Interview Prompts from Fired Product: CreatorMind

Whenever I have an issue with a product, I try to make up interview prompts that get at the heart of what I learned from the experience. In this case, the product was CreatorMind.co. I wrote about the why I fired the product, the (AI product) learnings and the potential that initially excited me.

Let’s dive into the reverse engineering prompt exercises.

1. Estimation Imagine you are the CEO of CreatorMind, a creator GenAI Chatbot service, how would you estimate the number of creators who would find your product valuable enough to pay $15 a month?

2. Strategy What do you think of the three biggest challenges for CreatorMind, a product that provides chatbots for creators who write blogs. What do you think of the opportunities for CreatorMind

3. Strategy Follow-up Who are the competitors in the market?

4. Strategy Follow-up What are their biggest threats?

5. Pricing How would you price create your mind?

6. Strategy Should Substack create a Chatbot tool for bloggers, yes or no? (Note answer should reference Horizontal vs Vertical approaches and success rates)

Product Sense/Design/Insights Prompts

New prompts are often created when an experience or article inspires a product leader. If we were to use CreatorMind as the inspiration for new interview prompts they might be worded as such:

• Design a solution for Creators using AI

• Design a chat for Creators

• Design a chat for Creators using AI

• Design a solution for knowlege Creators, struggling to answer questions from prospective clients (think coaches, experts, etc.)

• Help people search blogs to answer a specific question

• Design a product to help creators better understand their users’ needs

• Design a product to help Creators know what articles to write next

Product Execution/Analytics Prompts

New prompts aren’t just limited to product sense. These are more execution focused.

• Imagine you’re the PM for CreatorMind, what would be your success metrics?

• Imagine you are a Creator trying to decide whether or not to keep this subscription for CreatorMind, what metrics are you looking at?

Strategy Prompts

When you are frustrated with a product’s performance, the strategy questions can often be the ones that come to mind easily as we try to come up with insights we can learn from. That leads to prompt ideas:

• What do you think CreatorMind’s Mission statement is?

  • Is this a good mission statement or bad mission statement?

• Do you think CreatorMind will become a success, or is more of an acquihire opportunity?

Drills

Don’t limit your creativity to just prompts, you can create drills.

Design Drills

• What are clarifying questions if you were going to create a chatbot for Creators?

• Try User Segments based on Situation, Frequency and Motivation

• Try jobs to be done (think Creators for plumbing instructions vs makeup, etc.)

Strategy Drills

• Try answering should X develop a creator chatbot where X is:

  • Google/YouTube

  • Meta/Facebook/Instagram

  • Patreon

  • Substack

  • Beehiiv

Metrics Drills

Imagine the companies above built a Chatbot for Creators, what would be the metrics, how would they change if the company in question changed.