年了，10 年前我就热衷于为它制作主题，因为它功能很好但界面很丑，我想做出更漂亮的主题。最近我在一家叫 Ideaflow 的公司工作，他们做的是通用记事本，你把所有想法打进去，Ideaflow 会帮你整理，帮你理清更大的思路。在这个领域待了这么久，我和很多用户以及使用这类产品的人聊过。我自己也算其中之一。你会发现，使用第二大脑笔记知识管理工具时，那种模式是一种非常反思性的、慢思考的操作方式。心理学家丹尼尔·卡尼曼有一个著名的概念叫系统 1 和系统 2 思维。系统 1 就像我们大脑的动物部分，是脑干，非常反应性和恐慌，旨在让你活着并躲避捕食者。系统 2 是前额叶皮层，大脑的前部，负责推理和理性思考，能解决复杂问题。我认为很多思维工具领域都假设我们是系统 2 生物，能够进行非常复杂的推理和理性思考。这在一定程度上是对的——人类确实能解决极其复杂的问题，成为非常复杂的思考者。但不幸的是，我认为很多实际工作更多是系统 1 驱动的。如果你看看人们的日常工作，如果你在电脑上工作，你会过度承诺，答应为不同的人做 10 件事，开会迟到，努力跟上待办事项或收件箱。所有这些都让你处于一种反应模式。在这个领域设计的一个棘手之处在于，如果你假设用户是系统 2 的理性思考者，就会与现实冲突。实际上，你的用户很多时候只是在努力跟上信息的洪流和他们承诺的事情，他们根本没有时间按照你认为的方式使用你的产品。未来，你可以从过去一周的所有会议中退后一步，看看会议中的模式，或者不同客户通话中浮现出来的东西，花时间梳理有趣的事情。但这不是我们想从 Granola 开始的地方。我们知道我们想在会议中提供实用性，而会议是一种压力很大的情况，所以我们需要先解决系统 1 大脑的问题，其他事情可以以后再说。

I've been a designer for a bunch of startups before Granola, and I've always been into this space, hacking on note-taking apps myself. There's a tool called Workflowy which has been around for donkey's years, and I was big into making themes for it like 10 years ago because it was great but really ugly. I was trying to make prettier themes for it. More recently, I was at a company called Ideaflow, who were building a general-purpose notepad where you type all your thoughts in, and Ideaflow helps organize it for you, helps you make sense of bigger ideas. Through all this time spent in that space, I've spoken to a lot of users and people who use products like this. I count myself as one of those types of people too. One thing you see is that using a kind of second brain note-taking knowledge organization tool, when you're in that mode, it's a very reflective, slow-thinking way of operating. There's this psychologist Daniel Kahneman who has this famous concept of System 1 and System 2 thinking. System 1 is like the animal part of our brain, the stem of your brain, very reactive and panicky, designed to keep you alive and running from predators. System 2 is the prefrontal cortex, the front part of your brain that does reasoning and rational thought and can solve complex problems. I think a lot of the tools for thought space works on the assumption that we are System 2 creatures, capable of very complex reasoning and rational thought. And I think that's partially true—humans can solve incredibly complex problems and be very sophisticated thinkers. But I think a lot of real work, unfortunately, is much more System 1. If you look at people's day-to-day, if you work on a computer, it's a lot of overpromising people, promising that you'll do these 10 things for different people, being late to meetings, struggling to keep on top of your to-do list or your inbox. All of that puts you in quite a reactive mode. A tricky part of designing in this space is that if you assume the user is a System 2 rational thinker, it clashes with reality. Actually, your users are probably a lot of the time just trying to keep up with the deluge of information and things they promised, and they're just not going to have the time to engage with your product in the way you think they should. In the future, you'll be able to take a step back from all your meetings in the last week and look at patterns from the meetings you've had, or things bubbling up from different customer calls, and take the time to wade through interesting things. But that's not where we wanted to start with Granola. We knew we wanted to give you utility in a meeting, which is a stressful situation, so we needed to solve for System 1 brain first, and we could get to the other stuff later.

这个高层次原则如何转化为界面的外观和感觉？

How does that high-level principle translate into what the interface looks and feels like?

我觉得主要是我们尽量无情地优先考虑核心流程：从通知开始会议，记下你关心的几件事，最后得到很棒的笔记，整个过程无缝进行，你不需要在会议中想着 Granola。这有取舍。我认为 Granola 的很多边缘功能，比如模板，发现性远远不够。人们经常过了六个月才发现有模板或者可以查看转录。我想修复其中一些问题，但核心就是无情地关注核心流程，并尽可能让它无缝。

I'd say the main thing is that we just try to ruthlessly prioritize the core flow: starting a meeting from the notification, jotting down a few things that you care about, and getting really great notes at the end, and that happening seamlessly without you needing to think about Granola during the meeting. It has trade-offs. I think a lot of the features on the edges of Granola, like templates, are not nearly discoverable enough. People regularly go six months before they realize that templates exist or that you can view the transcript. I would like to fix a few of those things, but it's just ruthless attention to the core flow and making that as seamless as we can.

我们能聊聊查看转录这件事吗？因为你把它放在一个很小的弹出对话框里，很明显是二等公民。联系到你将转录视为原始材料的观点，这在多大程度上是有意与现有产品区分开来，或者是你对今天什么才是好的笔记工具的看法，而不仅仅是因为有很多移动部件，结果就变成了那样？

Can we talk about viewing the transcript for a second? Because you put that in this tiny little popover dialogue where it is very clearly a second-class citizen. Tying back to your view of the transcript as a raw material, how much of that is intentional differentiation from existing products or your opinion of what makes a good note-taking tool today versus just having a bunch of moving pieces and that's the way it ended up?

是的，我们在转录功能上经历了一段旅程，我觉得现在还没有达到理想状态。我认为随着时间的推移，我们可以让它变得更好。当我们与使用现有笔记工具的人交谈时，很快就发现转录基本上没什么用，除了非常特定的情况，但总的来说帮助不大。所以，我们把它放在一个 400 像素的框里。甚至更小。一开始，我们把它隐藏了。那是 V1 版本，根本没有转录。就是一张白纸，上面有一个小小的录音指示器，你打字，按 Tab 键，就完了。没有转录。

Yeah, we've been on a journey with the transcript and I feel like we still haven't got it in ideal form right now. I think we can make it better over time too. When we were talking to folks who used existing notetakers, it became apparent very quickly that the transcript was kind of useless, except for very specific things, but generally speaking, not very helpful. So, you put it in a 400 pixel box. Not even. At the beginning, we hid it. That was V1. It was like no transcript. It was literally a white sheet of paper with a little listening indicator, and you would type stuff, hit tab, and that was it. No transcript.

很快人们就说：‘第一，我分不清这东西是不是开着、是不是在工作，我不信任它。第二，这个笔记感觉像是……但我分不清是不是真的，我不知道这里到底说了什么。’第三，我觉得我们后来发现的转录的另一个用途就是，实时看到内容对很多人理解对话非常有帮助。尤其是非英语母语者，他们常常很感激能在对话过程中实时看到文字版的对话。有点像字幕吧。我们算是妥协了。一开始我们把它放在侧边栏，在侧边栏放了很久。总是很小，而且我觉得是故意让它难读。我想我们希望层级感非常强，让笔记成为 Granola 的核心。那就是 Granola 的本质——它只是你记笔记的地方，而转录是辅助性的东西，你想看可以看，但平时不应该去想它。它在 UI 里移动过几次，但一直都很小、很难读，我觉得应该让它有点摩擦感，你知道，用起来有点费劲。它被藏在点击后面是有原因的。

And very quickly, people were like, 'One, I can't tell if the thing is on if it's working. I don't trust it is working. Two, this note feels like but I can't tell if it's or not. I don't know what was actually said here.' And three, like I think another utility of the transcript which we discovered over time was just like having the thing coming in in real time is like really helpful for a lot of people in just understanding the conversation. Especially non-native English speakers, I think, often appreciate being able to see the conversation printed in words in real time during the conversation. It's like subtitles, I guess. We kind of conceded that. We put it in a sidebar at the beginning. Was in the sidebar for a long time. Always like much smaller and I guess kind of deliberately hard to read. Like I think we wanted the hierarchy to feel very strong where your notes were the thing in Granola. Like that's what Granola is. It's just a place for your notes and the transcript is like this supporting thing which you can look at if you want but otherwise you shouldn't be thinking about. It's moved around the UI a few times but like it's always been this small kind of hard to read thing which I guess should feel kind of frictionful, you know, like operating with it. It's behind a click for a reason.

我的印象就是这种有意的摩擦感，我觉得确实有效，你知道，我不会点进去，但也许你创造了一种潜意识的信任，因为我知道它就在一键之遥。是的。这让我想起你之前说的，你希望 Granola 感觉像你的个人空间，像是你的东西。我想把笔记放在转录前面，和这个总体理念是相关的。你还在做其他什么来营造这种感觉吗？尤其是当界面本身非常简洁的时候？

I mean that was my impression though is like intentional friction which I do think is working, you know, like I don't click into it but maybe there is that subconscious trust that you've created because I know that it's a click away. Yeah. It does remind me of something that you talked about earlier where you were saying how you want Granola to feel like your personal space, like this is your stuff. And I would imagine that having your notes in front of the transcript is tied back to that overarching idea. Is there anything else that you're doing to create that feeling, especially when the interface itself is incredibly minimal?

好问题。很久以前我在一本书里读到过一个想法，书名大概是《组织数字物品的科学》之类的，是史上最极客的计算机书。我真的很着迷。大部分内容我都忘了，但有一章讲了一个研究，他们比较了嵌套文件夹结构的 UI（比如 Finder 或 Windows 资源管理器）和搜索来检索东西。他们给 100 个人一台电脑，说‘找到这个文件，开始吧’。我印象最深的是，他们说搜索和浏览在不同场景下各有胜负，这不重要，但有趣的是，浏览文件和文件夹激活了你大脑的不同区域——它激活了空间导航部分，而搜索相关的东西激活了语言交流部分。我觉得有意思的是，导航和空间部分的大脑更古老，人类拥有它比语言多几千年，所以我们处理起来更快、更下意识，而语言思维更像是单线程的，更慢，感觉更费力。我觉得这个想法很酷。我不知道 Granola 具体是怎么回事，但我很喜欢这种共鸣。所以从一开始我就非常希望 Granola 有空间感。它应该有实体感，我们应该让用户保持在空间思维中，而不是语言思维里。这体现在几个方面。比如它是一个 Mac 桌面应用，感觉更像一个地方，在屏幕上有重量，占据空间。主屏幕我们尝试过无数次重新设计，都没找到好的方案，现在这已经成了一个笑话——每隔几周就有人想重新设计主屏幕。它应该感觉像一堆物体，一堆笔记。Granola 里有一种奇怪的张力：我们叫它们笔记，但实际上它们大多是会议，当然也有例外。但我觉得一旦你叫它会议，它就变成了一个概念性的东西，而不是笔记——笔记像一张纸，有实体感。它是一列物体，随着你使用，它应该感觉你正在构建一个有意义的收藏。UI 就像一张纸，把你的内容放在最前面、最中心。很明显 Granola 里只有一个主要对象。我们一开始看的很多笔记机器人界面都是三列，到处都是不同的面板，没有那种‘我在看什么？我搞不清这个对象是什么’的感觉。我们希望 Granola 里这一点非常明确。

Yeah. Good question. There's this idea I read in a book a long time ago. It's called like the science of organizing our digital stuff or something like that. It's like the most nerdy computer book ever. I really got into it. There was one bit of it which I forgot most of the book but this is one chapter where they talk about doing a study where they basically compared a nested folder structure UI in Finder or Windows Explorer to search for retrieving stuff. They gave 100 people a computer and were like 'find this file and off you go.' I think the thing that stuck with me from that was they said search and browsing won in different scenarios for different reasons, doesn't matter, but the interesting thing was that navigating files and folders activated a different part of your brain. It activated the spatial navigation part of your brain, whereas anything search related activated the linguistic communication part of your brain. And the thing that was interesting there to me was like navigation and the spatial part of your brain is much older and we've had that as humans for millennia more than language, and so we're much faster and it happens much more subconsciously, whereas linguistic thinking is much more single threaded and much slower and feels more effortful. I thought that's a really cool idea. I have no idea what's going on in Granola but I like that really resonated. And so I guess I've always been very keen from the start that Granola should feel kind of spatial. There should be a physicality to it and we should try and keep the user in the spatial brain rather than in the language kind of thinking. That manifests in a few ways. Like it's a Mac app on your desktop, it feels more like a place that has weight on your screen and sits there and takes up space. The home screen we've tried so many times to redesign this and haven't found it's like a running joke at this point that every couple weeks someone tries to rethink the home screen. It should feel kind of like a stack of objects, like a stack of notes. There's this weird tension in Granola where we call them notes, but actually they're kind of like meetings mostly, with exceptions. But I think as soon as you call it a meeting, it's like a conceptual idea rather than a note which feels like a piece of paper that has physicality. It's a list of objects and as you use it over time, it should feel like you're building a collection of your stuff that feels like it has significance. The UI is like one piece of paper and it kind of puts your content very front and center. It's very clear that there's one main object in Granola. A lot of the notetaker bot interfaces that we looked at at the beginning are like three columns and different panels everywhere and there's no real feeling that this is like what am I looking at, is this like I can't pin down what kind of object this is that I'm looking at. We wanted that to feel very obvious in Granola.

我们能聊聊用户引导吗？早期让我印象深刻的是，你花了大量时间把产品展示给别人，跟他们讲解，讲解他们的工作流程，你的产品怎么用。你是如何摸索出自助引导方式的？因为我觉得你的方法很独特，我多次把 Granola 推荐给别人，就是因为‘嘿，你应该看看这个引导，找找灵感’。那么，背后的故事是什么？

Can we talk about onboarding for a second? Something that stood out to me in the early days was the amount of time that you were spending just putting what you have in front of people, talking through it, talking through their workflow, how your product works. What was the journey like for you to figure out how to do self-serve onboarding? Because I do think you have a pretty unique approach and I've sent Granola to multiple people just for the fact that, hey, you should look at this onboarding for inspiration. So, what's the backstory there?

直到发布前两三个月，我们都没有任何引导，产品很难理解。早期我们得到了一些非常好的建议。David Lee，他是 YC 合伙人，也是 Granola 的天使投资人，他说：‘如果你在早期直接把产品给人们，看他们尝试使用，你实际上是在同时解决两个问题。你要解决的是：你是否做出了一个有用的产品，人们会拿起它、使用它并获得价值；以及你能否解决让产品容易理解、容易使用和容易上手的问题。而这两个问题是独立的。你不需要把它们看作相互依赖的。产品越简单，就越容易理解和上手。但你不需要同时做这两件事。如果你试图同时做，那就是在困难模式。’我们听了之后说：‘啊，是啊。好吧。’

Up until like two or three months before launch, we didn't have any onboarding and the thing was really hard to understand. We had some very good advice early on. David Lee, who's a YC partner but also angel investor in Granola, he was like, 'If you just give your product to people and watch them try and use it when you're very early, you're actually trying to solve two problems at the same time. You're trying to solve the problem of have you made a useful product that people pick up and use and get utility out of, and can you solve this problem of making the thing easy to understand and easy to use and to figure out. And those are like independent problems. You don't need to think about them interdependently. Like the simpler you make the product, the easier it is to understand and pick up. But you don't need to do both at the same time. You're kind of doing it on hard mode if you try to.' We heard that. We were like, 'Ah, yeah. Okay.'

我们之前做的事有点蠢。于是我们改为对每个使用 Granola 的用户进行人工引导。具体来说，我们会和他们视频通话，让他们共享屏幕，然后我会说：好，现在点击登录按钮。现在你想创建新笔记，就去右上角点这个，然后这个，再点这个。目的就是直接教他们怎么用，哪怕界面看起来复杂得要命，他们也能用起来，然后我们就能获得关于实际使用体验的反馈。

Was kind of stupid what we were doing before. And we switched to hand onboarding every user that we gave Granola to. By which I mean we would get them on a video call and I would share my screen and I would or no they would share their screen but I would be like okay now click the signin button. Now when you want to create a new note go to the top right and click this one and then and then this and then this. The idea being we just show them how to use it and even if the thing looks as complicated as hell, they can use it and then we can get feedback on what it's like to live with.

你觉得你们做了多少次这样的引导？

How many of those do you think you did?

我们每周大概做五次。当我们开始考虑引导流程时，大约有 150 个 beta 用户，之后我们开始稍微大规模地添加用户，但也不算太多，大概 150 个吧。

We did like five a week. We had like 150 beta users when we started thinking about onboarding, at which point we started adding people at scale a bit more, but yeah, so it wasn't a ton, but you know, like 150.

是啊，我敢肯定你在那些通话中学到了很多。

Yeah, you're learning a lot in those calls I'm sure.

没错，太对了。我觉得我们到了开始对核心产品有信心的阶段。留存率很好，人们一天用很多次，开始向别人推荐它有多棒。所有这些迹象都很好。唯一的问题是，如果你把产品给一个人，他们根本搞不清这是什么、为什么要用。当时的产品有点像弗兰肯斯坦——有一个转录侧边栏，还有可以切换的私人笔记标签页，还有一个也有标签页的摘要页面，可以有很多摘要。我记得右边还有模板按钮，可以生成随机内容，还有聊天功能。东西太多了。所以我们转变了思路：好吧，产品基本能用了，我们只需要想办法让网上的普通用户自己搞明白并开始使用。

Yeah. Big time. And I think we got to the point where we started to have confidence that the core product was kind of working. Retention was good. People used it many times a day. People started talking about how great it was to other people. Like all those signs were really good. The only problem was that if you gave it to someone, they couldn't figure out what the hell it was and why they should use it and all that. And it was kind of a Frankenstein at this point. It was like a transcript sidebar and then tabs with your private notes that you could flick between. And then there was like a summary page that also had tabs so you could have many summaries. I think we still had those template buttons on the right so you could generate random stuff as well chat. There's a lot of things. So you know the problem we kind of switched modes to like okay the thing kind of works. I think we just need to figure out how to get some random person on the internet to figure it out and start to use it for themselves.

具体做法就是，我们不再在视频通话中手把手教他们，但其他保持不变，然后慢慢观察他们在哪些地方遇到困难，我们就能逐一解决问题，看看哪些有效、哪些无效。

What that looked like was basically we just stopped holding people's hands on the video calls but otherwise kept the same thing and you know slowly started watching them struggle with things and we could pick away at the problems and what was working or what wasn't working.

所以听起来，自助引导和产品的强制简化之间存在某种关联——之前我们可能过度解决了问题，用了太多不必要的方式。现在的问题是：我们如何创造出人们能理解的东西？没错，太对了。

So it sounds like there was almost this correlation between self-serve onboarding and the forced simplification of the problem of the product where like before it's like okay can we solve the problem maybe we're oversolving the problem in more ways than we should be even thinking about it. Yeah. Okay. Check. Now, how do we create something that people can understand? Yeah. Yeah. Big time. Yeah.

我觉得自助引导暴露了很多问题。有些很明显，比如让注册按钮、权限页面等引导流程更让人安心，让你觉得注册没问题。更难的是：用户应该对 Granola 是什么、它做什么有一个怎样的心智模型？我们为此纠结了很久，因为当时的 Granola 有一个侧边栏显示你的笔记，这很难解释。会议中它是主要界面，会议结束后它会缩成侧边栏，并显示一个摘要面板。但这意味着你有两个产物：你写的笔记和 Granola 生成的东西，它们看起来是独立的对象。我们发现用户基本上只摆弄自己的笔记，因为那是他们熟悉的、认为自己在会议中创建的东西，而 Granola 摘要像是凭空冒出来的另一个东西，他们不信任。两个产物让用户困惑，它需要感觉像一个产物——你在会议中写笔记时，它应该是同一张纸，最后变成摘要。Granola 只是拿你的笔记，添加一些内容、整理一下，但它们是同样的笔记，没有区别，是同一个产物。我们花了一段时间才建立起这个信念。

I guess the self-serve onboarding brought up a bunch of things like it, there was a bunch of really obvious stuff like making the onboarding flow like the sign up button and the permission screens and all of that stuff comforting and you know like you feel okay about what you're signing up to and all that stuff. I guess the harder ones were like what's the mental model someone should have of what Granola is and how it and what it's doing. And we really struggled with that a long time because I guess back then Granola was like a there was your notes in a sidebar and which was like it's hard to explain. It was like the main UI in the meeting and then once the meeting was finished it would like collapse down into a sidebar and give you this panel with a summary. But what that meant was you had kind of like two artifacts. You had the notes that you'd written and then you had the thing that Granola made and they look like separate objects. What we saw was basically people gravitated towards just playing with their notes because that's what they knew and that's what they thought they created during the meeting and the Granola summary was like this other thing which they just come out of nowhere and they didn't trust. It's just confusing for the user to have two artifacts and it needs to feel like one artifact and it should feel like the same when you write notes during a meeting it's the same piece of paper that then becomes the summary at the end. It's just like Granola is just taking your notes and it's like adding bits and tidying stuff up but they're the same notes. They're not it's nothing different. It's the same artifact. That took a while to build conviction in.

然后我觉得，动画揭示效果对于让它感觉无缝非常重要。我们尝试了几种不同的方式才最终确定这个方案。为了做到这一点，我们在应用的其他部分承担了一些设计债务。比如私人笔记和摘要之间的标签页，它有点奇怪，仍然会让用户困惑。这其实是因为我们基本上不想让大多数人注意到它——我们把它做得很小，放在底部，实际上你最终只看一张纸，也就是摘要，但人们需要能看到自己写了什么，否则会有一堆边缘情况，而且他们更信任自己写的东西而不是我们生成的内容。

And then I think like the animation of it revealing was like really important in making it feel seamless. And that we tried a few different things before we landed on that as the approach. We took on a bit of like design debt for one of a better term in other parts of the app to make this happen. Like I think the tabs we have between your private notes and the summary, it's kind of weird and it confuses people still. It's like a product of the fact that we basically don't want most people to think about it. So like we make it small and in the bottom and really you just look at one piece paper which is the summary at the end but people need to be able to see what they wrote otherwise it just solves a bunch of edge cases and they trust the thing they wrote much more than the thing we generated.

没错，而且很有意思的是，听到你如何有意地增加一点点摩擦——让某些操作比一些人可能觉得舒服的程度稍微多一点——实际上却实现了产品的简洁性。我觉得这很有效。即使在我想到 Granola 时，那个交互——那个浮动条覆盖并把我的笔记变成 AI 智能笔记——就是我对你们产品的印象。听到你们经历了大量代码和设计探索才达到那个状态，真的很迷人。

Same and it's interesting again to hear how intentionally adding just a little bit of friction bearing something just a little bit more than maybe some people would feel comfortable doing is actually what allows for that simplicity of the product. and I think I think it works. And even when I think of granola, that interaction, that bar floating over and transforming my notes into the AI like smart notes, like that is the interaction that I associate with your product. And it's fascinating to hear how you went through a lot of code and a lot of design explorations in order to get to that place.

是的，那是一个非常愉快的回忆。我们碰巧在一月份在特内里费岛搞了一次团建。我们当时已经确信“单张纸”这条路就是我们想要尝试的方向，于是我们利用那一周在特内里费岛搭建了今天 Granola 的大部分功能，也就是主要的交互方式。那是一种快乐的体验——整天在阳光下捣鼓这个东西，到周末时已经有了一个能用的版本，感觉非常好。

Yeah. It's a very happy memory. We coincidentally had an offsite in Tenerife in like January. I think we kind of like built conviction that this single piece of paper route was going to be the thing we try and so we basically took this week in Tenerife to build a lot of what you see as Granola today or like the main interaction. And it was like one of those happy, you know, like hacking away at this thing all day but in the sun and we did it like by the end of the week there was a working thing which felt really good.

嘿，我是 Red。经常有人问我最喜欢哪些产品。所以我想花一分钟快速介绍一下我的工具栈。Destin 是我用来无需编码就能交付设计变更的工具。Framer 用来建网站。Gen 用来做研究。Jitter 用来给我的设计做动画。Play 用来设计和制作移动应用原型。Visual Electric 用来生成所有图像。而 Raycast 是我每一步的快捷方式。我精心挑选了这些公司与我合作，这样我就能全职做这些节目了。所以，支持这个节目最好的方式就是去看看它们。

Hey, it's Red. I'm constantly asked about my favorite products. So, I want to take just one minute and give you a quick rundown of my stack. Destin is how I ship design changes without having to code. Framer is how I build my websites. Gen is how I do research. Jitter is how I animate my designs. Play is how I design and prototype mobile apps. Visual electric is how I generate all of my imagery. And Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now, I've hand selected these companies to partner with me so that I can do these episodes fulltime. So, the best way by far to support the show is to check them out.

产品的质量很大程度上取决于交互的输出——AI 会为我写些什么？那么在设计这个产品的过程中，关于提示工程你学到了什么？

So much of the quality of the product is tied to the output of that interaction. What does the AI write for me? So, what have you learned about prompt engineering while designing this product?

是的，这真的很苛刻。我不知道。当我查看我们的笔记时，我仍然大部分时候感到失望。我想我们学到了一些有用的东西。你给笔记提供的上下文真的非常重要。如果你只是把转录文本扔给 ChatGPT 让它总结，结果会非常笼统。我喜欢的一个类比是：把 AI 想象成一个实习生，一个聪明的大学毕业生，但就像你刚从街上拉来的人。他们不知道你是谁，也不知道自己为什么在那里；他们只是被告知要总结一些东西。如果你从街上拉一个人，带进你的会议室，让他们帮你记笔记，他们完全不知道什么重要，你在乎什么，你是谁，这个会议为什么召开，或者每个人需要从会议中带走的最重要的一件事是什么。所以我们也不应该期望 AI 能做到这一点。我们需要尽可能多地提供上下文。我们还在改进这一点，但我们基本上在尽力为 AI 添加额外的上下文，让它尽可能了解会议为什么召开、参与者是谁等等。

Yeah, it's really harsh. I don't know. Still when I look at our notes, I'm mostly disappointed still. I think a few things we've learned or that have been helpful. So the context you give the notes really really matters. If you just give a transcript to ChatGPT and ask it to summarize it, it'll be super generic. An analogy I like is: think of the AI like an intern, like an intelligent college graduate, but someone you just basically plucked off the street. They don't know who you are or why they're there; they've just been told to summarize something. If you pluck a person off the street, bring them into your meeting room and ask them to take notes for you, they're going to have no idea what's important or what you care about or who you are or why this meeting is happening or what is the one most important thing that everybody needs to take out of this meeting. So we shouldn't expect the AI to be able to do that either. We need to provide as much of that context as possible. We're still improving on this, but we basically are doing our best to add in extra context for the AI so it knows as much as possible about why this meeting is happening and who the people are and stuff like that.

好的，让我们展望一下未来。你们已经实现了产品市场匹配，业务在增长，产品粘性很强。接下来你们会把产品带向何方？

All right, let's look ahead a little bit. So you have product market fit, things are growing, the product's very sticky. Where do you take the product from here?

最终，我们想构建一个你每天工作中大量使用的工具，成为你生活的重要组成部分，以多种方式帮助你。让我每天早上起床的动力是，我们有机会发明人们与软件交互以及如何与 AI 协同工作的未来。这是一个非常酷的机会。我认为随着时间的推移，我们会找到更多方法让你在更多场景中做到这一点。目前更具体的大方向是：我认为 Granola 对个人来说是一个非常有价值的产品，可以帮你做笔记，但我们可以做更多来帮助整个团队更高效地协作。如果每个人都用 Granola，团队应该会更好，因为你可以用这些信息做更多事情，而不仅仅是个人使用。另一个大的推进方向是帮你做笔记之外的事情。笔记很有用，但绝对不是你想从会议中得到的全部。通常，你在会议上承诺要做的事情才是之后更紧迫、更重要的事。我喜欢的未来愿景是：你使用 Granola，它占据你屏幕的三分之一左右。你在开会，会议进行中你说“哦，好的，我来做这个”或者“我们安排下次电话会议来做这个”。然后，哦，我需要更新 Linear 里的那个工单，我需要做这个，做那个。Granola 足够聪明，在你一路引导下，在后台为你做这些事情。它需要连接到正确的工具，并且需要足够了解你的上下文才能做到。但我觉得这里面有很多很酷的科幻元素，玩起来会很有趣。

Ultimately, we want to build a tool that you're using for a lot of your day and a lot of your work. Like that's a big part of your life. That can help you in lots of ways. The thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is we get to kind of invent the future of how people interact with software and how they work alongside this AI stuff. It's a really cool opportunity. I think over time we'll look more and more ways to let you do that in more contexts. The big things on our mind right now more concretely are: I think Granola is a very valuable product for you as an individual just getting notes for yourself, but we could do so much more to help a whole team work together more productively. A team should be better if everybody's using Granola because you can do so much more with that stuff rather than just any one individual. The other big area to push on is helping you with more than notes. Notes are useful, but they're definitely not everything you want out of a meeting. Often it's the things that you promise to do for someone that are the more pressing, more important things you need to do afterwards. The kind of handwavy vision of the future, which I like, is like you use Granola, it's kind of on your screen taking up a third of your screen or whatever. You're having a meeting and as the meeting goes on, you say, 'Oh yeah, I'll do that for you.' Or 'Let's schedule the next call to do this.' And then, oh, I need to update that ticket in Linear here and I need to do this and I need to do that. And Granola is smart enough with your kind of nudging it along the way to be doing those things in the background for you. It needs to be connected to the right tools and it needs to understand enough about your context to be able to do that. But I think there's a bunch of cool sci-fi stuff there which totally will be fun to play with.

我的意思是，通过捕捉会议，你几乎处于组织中所有其他事情的上游。

I mean by capturing the meeting you're upstream of almost everything else that happens in an org.

是的，我也这么认为。公司里最重要的上下文很大一部分都在会议中。我们一直把这看作是我们进入这个领域的敲门砖，能够为你作为知识工作者提供价值。

Yeah, I think so. So much of the most important context of what's going on in a company is in the meetings. And we always thought of this as kind of like our foot in the door to be able to play in this space and to be able to give you value as a knowledge worker, I guess.

不过，这里有一个有趣的张力：现在你们拥有这种美丽的简洁性，感觉像是我的空间，一切都精简了。但存在一个世界，你们完全搞砸了，充满了集成、一个巨大的“添加到 Linear”按钮，以及每页上邀请团队的 CTA。那么，作为设计师，你如何思考规划这条路径，避免走得太偏？

There's a fun tension, though, where right now you have this beautiful simplicity. It feels like my space. It's everything stripped down and there's a world where you totally botch this. It's like full of integrations and a big old add to linear button and CTAs to invite your teams on every page. So yeah, how do you even think about carving that path as a designer where you don't want to go too far in one direction?

我认为我们必须有点教条主义地保护使用 Granola 的核心流程。如果你不用它来开会、不收集正在发生的事情的上下文，我们就死定了。所以这一点必须高于一切。

We have to be kind of dogmatic I think about protecting the core flow of using Granola. Like we're dead in the water if you aren't using it for your meetings and aren't using it to collect context about what's happening. So that kind of has to win above everything else.

这种情况现在也经常发生。作为团队，我们想快速推进，所以大家一直在自主地把东西发布到应用里，这从设计上来说很棒。但有些东西，比如触及通知流程或会议结束后自动生成笔记，我和 Chris 尤其对此感到紧张。我觉得我们在这方面必须非常轻手轻脚，因为这又回到了我之前说的系统一和系统二的问题。随着你开始把 Granola 用于更多类型的工作，我们将能够超越仅依赖系统一的思维方式。在会议期间，尤其是连续会议，那是一个非常紧张、压力很大的时刻，你的大脑没有多余的空间。不过我们现在有一个内部版本，可以让你在一个地方查看所有客户通话，并汇总起来进行交流，这非常有用。我们内部一直在用。我认为这是一种完全不同的操作模式。如果你在做那种事情，你可能已经在一天中划出了一两个小时来做反思，思考下一步要构建什么，或者需要写一份产品规格。因此，你有时间，我们也可以提供一个更密集的 UI，有更多控制权和更多按钮可以操作。我可以想象未来版本的 Granola 会有明显的区别：核心会议流程极其简单、精简，而更分析性、反思性的部分则更强大、更面向高级用户。我不知道最终会怎样，但这就是目前的方向。

It happens regularly even now. As a team, we want to move fast, so folks are shipping stuff autonomously into the app all the time, which is great by design. But there are often things that touch the notification flow or generating notes after the meeting automatically. Chris and I are especially paranoid about things like that. I think we just need to have a real light touch there, because this goes back to the whole system one, system two thing I was talking about. As you start to use Granola for more kinds of work, we'll be able to get a bit beyond the system one only way of thinking. During meetings, especially back-to-back meetings, it's a very tense, stressful time where you don't have a lot of space in your brain for anything else. But we have an internal build now where you can see all your customer calls in one place and chat with them in aggregate, and that's incredibly useful. We use it all the time here. I think it's a totally different mode of operating. If you're doing that kind of thing, you've probably carved out an hour or two in your day to do some reflection and thinking about what we're going to build next, or you need to write a product spec. Therefore, you have the time, and we can afford to have a denser UI with more control and a lot more buttons to play with. I could see future versions of Granola having a quite apparent difference between the core meeting flow being super simple and stripped back, and the more analytical, reflective parts being more powerful and power-user oriented. I don't know how that will shake out, but that's where it's going at the moment.

这很有意思。你说得完全对。我不做销售之类的工作，也没有无数会议。但当我确实有会议时，我会特意把它们背靠背安排，因为我想压缩它们，尽可能在一天中创造更多空闲时间。我根本不会回头去看那些笔记。但也许有一天，我会为 Inflight 之类的东西做八到十个演示，然后我会回头说：“好吧，我到底想从这些里面提取什么？”你说得对，我能想象那会是一种非常非常不同的产品体验。

That's interesting. You're totally right. I'm not in sales or anything, I don't have a million meetings. But when I do have meetings, I stack them back to back quite intentionally because I want to compress them and create as much empty space in my day as possible. I don't go back and look at those notes at all. But maybe I'll get to the point where I have eight or ten demos for Inflight or something like that, and I'll go back then and say, "Okay, what do I actually want to pull out of these?" And you're right, I could see that feeling like a very, very different type of product.

是的，我也这么认为。在我们把 Granola 精简到今天的样子之前，当它还处于复杂模式时，那正是我们当时有点追求的方向。除了所有面板和侧边栏，我们有两种模式：会议模式和非会议模式。一旦你点击通知或开始转录，Granola 就会进入会议模式，那是一个紧凑的窗口，上面什么都没有，只有记事本。然后你点击结束会议，就会得到一个巨大的飞机驾驶舱式的按钮和控件。我觉得我们放错了地方。会议笔记不是做飞机驾驶舱式界面的地方，但我能看到应用的其他部分更适合这样，我们可以在那里更多地尝试。

Yeah, I think so. Before we stripped Granola back to what it is today, when it was in complicated mode, that was kind of what we were going for a little bit. As well as all the panels and sidebars, we had two modes: meeting mode and non-meeting mode. As soon as you hit the notification or started transcribing, Granola would go into meeting mode, which was a compact window with nothing on it, just the notepad. Then you hit end meeting and you get this huge airplane cockpit of buttons and stuff. I think we got the placement wrong. The meeting notes weren't the place to do the airplane cockpit thing, but I can see other parts of the app where that's more appropriate, where we want to play with that more.

好的。到目前为止，一直是你一个人在设计产品。我想，到本期节目上线时，你应该会引入另一个人了，对吗？

All right. So up until this point, it's just been you designing the product. You're bringing on someone else, I think, by the time maybe this episode goes live. Is that correct?

计划是这样的。是的，我们实际上已经开始与一位自由职业设计师合作，他负责品牌和一些产品方面的工作。但我们才刚刚开始寻找第一位全职内部产品设计师。

That's the plan. Yeah, we've actually started working with a contractor designer who's doing brand and some product stuff for us. But we're just starting to look for our first full-time in-house product designer.

假设一年后我们再进行这次对话，你回顾这次非常成功的招聘。你会特别欣赏那个人的哪些核心特质或技能？

Let's say hypothetically we're having this conversation a year from now and you're reflecting on what has become this super successful hire. What are some of the core traits or skills that you're particularly appreciative of from that person?

好问题。我们身处一个极其快速发展的领域：AI 驱动的工作工具。很多人都在瞄准会议笔记、会议转录这个方向，因为它潜力巨大且非常有用。所以作为产品，我们不能停滞不前。我们必须持续创新。我认为这意味着我们要经历这样一个循环：针对某个特定问题或工作流程的一部分，找到什么样的交互模式能让用户效率提升 10 倍？这需要原型设计、探索和大量试错。我希望有更多的脑力来在这方面进行尝试，并找出下一步的方向。我们现在有一个运行良好且拥有众多用户的产品，所以我们面临的挑战是既要维持和保护它，同时还要在其他地方继续迭代。

Good question. We're in an incredibly fast-moving space: AI-powered work tools. A lot of people are coming after the meeting notes, meeting transcribing thing because it's got so much potential and usefulness. So as a product, we can't afford to sit still. We have to keep innovating. I think that means we're going to have to go through this cycle of, given a particular problem or part of someone's workflow, what's the interaction pattern that lets them do 10x more? That's going to take prototyping, exploration, and a bunch of wrong turns. I would love to have more mental firepower to be trying stuff on that front and figuring out what's next for us. We now have a product that's working and has many users, so we have the challenge of keeping that going and protecting that, but also we still have to keep iterating in other places.

你现在每天都要发布产品更新。

You just ship a product every day anymore.

完全正确。我们现在已经到了需要并行开展探索、发现和原型设计线程的阶段，以确定下一步的方向。我还认为，我们必须以极高的执行标准发布产品，同时不能破坏 Granola 的 UI，保持它现在给所有人的那种简单、平静的感觉。我觉得这就是游戏规则。如果你是一名早期阶段的设计师，你必须能够身兼两职，并知道何时运用哪种技能。但这也是乐趣的一部分。这正是我喜欢的地方。

Exactly. We're at the point where we're just going to need parallel threads of exploration, discovery, and prototyping to figure out what's next for us. I also think we have to ship things to a super high level of execution in a way that doesn't mess up the Granola UI and keeps it the simple, calm feeling place that everybody thinks of it at the moment. I think it's the game. If you're an early-stage designer, you've got to be able to wear both hats and know when to deploy which skill. But it's part of the fun. That's what I like about it.

我喜欢“试错”这个想法。就在你说话的时候，我脑海里浮现出一个人在迷宫里的画面，你需要一个设计师能够快速冲刺，尽可能多地走错路，从而找出正确的方向。

I like the idea of wrong turns. Even as you were talking, I was picturing someone in a maze and you just need a designer who can sprint and take as many wrong turns as quickly as possible in order to figure out what the right direction to go is.

随着团队壮大，这变得很有趣，因为我们不得不学会将我们相信的一些东西或我们的运作方式更多地外化，以便能够与更多人一起规模化地工作。我认为我们正在尝试的一件事是，对于一个给定的项目，我们是处于探索模式——不知道解决方案是什么，重点就是尝试一堆东西，看看什么能引起共鸣、什么有效？还是处于利用模式——这个问题有已知的解决方案，我们只需要从货架上拿一个下来，然后高水平地执行？举个例子，搜索功能：一个搜索栏，输入公司名，看到结果。

It's been interesting as the team's grown because we've had to learn to externalize some of the things we believe or the ways we operate a bit more so that we can do that with more people at scale. I think one of the things we're trying out is, for a given project, are we in explore mode where we don't know what the solution looks like and the whole point is to try a bunch of stuff and see what resonates with people and what works? Or are we in exploit mode? Is this a problem where there are known solutions and we just need to pick one off the shelf and go execute it to a high level? As an example, search: a search bar, type the company, see the results.

这里面有很多设计工作，让它用起来很舒服，但漂亮的搜索并不会改变我们的游戏规则。我们需要它，而且应该把它做好。对于这类问题，完全可以放眼世界，看看谁做得最好，从中汲取经验，应用到我们身上，然后快速执行。这种熟悉感也很重要。我在使用产品时，从未见过那个窗口，却直接用了 Command-K 搜索，结果完全符合预期，因为这是一个已经解决的问题。

There's a bunch of design work in that to make it feel nice, but beautiful search isn't going to change the game for us. We need it and we should do it well. For those kinds of problems, it's totally okay to look out there in the world, see who does it best, take what you can, apply it to us, and execute really fast. That familiarity hit too. As I was using the product, I command-K searched without having ever seen that window, and it worked exactly as I would expect because it's a solved problem.

我们即将要解决的探索模式问题的一个例子是：如何将一系列会议转化为对客户真正有用的简报？如果你在一家代理公司工作，试图为客户制作简报或提案，查看上周所有的客户通话，帮我理清思路，从中找出有用的东西。这是一个未解决的问题，没人能搞定。要弄清楚什么是有用的，通常不是仅仅制作不同布局的 Figma 原型，而是要在产品中实际尝试。

An example of explore mode problems we're going to be grappling with is how do you turn a set of meetings into a brief for a client that's actually useful? If you work at an agency and you're trying to produce a brief for a client or a proposal, looking at all my customer calls from the last week, help me make sense and find the useful stuff out of that. That's an unsolved problem. No one has figured that out. The way to figure out what's useful there is often not to just produce Figma mocks of different layouts. It's to try stuff in the product.

我刚才想说，这些其实不是像素级别的问题。不，不，不。自从 Granola 上线以来，我们做过好几次了。如果遇到这种探索模式领域的问题，我们会刻意分叉应用。通常是我，但有时团队里的其他人也会直接动手，粗暴地将一个潜在解决方案塞进应用里。代码可能很糟糕，东西可能坏掉，这完全没问题。然后我们几个人会切换到那个版本，用上几天或一两周，看看感觉如何。关键是，一旦我们有了信心，就会扔掉那个应用，重新好好构建生产版本。这给了我们疯狂尝试的自由，同时不用担心真实用户。

I was about to say those aren't really pixel problems. No, no, no. We've done this a few times since Granola's been out in prod in the wild. If there's a problem in this kind of explore mode territory, we'll deliberately fork the app. It's usually me, but sometimes other folks on the team will just hack away at it and brute force a potential solution into the app. Code can be horrible, things can be broken. It's totally fine. Then a few of us will go and live on that version for a few days or a week or two and see how it feels. The point is once we have conviction, we throw away the app and build it properly in production. It affords us the freedom to go nuts and not worry about real users at the same time.

有没有一个例子，你们通过实际代码的摸索，最终找到了解决方案？

Is there an example where you've done that and arrived at the solution just by playing with real code?

我们即将推出的多人协作功能可能就是一个例子。具体细节我就不多说了，因为我们还在摸索中，但关键是如何让 Granola 笔记在应用中对他人在不侵犯隐私的前提下可见。以及，当一家公司有 100 人使用 Granola 互相分享笔记时，你需要一定的组织层级来帮助人们把内容归类到合理的地方。这有点像一扇单向门问题。我们必须选择提供给用户的基本元素和组织结构。一旦我们把它推向市场，就很难收回了。人们会开始使用它，建立文件夹，通过特定的分享机制邀请他人，到时候再想回头尝试其他方案就非常困难了。

The multiplayer stuff that we're going to ship soon is probably an example of that. I won't talk too much in the specifics because we're still figuring it out, but how you make Granola notes visible to other people in the app in a way that feels like we're not invading your privacy. And how you help, in a world where you have 100 people at a company using Granola sharing notes with each other, you need some level of organization on top of that to help people cluster stuff into places that make sense. It's kind of like a one-way door problem. We've got to choose the kind of primitives, the organizational structure that we're going to give users. As soon as we put that out in the wild, it's going to be real hard to pull back. People are going to use it, set up folders, invite people with this particular sharing mechanic, and it's going to be real hard to backtrack and try something else.

所以，对于这个问题，我前期做了大量开放式的用户调研，但之后我们开始通过构建代码版本来尝试解决方案。最初的版本纯粹是 UI 层面的，没有数据持久化，没有后端连接，什么都没有。只是感受一下把笔记放进这样的文件夹是什么感觉，或者这样邀请别人查看笔记是什么感觉。全是障眼法，UI 层面的东西。然后随着时间的推移，我们逐渐把它固化了一些，但归根结底，这些都是可丢弃的代码，我们只是在现实生活中尝试这些想法。

So that was one where I did a bunch of upfront open-ended talking to people research, but then we started trying solutions by just building versions in the code. First versions were purely kind of right at the beginning, all UI, no memory, no connection to the back end, anything like that. Just how does it feel to put a note in a folder like this? Or how does it feel to invite people to look at this note like this? All smoke and mirrors, UI stuff. Then over time we solidified it a little bit, but at the end of the day it's all throwaway code that we're just trying out the ideas in real life.

我们聊了很多，我很喜欢这个故事，因为它真的就是从朋友间的副项目开始的，非常广泛地观察人们的日常工作流程，试图找出要解决的正确问题。而现在，你拥有了我所知道的最令人兴奋的初创公司之一。这真是一段鼓舞人心的旅程。我相信听众中有人希望自己也能踏上类似的旅程。那么，在我放你走之前，你还有什么其他见解、经验或教训想分享给大家吗？

We've covered a ton of ground and I love this story because it really did just start off with side project friends super broadly trying to look at people's day-to-day workflows and try to figure out what's the right problem to solve. And here you are now with really one of the most exciting startups that I know of. So it's an inspiring journey. I'm sure somebody out there listening is hopeful that they can go on a similar journey. So, are there any other insights or lessons or learnings that we haven't talked about yet that you want to leave people with before I let you go?

这句话说得太多了，以至于现在说“做出人们喜欢的东西”或“做出真正有用的东西”都有点老套了。作为设计师，我在职业生涯中显然必须学会这一点。但我认为，打造 Granola 让我更深刻地认识到，作为产品构建者，很容易爱上自己的想法，认为某个东西听起来很棒，自己找到了正确答案。但真正重要的只有一点：有人真的觉得它有用吗？他们会一次又一次地使用它吗？它真的解决了他们的问题吗？让自己保持诚实也是一件非常困难的事。我认为，我们团队仍然会不断陷入这样的陷阱：以为自己解决了问题，结果发现并没有。困难之处在于，人们会告诉你你做得很好，你在打造一家伟大的公司和伟大的产品，会说“天哪，我想要你提到的那个功能”。但真正重要的只有他们是否一次又一次地使用它。

It's said so often that it's kind of a cliché at the moment to say 'make something people love' or 'make something really useful'. I've obviously as a designer over my career, I've had to learn this. But I think building Granola has hammered it into me even stronger that as a person building product, it's so easy to fall in love with your ideas and think something sounds great and that you've got the right answer. But really the only thing that matters is: does somebody actually find it useful? Do they pick it up again and again? Does it really solve their problem? It's a really hard thing to keep yourself honest too. I think we continually still as a team fall into the trap of thinking we've solved it and then finding out that we haven't. What's hard about it is people will tell you that you're doing good things and that you're building a great company and a great product, and 'oh my god, I want that feature you're talking about'. But really the only thing that matters is whether they pick it up again and again.

我只是喜欢不断提醒自己对此保持诚实，并让自己脚踏实地，与真实用户交谈，观察他们使用我们的产品，看他们在哪里遇到困难，然后修复那些让他们困扰的地方。归根结底，这就是我们做出更好产品的方式。

I just love to keep continuously reminding myself to stay honest to that and to keep grounding myself in talking to real people and watching them use our thing and watching them struggle with it and then fixing the things that they struggle with. That's how we make a better thing at the end of the day.

你完全有资格给出这个答案，你深刻理解这个领域，花了多年时间研究不同的实现方式和不同类型的笔记体验。所以，你仍然说归根结底，他们是否会反复使用，以及以此为唯一标准来运营是多么重要和困难？我给自己记了笔记，因为这在当下绝对适用。非常感谢你来做客，分享了你的思考过程、各种实验和教训，这些构成了这条曲折的道路。谢谢你，Sam。我是 Granola 和你们所做一切的超级粉丝。感谢你今天的时间。

You're perfectly qualified to give that answer to us, someone who really deeply understands the space and has spent years working on different implementations and different types of note-taking experiences. So for you to still say at the end of the day, do they keep picking it up or not, and how important and difficult it is to operate with that being the only thing that matters at the end of the day? I'm taking a personal note for myself because it's definitely applicable right now. So I appreciate you coming on and giving the really nitty-gritty into your thought process and all of the different experiments and lessons that make up the winding road. So, thank you for coming on, Sam. Big big big fan of Granola and everything that you all are building. So, appreciate your time today.

谢谢你，Red。我真的很感激。非常高兴能来这里。

Thank you, Red. I really appreciate it. Really appreciate getting to come on here.

我一直是这个节目的忠实听众。能来到这里真是太棒了。

I've been a fan of the show for a long time. It's super cool to be here.