Reid Hoffman describes a thank-you email experiment that revealed each user's signup rank. Sent to 100,000 users first, the overwhelmingly positive response led to a million-user rollout. He also shares a principle for maintaining trust: any company action should be acceptable if printed on the front page of the New York Times.
Chapters
So the question is how to think about how to engage your customers the right way. And the short answer is you have a set of ideas by which you think things could be very, very valuable to them. And so you're building to those. Those are the value propositions. But then people are diverse. You have a wide range of— you have a wide range of of possible reactions to things. And so you have to kind of test them. So for example, on that specific email, we thought that people would like getting both a thank you and also essentially the number of when they— what number they were when they signed up. And we thought that people would like getting that. But we weren't sure. So we said, okay, let's send it for the first 100,000. And see how the response to that goes. And we were looking at Twitter and a bunch of other things as a way of finding out, like, were people going, "Ugh, you know, this— damn it, this guy Reed's putting an email in my box that I don't like," or are they going, "Oh, that was kind of cool," right? And kind of getting real-time sentiment analysis. And it was clear within a couple hours that the vast majority of people who were getting that were going, "Oh, that's kind of cool. I both like being appreciated for being an early adopter and for, you know, part of our theory is the members make the network and so it's all about the individual members and everything else is secondary. And then also what my number was. And so we then set the second batch which was up to the first million, 'cause the thought is to confirm it to early adopters. And so that was kind of an instance of thinking this through. The last piece I'd say on this is when you're a company, you're building all kinds of things where you want to kind of pull off the— open up the curtains and say, "Ta-da!" You want to make sure that everything that you do, because your members only see a small portion of what you do. The rule that we follow in the company is if everything that we would do were printed on the front page of the New York Times, everyone would be happy with us. Or at least neutral, but preferably happy. And no one would go, "What? What are you doing?" Right? And so, and that's part of the trust that you have when you say, "Well, it's a network of over 100 million people and growing." How do you preserve that trust and how do you have them go, "Yes, I think that you have, you've never acted badly, you've acted frequently well, and the times where I don't agree with you, I at least kind of get it and I think it's worth it." neutral, right, as kind of a compass for how you, how you drive it forward.
