Jordan Krieger: All right, welcome in everybody. We're really glad to see you today. Nino and I are really excited to chat with you. And if you're not already aware, I'm Jordan. I'm Finch's community manager, the one you see giving you all of the updates and details and announcements and just generally hanging out around the community. And I will let Nino introduce himself, but go ahead, Nino. I think you're muted.
Nino Aquinas: All right. I'm too excited to start talking. But hi everyone. Can you all hear me? It's good. Okay. I'm Nino. I am one of the founder of Started Finch with Stephanie back in 2020. Tried for a year building a lot of different things and it's been more than five years since Finch was first out in the App Store and beyond grateful where we are now and super excited to see all of you talk to you more and share just a sneak peek behind the scene of how we are thinking about building Finch and how to make Finch more fun to all of you. So, super excited though to see you all and looking forward to it.
Jordan Krieger: So before we get into it, if this is your first time joining us for one of our AMAs, what we'll do is we've got some pre-planned topics that a lot of you have been curious about for a while that we will plan to go over. Some of you might have submitted questions to our survey ahead of time and we'll try to answer as many of those frequently asked questions as possible, but we'll also take some time for live questions after answering those pre-submitted questions as well. And we'll queue you in when we're ready to take those. But you can feel free to drop those into the chat on the side there as we go along and I'll try to read as many of those as possible to Nino so that he can address them. So to start, Nino, I thought we could touch a little bit on how Finch has been growing and changing over time. Specifically, I think we've done a lot of growing this year and, I'm sure our users are always really curious about what really we've been focused on internally this year and, are there any learnings that have influenced us and the direction we might be heading so far this year?
Nino Aquinas: Yeah. No, thank you. Let's see.
Jordan Krieger: Yes, people can ask specific questions in the chat.
Nino Aquinas: Maybe I don't know how I'm curious, I guess. So Jordan, just to check, people can answer in the chat, Awesome. I'll be curious just if folks can let me know when did they first start Finch. I'm just very curious if people know how long people have been at Finch and know the history of how much sort of Finch has been changing. Five months. Yeah, I mean to answer the questions that Jordan mentioned, I think maybe going further back to the reason why sort of Finch exists we Steph and I started Finch because we are trying to build a product to help ourselves really to sort of remind ourselves on how we can take care of ourselves every single day. Just like the little thing, right? Sleep better, go out and get some sunshine, just get a little bit more steps, reaching out to people that you care about. And we realized that oftentimes those small things when things get tough in life is the things that you drop first because you just feel like it doesn't matter. My problem is bigger than all these small things, it's just not going to change anything. So we fell into depression late 2010. We were close friend and then we were trying to basically build Finch with that idea of every product out there there's a lot of meditation apps and then all these different self-care apps that has the posture of why are you overwhelmed you should just sit down and meditate and whatnot and for us we just can't quite do that because we just couldn't prioritize ourselves And the thing that helped Finch and get Finch to where it is today is that we make Finch generally like fun and we create spiritual pet that helps you that makes you want to take care of and in the process of it you're taking care of yourself. And that learning of how to make self-care in some ways doesn't feel self-care because when things get tough it's so hard to sort of focus on that get even more crystallized towards the late part of last year. I think some of you probably remember some of you might not join yet where we have the midnight manor events. That's our first special edition seasonal events where we are trying to make seasonal events so much more immersive. There's a lot of new things and we've gotten a lot of positive response from that and we are seeing a lot of people basically returning from having been using Finch to actually go back and engage with the Midnight Manor. And we thought that part around Finch being just more enjoyable, more entertaining, more lively is something that we want to focus on on the first part of the year. So to answer your question Jordan, that has been the main thing of what we are trying to do. Everything with just the goal and the assumption of self-care inherently is something that you're doing the same thing day in and day out and can Finch adds value in a way that every single month we try to make it different and make it more colorful. Along the way though, we learn and you all let us know about this too that you want to see more things on the self-care side of things. How can we make the utility and the function and the usefulness of Finch just like richer and more helpful? And I think one of the thing that we learned along the way as we make things more and more fun is that it has to be company with just an app a product that genuinely becoming more and more helpful over time with the users. So I think one of the biggest learning is it's great our attempt to make things fun and I think that's the thing that make Finch unique. You're not going to stop doing that, but it has to be coming together more harmoniously with just generally make Finch as a product more helpful to help you go through the day and that's like what we have been focusing on in the first half of the year and some of the learning and how we are thinking about prioritizing for the second half of the year.
Jordan Krieger: Yeah, we've spent a lot of time thinking about how to make self-care fun, which has been a lot of fun to and watch evolve over the last few weeks. But I think something our users want to know and something you touched on that is that we've been hearing a lot from users about they have a curiosity about some of the more core self-care experiences. So, are you able to talk a little bit about what some of those core self-care experiences we might be thinking about trying next?
Nino Aquinas: Yeah. I don't know how much I can talk about the specifics but I think one thing that I can share. I've heard some of the feedback from people to around it seems like the app focuses especially for folks who has been here for five years for example. You've seen how much Finch has changed and if you've been there from the very beginning you probably are seeing this progression of Finch becoming more sort of goal oriented product and as you become more of a goal oriented product your homepage is just like a task that you can set yourself that you completed you might feel that wait why different exercises and all of these different thing that I thought is helpful is getting sort of push away to the back. Maybe I'll talk about the reasoning behind it at least why we did it in the past and how we are generally thinking about it more next. So the reason that happened truly is because when we are actually looking at how people are using Finch and looking at what are the main thing that help people build healthy habits and doing an action at Finch that encourage them to actually complete the same action whether that's drinking water or get out of bed and so on and so forth. We found out that the more you can actually focus on just goals in front of you, the more you are likely to actually return the more you actually do other of these exercises that we actually spend so much energy crafting this breathing exercises like crafting all of these quizzes, the more you actually less likely to return the next day. And at the time our team was confused about it and sort of even though the instinct was wait but this feels like a useful thing the data or the feedback that we are getting back is very conclusive that if you do want to help people building healthy habits then you have to make them focus on the goal side of I think the thing that I realized now that maybe I didn't have as much sort of clarity back in the day is the reason why all of those exercises might not be as effective in helping you build healthy habits is because it's a dead end. What I mean by that end is when you do a breathing exercises at Finch. Yes, you feel good in the moment but that's it. We are not helping you make sense of okay what's next after this breathing exercises? How do I I was overwhelmed before now I feel slightly better. How can I then equip myself so that I can feel even better tomorrow? I think we put a lot of effort in creating that experiences but we stop short in actually building an experiences that makes people able to equip themselves more regularly day in day and so maybe to answer your question, Jordan, when we think about a self-care experiences that we want to focus on more today, you should hopefully be able to see more self-care tools like that affirmation that breathing exercises show up in a way that not only helps you in the moment, but helps build momentum for you to be able to build a much healthier habit down the line, too. Including a journaling, some people mention quizzes, a lot of people actually love it. But the fun fact about quizzes is we actually learned that after people do our quizzes oftentimes people actually feel worse and the reason why is because you do the quizzes and then you found that you feel you're not feeling you're not in a good spot but then Finch can't do anything about it and we are putting people in this weird stuck place without actually being able to help them and the type of things that we want to be able to put more attention on and figure out how can we not actually make something that is helpful in the moment, but use that moment to create something that can help you tomorrow, the day after that, next week.
Jordan Krieger: So, it sounds like there's a really delicate balance we're trying to strike between in the moment versus tools that help us all build long-term healthy self-care habits. It's Yeah.
Nino Aquinas: Yeah. And it's very hard. I think that's the part that the team needs to crack. We are just trying our best figure out how to do that really well.
Jordan Krieger: Yeah. That's a big task.
Nino Aquinas: Yeah.
Jordan Krieger: So I guess on the topic of, making our daily self-care a normal habit. That's our mission, every day is to normalize self-care. So, as we're evolving over time, do you have any thoughts about how to really stay true and grounded in that mission even as we're trying different things and new experiments and new ways of tackling that delicate balance?
Nino Aquinas: Yeah, I think everything that we do at Finch is within that mindset of our mission is to normalize self-care. What that means is just we want to do everything that we can to give people a reason to show up for themselves and to make themselves feel self-sufficient and take care of themselves first because we believe that if you are able to take care of yourself first then you'll be able to do what you want with your life much better and take care of people that you care about or whatever else that you want to do with your life and I think at least internally everything that we do is really grounded in that we always ask for every single fun things that we ask people to we created an event or whatever it's like does this actually make people return back again and make them actually want to take care of themselves again that's also the reason why we are I mean a lot of people and some of you here might also ask maybe mini games or stress games that help people feeling less stressed and whatever can be added into Finch and make things more fun That's also the reason why we haven't been doing a lot more of that too because we want majority of things that people do at Finch is still all about self-care. So there's that just constant conversation within the team on that. The other thing I think is just I mean to be really honest the community all of you has been letting us know if you think that we haven't been investing as much on self-care or how we talk about Finch. I think that has been very very helpful. I'm really happy that I'm able to talk to a lot of you today and I'm hoping that we can have a lot more interaction like this because at the end of the day Finch is just a group of 30 people really they're not even like that big. And I like to tell the team that it's a group of 30 people who are trying to who have a very different unique skill sets. We have engineer, we have designer, we have an artist, we have an animator and everyone set aside their ego to sort of work together to just make software as fun as possible with what we know today. I think. We'll try a lot of different thing. We'll make changes Jordan and we'll learn from it. We learn what the user do in the app. We learn how the community speaks to us about it. And then we'll make adjustment and we'll try our best to make an experience that eventually hopefully can get and attract more and more people to take care of themselves.
Jordan Krieger: Yeah, it would be literally the dream come true if everybody in the world was, taking the best care of themselves. And as one of those 30 employees, I can't say enough how proud and privileged I am to take part in that mission every day. Yeah, but somebody asked Nino if you can share what are your top five goals for the rest of the year.
Nino Aquinas: Yeah. Let's see. Five is I don't know, a lot, but also very little depending on how you're thinking about it. Let's see. I'm just going to maybe share what is sort of on top of my mind. I know that for example the month of June has been a month that was pretty hard on the community and hard for us with the reliability issues and some of the things that we felt we're not proud of. I think we've seen make a lot of improvement on that. And the team has been working very hard to get to that outcome and I think I've heard a lot of people saying that it's been a lot better. But I think that's number one thing to me. I don't want it to ever happen again. And I want us to sort of get ahead of it. How can we make it's going to be the antithesis if when you open Finch you get even more frustrated we want to be an app that at the very least when you think of Finch you feel joy you feel like this brings positivity this brings joy and no matter what we built on top of it no matter how useful Finch is if it crashes if it lags so much then you all our hard work just resulting to nothing. So that I think is very important. The usefulness aspect of it, if I think about it from just foundation up that usefulness I talked about that self-care aspect of Finch, I hope that six months from today when you think about Finch and you're all of you who love Finch and talking about Finch to people who doesn't use Finch can point to a specific software problem that you might be feeling where Finch can actually truly be helpful and then just genuinely sort of say that Hey, Maybe you can use Finch for this specific thing. I think that will be very very cool if we can actually invest on our self-care side of things to the point that not only the value is felt by people in the community. But it's so nice that people are willing to also say that to people that they love and help people that they love through Finch. So those two things are probably the highest Jordan in terms of the main thing and then obviously there's the wish list or the bunch of other thing that I think is important and makes Finch unique that we still want to continue make it better right how do we make Finch week month in month out more fun and different and self-care feels there's always slightly different angle for you to actually do. How can we make our community feel like a part of the Finch journey a lot more? So we all can sort of build this together. We have Acts of Compassion. And I don't know if some of you here knows but some of our community member meet up in person to not only connected with each other but actually do good things in their neighborhood. It's always super cool for me to actually witness that and see that and I'll be very curious to see how much more we can actually do to support those things to happen because I think that's literally the embodiment of the type of positive impact that we want to have in the world. So yeah, I think there are five there, but it's a little bit sporadic, but those are some of the things that's top of mind for me.
Jordan Krieger: Those sound great. While you were talking about that, we did get one question that is a bit related to the first goal you touched on. Somebody was curious if you have any specific future improvements on performance that you have planned. Anything like that we can describe more concretely for our users that we're able to talk about
Nino Aquinas: Yeah. Let's see. So speed and lag I think is the main thing. We know that for people with tons of data and old devices using Finch can be pretty hard or rough. So we are looking at different ways to go about it to make that even better. So that's number one. I know that data corruption has been an issue to a lot of people are obviously this one of those type of issue that technically it doesn't happen that often in the grand scheme of thing but when it happens it's so bad. So that will be one thing that we really want to get into and then maybe I can get into also the details because maybe there's more people invested on that particular problem because of the magnitude of how bad it is on why is this even a thing like why there's a data corruption. I'll try to explain it as simply as possible. I'm going to touch upon a little bit of technical jargon here, but Finch when we first build it, we want to design Finch to be as accessible as private as possible. So one of the decision that we make in the beginning is also the team is very small. It's just like me and Steph. We don't have any other engineer in it. We are building everything on our own. The design and everything is on our own. So we also want to find a technology back in 2020 that we write once we can have both iOS app and Android app. So that basically leads us to a decision where every single thing that you write on Finch it literally just stays on your device. We don't know. No one knows if you ask us to recover it. We cannot because it's literally just on your device which is great for privacy. We thought that it's going to be great because the mental health can be a very sensitive topic. So we want to make sure that we just want to build something that you love without actually asking anything in return. The problem though is that then when there's an issue with that data then we just cannot help because it's literally outside our control. Late last year or maybe a couple years ago we built a solution we call it a cloud backup tool that maybe some of you has been opted into where then you can encrypt it so that we don't know what's in it but then we automatically back it up to the cloud. But we know that this is an optional feature and some of you are not having it on or do not want to have it on. So the data corruption for people who doesn't actually have it on is still actually like a thing. And the reason why it's very hard to fix the data corruption for your data locally is that we are at the limit of the technology that we are using right now. When I told you the first technology that we decided to actually use when it's just like Steph and I together. It's very fortunate that Finch today has grown so much more into what we never thought we could. But I think the consequences of that is that the abstraction that we are using the library that we are using just doesn't have the capability of reliability that we need. So one concrete thing that our team is actually exploring is to undergo a pretty big investment potentially to move away from those very foundational data technology that we are currently relying on. Yeah, so hopefully the end results though is that next year if you use Finch again, data corruption is something that a thing of the past and you're just not going to encounter it ever again. Yeah.