The quiz that nearly broke me

Kimberly Green | 2024-08-16

I’ll admit it—I'm a little embarrassed, but I’m on TikTok every day. There’s this account called Socially Inept that keeps popping up as I scroll, with three guys who are like a mix between comedians and tech employees. I haven’t looked them up to fact check their job history, but from their content, it’s clear they’re deep in the Silicon Valley startup world. They do a lot of crowd work, roasting the audience, which is made up of founders and tech employees who, for some reason, love getting roasted about their jobs or startups. The employees in the crowd always have the most niche jobs working on the most random features at their company—the search function in your email—the recommendations section of a food delivery app, you name it. I couldn’t believe entire teams were dedicated to these small features! But now I get it. Sort of. I just spent about a week and a half sweating over a progress bar for our new quiz. When I first scoped out our new quiz, I included the addition of a progress bar, which I thought would be just a little addition, quick and easy. I even shared documentation on how it should work and look, thinking I was going above and beyond with those extra references. But guess what? It ended up delaying our new quiz launch by almost two weeks. Whoops. So, to our developer: I’m sorry. 🙂 The thing is, I was firm on having this new progress bar because I believe it will reduce our drop-off rate. There’s some weird psychological stuff behind these small tweaks, and I was committed to getting it right. During the first week of building Sam’s List, I remember Sam telling me: “Kimi: Remember that in this stage, we are in “bull in a china shop” mode. Brute force. Not “make a deck on improving marketing” For context, I had just shared a story about something I worked on in the past that I was proud of so he was basically like “Ya cool, I know you know how to improve stuff but we need to skip the formalities, skip the organization, and go full throttle”. From then on, I knew exactly what needed to be done to move forward. Now, we’re in a phase where we can start cleaning up and improving things that were built on Day 1 when I was acting like a "bull in a china shop" and now need some Tender Lovin’ Care. #MichaelJacksonReference Which brings me to our quiz! This has been my biggest handicap with Sam’s List. The quiz is good—it does what it’s supposed to—but I want it to be even better. Why?...