I’m David, CEO at Anyone — #1 Product of the Week. AMA 👇

@david_sarlos Thanks David – excellent question! We've been heavy on UGC since day one. Many of our most engaged users are creatives/creators who use the app to bounce ideas with peers and share career advice. Early on, they started sending us creative ideas on how to reach more people – so we decided to make this our _entire_ marketing mix. When we spend any money on marketing and comms today, we make sure our users create it. With this in mind, we recently launched anyone.fm – a place where we showcase the brand and marketing work done for Anyone by our community, as well as a call for entries where anyone can submit their idea. For example, the mouths that you see on our Product Hunt page come from a poster campaign in NYC, shot by Emily Lipson — one of the world’s best photographers, who's also available to call on Anyone. What do you think about UGC in general? Any particular advice to anyone considering adding it to their marketing mix?

@davidorlic, the concept of Anyone is genuinely inspiring, and this is a perfect quote from you "When we spend any money on marketing and comms today, we make sure our users create it." ✨ Authentic, evergreen User Generated Content will grow traffic, engagement time and conversion on any website. Websites will look and feel more like decentralised social media. Adding safe social spaces to websites will improve their marketing ROI plus unlock new, future-proof revenue streams. Successful brands will not only broadcast marketing but integrate dialogue into their business with their clients. To anyone (sic!) still reading this, we are building a tool to do this: grow traffic, engagement and conversion using unique social videos. Here is a demo: https://share.vialog.io/vtesrl24...

@johnny_ly Thanks Johnny – great question. Storytelling is an important part of any product – as a result, we're seeing a lot of talent from the marketing and PR industry enter the startup world, or even start their own companies. (By "storytelling", I mean things like product narrative, company vision, founder story, and visual identity.) But ultimately, it's only one of many, many skills you need to build, ship and grow a product. Personally, I've developed a deep respect for the engineering side of the product org – this is something that many marketers have zero exposure to in their professional lives, as they work with distributing existing products rather than creating new products and bringing them to market. For me, the biggest challenge was to learn software development on the job. Luckily, our team has a lot of experience from that, so it didn't affect our output negatively – only my self-confidence :)

@mycelebs_elle Hi Elisabeth! We built Anyone because everyone on the team had personal experience from not having the right connections or network when setting out to do something. If you're from a small town, or if you didn't go to the right school, it feels like a lot of doors are closed. We wanted to create something that removes those barriers, so that more people can get further faster. Because who you know shouldn't limit who you can become.

@leojbarnett Hi Leo – thanks for a fantastic question. I would say that most people always have five minutes to spare – the problem is that it never ends up being a five-minute chat, which leads them to decline or ignore. The standard length of a "quick chat" online is still expected to be 30 minutes – mainly because the calendars and tools we use have set that as the norm. Sending a calendar invite for a 15-minute meeting is not a good look :) But IRL, it's pretty common to have a five-minute chat with someone – this is how new connections are made at industry events, in the elevator, on the street, etc. One of the reasons why we built Anyone was to make more of these new conversations happen – much of the magic lies in the spontaneity and serendipity, so we wanted to create a product that wasn't dependent on inherently broken technology like calendars or video calling. Now, we're noticed that users who get a lot of inbound emails and DM’s asking for their time actively ask people to call them on Anyone instead. So maybe we're on to something! If you really want five minutes of someones time outside of Anyone, I recommend going asynchronous and drop them a very short and friendly note asking them a very specific question that they can reply to in less than five minutes.

@davidorlic Thanks for the awesome answer David. Interesting regarding expectations and agree serendipity is rewarded with magic. Love the idea and look forward to using it.

@ersu_dalbudak Thanks Ersu – great question! @mycelebs_elle asked a similar question about why we started Anyone – you'll find the answer here. But I'm happy to share how we came up with the specific idea to only do five-minute calls! We knew that we wanted to build a product that would make it 10x easier to share knowledge and experience online, and were excited to explore voice as an alternative to text or video. When working on the MVP, we quickly concluded that one of the biggest hurdles to jump on a call with a stranger was the lack of clear context and rules of engagement. This meant that we had to address two things upfront: time and content. We realised that a lot of people have a lot of 5-minute problems – and while there are plenty of solutions in place for 30-minute problems or 60-minute problems, there wasn't really a dominant design in place for quick questions and candid feedback. "Five minutes" is also a phrase that's used colloquially, so it made sense to cap the conversations at that length. When reading up on academic research, we also learnt a lot about conversation design and how to craft topics that make it easy to quickly connect with someone new. Product-wise, this led to every call on the app having a clear topic. The final thing to solve was/is availability – since we're not scheduling calls, our ambition is to match people when they're online and available to talk. This spontaneity and serendipity is something we really believe in, and the team is putting a lot of work into making it happen.

@hermes_holm Thanks so much, Hermes! What a thoughtful question. Our vision is to live in a world where you can have five minutes of anyone's time. This means opening up closed networks so that more can get further faster, and increasing peer connection so that people doing something for the first time don't feel like they have to go at it alone. For those who are established in an industry with a lot of knowledge and influence, Anyone can provide an easy way to give back and support people that are just starting out. For those without the right connections or CV, Anyone can be a powerful tool to grow their network and make new connections across geographies. For all of us, Anyone can inject some serendipity into our daily lives and act as a reminder of just how valuable authentic human connection can be.

@areab_mian Thanks Areab! Educating others by sharing your knowledge and experience is a generous and meaningful endeavour, but building an audience around it can be difficult. Here's a cheat sheet :) → Find 1-2 things you really care about – people will notice your passion! Once you learn what you're really excited about, go all in on those topics. → Experiment with 3-4 channels of distribution. Is it Twitter, Youtube, podcast or newsletter? Once you notice which works best, go all in on that platform. → Find 5-6 people that really, really like your content. Understand what they have in common. Once you find a pattern, go all in on that audience. → Expect it to take 7-8 months of work before people really start to notice you. We all always expect things to happen faster than they do. But once they do... Hope this helps. Good luck and have fun!