same mission. different execution.

the why behind our shift from a workplace product to a consumer social experience.

It feels so good to be here writing to you all again.

If you’ve been following this substack then you know how obsessed I am about work and the state of the workplace.  You’ve heard me talk about our mission to accelerate understanding and help people better understand each other. Manual was created to give more people access to the working life I’ve enjoyed in the past — and it was also an opportunity for me to build a company that fully reflected the vision of how work ought to be.

One of the values we’ve prioritized in that vision is freedom to pursue the wildest parts of our imaginations, without ego or fear getting in the way. This is not easy, it’s a privilege but it’s also a daily practice to let go of the habits we’ve learned. And throughout that daily practice, our little team realized something: The mission of understanding and closeness is so much bigger than the workplace. After a year and half of building, learning and reflecting, we are no longer building a product focused on work. We’ve decided to do the crazy thing and build a new kind of social network called why?! that we announced this week in TechCrunch, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and places like Hypepotamus.  

why?! is a conversation app centered around questions. Big questions, funny questions, wild cards, and curiosity about other people in all its forms. We’re in an invitation-only private beta right now but you can join the waitlist here.

Same mission. Different execution. Let me explain what led us here…

We’ve always been focused on people and believe that the people part of life is the most important part. We’ve always wanted to center our work on the quality and depth of interpersonal relationships because that’s where we see the most pain.

At the top of 2023, we set out to help people better understand each other in the workplace. We spend most of our lives at work and it’s nearly impossible to love your life if you don’t love your work. The number one pain point at work is … the people part. Leaders are at the core of this problem. Not feeling seen by your boss or coworkers, feeling misunderstood and not safe to be yourself. 

As the world started to settle into remote working as a new normal, we also started to see this trend of people creating their own user manuals in their own form – Google Docs, PDFs, Notions or even personal websites. Our hypothesis was that instead of trying to teach leaders to be better with their people, what if we built an easy, standardized, productized version of these documents?  

Boom, Manual was born. 

We assembled a team, built a prototype and started on the path to getting Manual in your hands. We had an idea of where we thought the product could enter into work: at the company level, with buy-in from top execs; at the team level, starting with mid-level leaders and growing from there; and at the individual level, targeting people on the job hunt and hoping they’d bring Manual with them when they landed a new role. Over the course of 10 months, we hustled. We started going through our networks setting up calls, walking people through the vision and the product as it was. I was posting on Linkedin like crazy and you all responded so generously and positively.  

This is the thing about Manual: It was a good idea in theory.  We received so much positive feedback on the idea. Everyone picked up our calls. Everyone said they wanted to improve the interpersonal experience at work. But after onboarding 4,000 users, dozens of teams and working with a handful of companies, we started to sense that it wouldn’t work the way we hoped it would.  Here are our key learnings in broad summary:

1. Top execs said they wanted it, but they didn’t really want it. Leaders expressed, both subtly and explicitly, a real fear of employees being “too” empowered and “too” free to be themselves. In other words, your employer doesn’t actually want you to be yourself. They want you to be the version of you that creates the least amount of problems, produces the most amount of work. It became clear that companies — big traditional ones and smaller startups — were looking to announce a perk but not willing to commit to its more progressive implications. 

2. Mid-level leaders are too overwhelmed to implement big change. We onboarded a dozen small teams across different industries and company size, with fully bespoke service. We found that leaders were excited but drowning in their current workloads, and couldn’t find the time to utilize the product or the learnings with their team. At the end of the day, it would sit on the shelf and they wouldn’t return even with real-time prompts into their daily workflow.

3. Individuals were either too afraid to give honest answers in their Manual or if they did, they were hesitant to share broadly. This is where we saw the most energy and enthusiasm. Thousands of you filled out Manuals and some of you even posted on them in your LinkedIn bios, in your email signatures, and other places across the Internet.  As we started to read them and analyze them, we realized the answers were more generic than the incredibly unique people we’d met through onboarding. We interviewed hundreds of you and ran some focus groups and found that you didn’t trust the majority of your coworkers or leaders with the truth of your whole self.

We could have stuck with it and built Manual into a profitable business. There was a path. We could have convinced companies and teams to buy it. We could have kept onboarding more teams. But doing so would have required altering our product into something bland and palatable enough that it would end up perpetuating the exact thing we were trying to fix. 

Sigh.

In hindsight, this is all very obvious. I spent the last 6 months writing about my own traumatic experiences with work, like the workplace is killing black women, breaking up with work and no one is coming to save you. While it was a valiant effort, intention and ambition, we had to get real with ourselves and deal with the truth about how work was designed and the fact that we weren’t going to be able to change it the way we thought we could. 

These are some of the thoughts of darker moments. But even during our more discouraged times, there was one insight that stood out really bright, one thing about Manual that really worked: the questions.  

The thing that everyone universally enjoyed about Manual was the experience of answering questions. This tracked with some additional research we’d done with therapists, psychologists and social scientists. These experts told us that the best way to help people better understand each other and for people to get closer, they have to be in a reciprocal relationship and state of self-disclosure that is consistent and gets deeper over time. 

We realized our experience was entirely inverted. We were trying to get good-enough answers for questions in order to create a document that would help people know each other. What we missed was that the act of asking, answering, discussing, and sharing is the thing that creates closeness. No Manual could ever be perfect or complete enough to replace the understanding that comes from a shared journey of asking and answering questions with one another. 

When we realized this simple yet profound insight in mid-March, we made the decision to pivot pretty quickly. Pivots are common for startups and what we’ve read in The Lean Startup and heard from others inspired our thinking in how to evolve.  We thought about these core four areas:

1. Mission – the mission is essentially staying the same. We still believe there’s a need to help accelerate understanding, improve the quality of our interpersonal relationships and help people get closer to each other. The exacerbating factors of loneliness, atomization, and discontentment with our current social structures are still as relevant to why?! as they were to Manual. 

2. Context – we decided to let go of building specifically for the workplace and open it up to all areas and relationships in our lives, because why not? The idea and the mission is too big and too important to wall it off into one part of life. That’s not how people work and the product should be flexible enough to go wherever people want to take it.  

3. Form – we decided to walk away from building a web-based enterprise work product and shifted to building a consumer social network that would exist in a mobile app to start.

4. Name – we opted to change the name from Manual to why?!. Manual felt more work-related, clinical and complete. “Why” is an open ended question that you never stop asking. We added the ?! to give it a touch of wild, exciting, unpredictable energy that we believe is present in the best conversations. 

Our new hypothesis is that one of the ways we can help people get closer to each other is to build a social network designed exclusively around questions. 

Today, I’m more excited about why?! then I ever was Manual. why?! is way more simple in its form, but has the capacity to make bigger, deeper, more powerful changes in people’s lives, if we can execute it right. It requires a completely new set of ideas on how to bring it to life. And frankly it’s also just so much more fun. This has been a difficult yet thrilling overhaul. So far, the response in both theory and the very first weeks of our beta have been really exciting and we’re seeing people understand and jump into the product much more naturally and quickly than we ever did with Manual. 

We are in a private-invitation only beta and are letting people in slowly. You can join the waitlist here. I’m personally letting people in off the waitlist on a weekly basis. 

I still have intentions to improve the workplace, but it occurred to me the way to do that is by building a really successful company that models a new way of working for the world instead of trying to change the old paradigm. We are so intentional about our culture, our values and our ways of working even now as a small team.  

It was tough for me to let go of Manual. To let go of almost two years of imagining Manual and what it could be. But that’s the thing about building and pursuing the best work of your life. You don’t know what’s on the other side until you get started and you try.  If someone would have said to me five years ago that I would be launching a social network, I would have laughed in their face. But today, it doesn’t seem crazy at all with everything we now know.  You don’t know what’s out there and available to you if you never take the first step. And once you get going, sometimes you have to let things go that you love to make space for something more beautiful to flow in. 

Sending you so much love wherever you are.

m