“Part of the instinct of getting started with new products, for me, is starting with real human motivations and the customer base you are going after.”

Adam Nash, CEO & Co-Founder at Daffy, joins Bill Staikos on this episode of Be Customer Led. Daffy is a non-profit organization founded on the principle that everyone should set something aside for those in need. Providing a streamlined mobile experience for saving, investing, and donating to over 1.5 million charities, they encourage people to give more frequently and increase the amount they give. Throughout this episode, Adam imparts the wisdom he has gained in product experience.

[01:40] Background – Adam discusses the defining moments in his professional background that helped him get to where he is now.

[04:33] Daffy – Adam explains how he and his team created Daffy and the customer experience he aimed for when designing the platform.  

[09:58] Meeting the Demand – Adam outlines how he considers customer reactions to his products when they are so diverse. 

[14:56] Customer Delight Features  - Customer delight is special. Mentioning that, Adam points out that the delight features are not readily apparent enough for customers to request.

[25:00] Adam's Advice – Adam's advice for other leaders who wish to launch their enterprise.

[29:15] Guest Question Answer – Adam mentions how he achieves balance in his life and applies it to his work.

Resources:

Connect with Adam:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/adamnash/

Mentioned in the episode:

Website: daffy.org/

App: apps.apple.com/dk/app/daffy-charitable/“Part of the instinct of getting started with new products, for me, is starting with real human motivations and the customer base you are going after.”

Adam Nash, CEO & Co-Founder at Daffy, joins Bill Staikos on this episode of Be Customer Led. Daffy is a non-profit organization founded on the principle that everyone should set something aside for those in need. Providing a streamlined mobile experience for saving, investing, and donating to over 1.5 million charities, they encourage people to give more frequently and increase the amount they give. Throughout this episode, Adam imparts the wisdom he has gained in product experience.

[01:40] Background – Adam discusses the defining moments in his professional background that helped him get to where he is now.

[04:33] Daffy – Adam explains how he and his team created Daffy and the customer experience he aimed for when designing the platform.  

[09:58] Meeting the Demand – Adam outlines how he considers customer reactions to his products when they are so diverse. 

[14:56] Customer Delight Features  - Customer delight is special. Mentioning that, Adam points out that the delight features are not readily apparent enough for customers to request.

[25:00] Adam's Advice – Adam's advice for other leaders who wish to launch their enterprise.

[29:15] Guest Question Answer – Adam mentions how he achieves balance in his life and applies it to his work.

Resources:

Connect with Adam:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/adamnash/

Mentioned in the episode:

Website: daffy.org/

App: apps.apple.com/dk/app/daffy-charitable/

Adam Nash on the Product Experience

[00:00:32] Bill Staikos: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another week of B Customer led. I'm your host, bill Staco. one of the reasons why I do this week in and week out is because one personally, and actually, just, I, I gotta say, I get to meet amazing people every chance I get. And, this podcast has been, been helpful to that cause.

And, I get to bring them to you all each week as well. expand your thinking, create new learning for everybody. And this week frankly is nothing short from a guest perspective, nothing short of just awesome. Adam Nash is the co-founder and CEO of a really neat company called Daffy. Now, if you haven't heard of them, that's okay.

We're gonna get into that in a moment. But he is also, if you look at Adam's profile on LinkedIn, you kind of just make sure that like you sit down and you lock yourself into the seat cuz he is got this amazing back. Not only as an executive, but also as an investor at some major brands, obviously that you all have heard of.

I'm not gonna go down the list. That's too long, frankly. But Adam, welcome to the show. I'm super excited and pumped to have you

[00:01:35] Bill Staikos: So I ask every guest, Adam, before we kind of get going, just share a little bit about your professional journey and your background.

Your professional expertise is just so incredible. again, not only as an executive, but also an investor, like what were some of the like really pivotal points in your professional background that made a difference and got you to where you are today?

I don't think of my background as so unique or exceptional. It feels like a very Silicon Valley story. , I grew up in Silicon Valley, but my parents are both doctors, so I didn't come to. And technology until I went to college, ended up getting a degree in computer science and then a graduate degree in human computer interaction.

Largely because I was fascinated, not just with technology itself, but where the technology actually meets the customer, where it meets people. Right. I remember asking, what's the point of getting this algorithm to work in 30 milliseconds if it takes the user 15 minutes to figure out what to do?

And so I went off, my first job was actually, I thought I was joining a company called, It turned out that, apple had other plans and Steve Jobs had other plans, and so I ended up joining Apple, actually worked on the Rhapsody project, which became Mac OS 10 and iOS and all the OS as we use now. But I didn't love being at a big company, believe it or not, I jumped to a startup in the late nineties that went public in the digital app distribution space and got a little frustrated with what was going on in Silicon Valley in the nineties.

It felt very performative. It didn't feel very authentic. Ended up going to business school. Spent a couple years in venture capital and then I did a run at a series of companies that I, each time I felt were making a difference, bringing technology to a new problem. eBay, enabling really thousands and hundreds of thousands of small businesses to form and flourish across the country, across the world.

And so I jumped to a company called Wealth Front. I was a C there for four years and really built out the early parts of this category. We now think of as fin. After Wealthfront, I spent some more time in venture capital, did a quick St at Dropbox, helping them as a public company, their product and growth.

[00:04:14] Bill Staikos: So tell our listeners about like daff, like as I mentioned, Daffy is like, it's one of those companies where you look at it and say, that makes complete sense. One. Number two is like, you gotta sign up for it.

And tell us a little bit about what you and the team. Are doing and building there. And, we talked about this, but like, I think just the names and acronyms, so just tell our listeners what the acronyms stands for too, which is so cool. Like, it's just a great story.

So, but Daffy has a really simple mission. The idea is to use technology to help people be more generous, more. And the name Daffy is an acronym. It stands for the donor advised fund for you. Now, a donor advised fund has been around for decades. It's a tax advantage account. Yeah, the same way that an IRA or a 401k is for retirement or a 5 29 is for college savings.

But Alejandro and I really got excited about this idea of what if we reinvented the donor advised fund for everyone? What if instead of being a niche product, For millionaires and billionaires to put assets aside. What if we made it available to the 60 to 70 million households in the US who donate to charity every year?

Mm-hmm. . And so that was really the inspiration behind Daffy, really pushing this old fashioned idea that people should put money aside proactively for those less fortunate than themselves.

You, you've got, deep expertise as an executive, as a product leader at major organizations, how do you think about customer experience? And when you're thinking about Daffy, like how did, did you and your co-founder think about the experience that you both wanted to be creating for the platform?

Do you follow certain tenants? Do you kind of think about. The platform experience may be differently than you might from a product perspective. Like tell our listeners a little bit maybe about

How do they frame the problem? How do they think of it? I have my own perspective on giving. Alejandro has his own perspective. Everyone has a perspective, but you don't know how common it is. You don't know where the market is. And so the very first thing we. When we raised our money to start Daffy was we talked to customers.

I talked to several dozen customers and asked them very simple questions. in fact, I, I was about 20 questions. I think the first three, the first question was, how much do you think people should give to charity every year? I was hoping that this would be very unifying and common, that there'd be a couple answers that everyone.

No, I have bad news. It turned out first Founder Disappointment . It turns out no one agrees on this. You ask 25 people, you get 23 different answers. Literally, they don't even frame it the same way. Some people talk in dollars, some people talk in percentages. The second question was, how much do you believe you should give to charity every year?

And I wanted to see if people had a different opinion about themselves. Interestingly, no one suggested that they should give less than the average person. If anything, there was a bias saying, well, I'm. I wanna be better than that. I wanna be better than average. I wanna be more generous. And then the third question, which was really telling was just how much did you give to charity last year?

And that turned out to be the magic. It turned out that most people have been raised by influential. They have a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, a priest, a rabbi by someone who taught them that giving is important. Yeah. But it turns out life is busy and most people didn't hit the. That they had set for themselves.

And so we took that idea, did some research, and discovered there is a lot of research that giving is very similar to other financial problems. If you don't set a goal and automate it, you give less. And being a product executive, a product leader, I like to get to fundamentals, the human fundamentals of what you're trying to solve.

And what Alejandro and I realize is that fundamentally giving is two hard problems in. , how much can I afford to give and who do I give the money to? And right now, most people are caught in the worst of both worlds, where someone asks you for money and you have to solve both problems at once. And the magic of the donor advised fund was to just separate them.

Be proactive. Pick a goal for your giving. Automate that and give yourself the luxury of time to now know that you don't have to solve that first problem. Mm-hmm. , you can focus on the more important. Which is who to give the money to. And so I'm happy to talk more about frameworks that I use as a product leader to help guide teams, et cetera.

But that was really, part of the instinct of how you get started with new products for me is starting with the real human motivations in the customer base

Six maybe for that third question. So how do you think about that then, when the responses are so? And you're trying to create a product that's gonna obviously, meet a demand in the marketplace, how do you start to think about, or, or at least refine that product into something that's gonna fit the sort of, or I should say, maybe solve the problem that people are trying to figure out?

Like, how did you get it down to those two specific points that you just mentioned from, you asked 20 different people, you're gonna get 20 different answers. Like, how do you guys kind of distill that?

So you'll notice when you joined Daffy today, we thought we were gonna invest a lot in picking goals for people and telling them what they should give to. We do not do this. We do have a calculator. We will help people if they want it, but it turns out for most people, that's not a productive way to build a customer relationship.

Instead, we really focus on behavioral finance basics. I didn't mention this before in my background, but I'm on the board of a company called Acorn. Mm-hmm. which helps millions of people save and invest. I've been on the board for almost six years and it's been amazing to watch them build this simple experience that helps people who had trouble saving before.

And so some of the insight for the product is finding inspiration from other product that may not solve the same problem, but actually delight customers in the way that they solve it. And if you use Daffy, you will see elements in that. A lot of Daffy is taking the features and functionality that we know have delighted people and helped millions of people spend better, save better, invest better.

We're just applying it to a new problem, which is.

Like how do you balance all that as co it's gotta be one of the toughest or biggest challenges, or maybe not, I should say the biggest, but it's gotta be a pretty big challenge or, or one of the tougher ones to think about and execute. On a, on a day-to-day or

You're not just building products. Mm-hmm. , you're trying to build a company. Right. And so all those problems, financing, your team and your talent, the knowledge, the actual product itself, the technology, you have to solve all those problems in concert. Mm-hmm. . But I will say this is something that I have strong opinions about.

I give a talk regularly. And have for more than a decade about product leadership, which for me is at least my background in home when I come to building the company and I talk about this big change, it never, by the way, it makes a lot of people unhappy when I talk about this cause . Okay, listen, every engineer out there, myself included, and I, I, I just, I just wanna say that I had the same feeling, I spent the first half of my career believing that there was a simple way to make a list of all the ideas, rank them one through end, and then draw a.

Right. And that's, every engineer wants the line, right? Like, oh, if we rank all the ideas, if we have enough time to do the first 10, we'll do the first 10, right? And what I discovered through my career is that while that's a very effective operating principle, it does work. It's simple, easy to do. It does not seem to result in great product and great customer experience.

And that's because what I discovered is that the features that move the metrics. Are rarely the same features that customers request and neither of those two types of features, either metrics movers or customer requests actually delight anyone. But if your goal is to not only build a product that pays the bills, as I would say, moves the metrics that you're funded for with a customer base that actually likes you and you listen to, and you have a pattern of listening.

and more importantly, a customer base that Irrationally loves you. Yeah, that's where delight comes in. That irrationality, you have to have three different buckets for new features and so on. All my teams, all my companies, since LinkedIn, I ask product managers, engineers, designers to think clearly is this idea of metric mover, are we doing it to move a number?

Is it a customer request? Or is it a delight feature? Something we think that will surprise and inspire our customer base and reward the faith they've put in us as theoretically experts in this area. And so to this day, that's how I structure things.

If you were to say, Hey, I've got, the like a hundred chips, if I was gonna put X chipps in one versus the other, how would you kind of even allocate that around it? Have you found that the delighters move sort of the business metrics at the end of the day over time? Or like, how do you think about that too?

Or what have you seen?

you can't measure everything. Right. And so, but let's be realistic business. You wanna operate, you have to unify a team. You have to scale metrics. Movers are usually the vast majority of what you work on. Mm-hmm. , 70%, 80%. Because it turns out business is difficult. It's very rare that you have the luxury to spend most of your time on things that don't move numbers.

Mm-hmm. in a proven way. In fact, how would you even prioritize idea? . Now customer requests are different because they usually don't move numbers, but if you don't listen to your customers regularly, they will stop liking you for sure. No one likes people who don't listen to them. We're human, and I saw this happen at eBay.

I saw a customer base that was so excited about the company, and the company did not listen to customer requests as much as they wanted to. They wanted to. All the people at e B I worked with fantastic. , but it turned out they ran the numbers. They were very mathematical. And if the customer request didn't, wasn't a better idea by the numbers, they didn't do it.

Hmm. The customer doesn't know that. They just know you didn't listen to them. And that's why I believe in that separate cue. But, customer delight is special. I use the old Apple definition of delight. Tim Cook is great at this. He gave an interview with Kara Swisher about a decade ago, Kara.

pushing him on like, what's the next big product from Apple? Is it tv? Is it a car? blah, blah blah. Tim, of course says, we don't pre-announce things. Cara says, why not? Everyone wants to know. All the other companies do it. Like why not just give your fan something? And Tim said the perfect Apple answer, at least my memory of Apple culture, which is that we believe that our customers value surprise.

And so when I talk about delight, I talk about features that customers aren't, they're not obvious enough for customers to request. Let's be honest, your customers are not experts in technology or design. That's not what they do. Yep. And by the way, they don't wanna do it. They have their own life. They have their own jobs.

But every now and again, you roll something out where they see it, they didn't think about it, but once they see it, they can't unsee it. And they go, wow, this is clever, this team, this company, this product, I love these people. And they show other people. Does it come out in the metrics, I believe long term.

Yeah. It's part of what makes brands irrationally popular. And you see this at Apple, by the way. I mean, it's legendary how many competitors look at Apple releases and go like, but we already did that. No one cares. Yeah. No one cares. Yeah, right. And so triggering that irrational love, We actually have done some delight features at Daffy already.

We rolled out a feature actually for the high Holy Days for our Jewish members. Cool. In September. Simple story, but it turns out one of our customers complained about something, started with a customer complaint. They came to us and said, Hey, your minimum donation on the platform's, $20, which we were proud of.

Right. Much lower than other donor advice spot. Yeah. And they said, well, in Jewish tradition, 18 is a lucky number. High. Like, why life? , can you change that number to 18? So we did that, but we actually thought a little bit about how we could make that more magical. And so now on Daffy, when you go to a Jewish charity organization, you get a different interface.

They didn't expect it. No other donor advised fund does that, and yet it's something that's just clever enough where they go, I gotta show my friends. This is. and it wasn't just,

But you created that sort of, that surprise nature around it. Yeah. Made people realize like, I'm doing something special here through this app, through this platform.

delight features are a little bit like a lot of creative exercise. How do you know something is funny? How do you know that something, et cetera.

And more importantly, we found that our non-Jewish customers were actually really happy to see a little education cuz they'd all been in that position of not knowing what to give, what's. what's customary. And so sometimes these paths can really take you down to better understanding the customer's frame of mind and what they're looking for in a solution.

Adam,

Do you do anything at Daffy to ensure that you know that customer's voice is in front of your product teams and they're constantly looking at it and leveraging it to, to build out not only sort of the, user requested or the, or the surprise and delight or the metric movers? Like how do they, how do you create that space within Daffy?

You can't do that when you're a thousand people. I saw it at LinkedIn, like you get to certain size, but in the early days it can be amazingly aligning. Believe it or not. I think the second thing that you can do to help align yourself around customers is actually writing. I'm a huge fan of leadership with writing.

I know Amazon, of course, is famous for their six pagers. Remote work, by the way, has accelerated this need. But I think that most leaders are used to being a little lazy about writing. Hmm. A little lazy about managing by walking around. Mm-hmm. , chatting, talking, giving speeches. Maybe they're great at that.

Maybe that's why they're a leader, which can be helpful. But at scale you cannot talk to everyone. Okay. And more importantly, if you walk by manage, by walking around, you're telling a hundred people a slightly different. . And when you force yourself to write, I've just seen this for technology leaders, marketing leaders, design, when you force yourself to write, you actually have to put your hypotheses down.

Mm-hmm. , you have to state why you're doing this, and so explaining what the goal is, right? What the insight was that led to it, what the proposal is, why now is the right. These are things everyone knows the questions that people have about this. Mm-hmm. so they know how hard it's to prioritize, but there's really no substitute for writing.

And I write new memos every six months. What did we learn the last six months? Mm-hmm. . How does it affect what we're doing? What's the good? What's the bad? It's the ugly. But I think when you're building the company, there's really no substitute for teamwork and having the team align what you're trying to do as a business, the technology you're building on.

And then what your customer insights are, right? What market you're going after, who is that customer? How do they think about the problem? I'm a huge believer in writing.

But number two is you're documenting sort of the cus your company's history almost in a way, you're, you're creating a record of understanding and perspective that not a lot of companies have. Do you think that is one of the, one of the questions I want to ask you, Adam, was like, what advice do you have for founders or other executives, who are looking to be more intentional about their companies delivering a better experience, having that aligned to the brand, et cetera.

But like, is, is it, right? And do you do anything else that kind of helps your company? C sort of, you as a leader in the organization, you modeling that, customer obsess or customer-centric, whatever term you want to use. I know they're all different definitions, but, how do you kind of, how else do you think about that?

Or what advice do you have for other, leaders who wanna start up their own business, and maybe thinking about doing this? Well,

Versus them seeing you read is a very different thing. Yeah. And so if you're building a scale organization, it's not enough to lay out a mission and a vision, although I'm a big believer in that. Mm-hmm. , it's gotta be simple. Duffy's mission is to help people be more generous, more often. Our vision is a world where everyone puts something aside proactively for those less fortunate than themselves.

Very simple and easy, but, but those statements aren't enough. They have to see you use it to make prioritization decisions. Mm. , and that's where you get into the complexity, right? This distance. It can't be divorced from the actual product you're building, from the actual customer experience. If you tell people that you're doing one thing and then in action you do another, all you're teaching your team is some sort of duplicity, right?

And, and that's the wrong lesson. I do have strong beliefs though about the frameworks that use as a leader. I believe a lot of companies fall down at the strategic. This clear annunciation of strategy, which I simplify because despite business school, unfortunately, my professors may not be happy with this answer, but , it has to be very simple.

What's the game you're playing, right? That encompasses who your competitors are, what the market need is, what your go-to-market is, what game are you playing? And then the metrics, how do you keep score? And most company dysfunction I've seen at almost every level of. is because one of those two questions wasn't answered in the strategy.

They talk a lot about what game they're playing, but they don't agree on what metrics they're tracking to know if they're winning or not. Or they're so obsessed with metrics. No one understands what game they're playing. They're just trying to run up that score, which, by the way, lease is some very bad activity at scale.

Mm-hmm. , once you have the strategy, then prioritization, which is the second thing, becomes easy. Mm-hmm. and people have to see you model. , prioritizing based on that strategy and those metrics, right? They have to see the rationale. and then lastly, execution. Right? The details. Do you sweat the details? Do they matter?

Are you in 80 20? Are you building a culture that moves fast and you'll fix it later? You know? So for example, in FinTech companies, I am a big believer in moving fast in iterating and experimenting. I love teaching people to not get too attached to the idea. It's an idea. Hypothesis. Mm-hmm. , how can we test it?

right? Can we test it out? Do we have data? Do we test it out with customers? How do we test it out? That's a wonderful thing. But there are some things when it comes to money that you're not testing out, you're not playing fast and loop with like, all the FinTech fund companies I've worked for have been regulated by multiple agencies.

Very important to me at Daffy. Then we set out to build a donor advised fund that we did all the hard legal work upfront, that we got all the right approvals. Mm-hmm. , right? We wanted to make. That if people were trusting us, not just with their money, but money that was meant to help people, money that was meant for charity.

That's a place where you sweat the details, where you go over the legal documents, you go to the regulations. I do a lot of those filings myself, c f O or so law, even hiring a cfo, F o, when we're as small as we are, was a statement to the company that finances matter, that regulations matter, that trust matters.

So those are tend to be the high level themes that I use when I give advice to founders. Awesome. On how to drive culture.

How do you find balance in your life and how do you t. That into your working life. That question makes sense.

Right. it just, but I think for a lot of people, they discovered something that for most of my career I've been a big fan of, which is having a more integrated life, little bit more flex. , but being very clear to know when your priorities are right, and that can be your health. That can be making sure that you blocked out time to exercise, to work out, to eat properly.

Yeah. Can make sure that for family, right. sometimes you block out things on the calendar. Kids, softball game, parent teacher meetings. Yeah. Or even just trips, I like to do a trip with each of my four children, one-on-one if I can every year. Cool. Pandemic made that. , but I think I'm a big believer in systems.

I mean, Daffy is like this, right? I, I'm basically telling everyone, you'll be a better person if instead of just waiting for people to ask you to give if you're proactive. And so I feel the same way about time. If something's important for you, it matters if you do it monthly instead of quarterly, it matters if you do it weekly instead of monthly, right?

My father retired a few years ago. I meet him every. And that's because if I meet my father every Friday for happy hour, which he loves, of course, but if I meet him every Friday, that's 50 times a year. it's very different if you see something. So whether it's my kids, whether it's my spouse, whether it's my parents, whether it's work, I'm a big believer in being proactive and intentional about the time you're spending on different.

Awesome advice.

[00:29:57] Adam Nash: guest? Oh, this is exciting. What guest is it? I can't

[00:30:05] Adam Nash: Well, the very on brand thing to ask would be how much do you think people should give to charity every year?

All right. I definitely

What do you go for that?

It's one of the reasons I went to business school was the belief that there might be something to learn from people who've tried this before. And so whether it's people I've worked with directly, people like Reid Hoffman, obviously I got to see Steve Jobs when he came back at Apple, et cetera. It's hard not to be inspired by some of the people I've worked with, but I will tell you that now more and more as a parent, it's a different frame of reference.

when you have to explain things to children, when you know that they're watching what you do, not what you say, yeah. But what you do. And so more and more I find myself guided inspirationally by being that person that I am for them. And it does inspire me when my children, they come visit Daffy.

They see what we're doing and the excitement, et cetera. They're excited about it. They, they care about it. I feel like it's teaching them something. I think that it's funny, I think when we're younger we're we model those who came before us and there's a curtain point where you come up with ideals and actually you're inspired by that ideal and you just try to live up to it as much as you can.

[00:32:06] Adam Nash: yeah, so perfect time of year two. Of course, it's as easy as going to daffy.org on the web or if you go to the app store.

we were the first fully functional donor advised fund in the app store, so if you just type Daffy into the Apple App store, you'll get to our app, but either way takes just a couple minutes to sign up and try it. It's free under a hundred dollars and past that, it's just $3 a month. Very easy to make giving a part of the way you.

[00:32:40] Adam Nash: soon everyone. Thanks for listening to be customer led with Bill Stagos. We are grateful to our audience for the gift of their time. Be sure to visit us@becustomerled.com.

For more episodes, leave us feedback on how we're doing, or tell us what you wanna hear more about. Until next time, we're out.