Jess Lee knows how to build a community of delighted users at Hustle Con

So, are we all ready to get started? So our first speaker is Jess Lee. She's the CEO and co founder of Polyvore, which is a global community that helps people discover and shop for things they love in fashion, beauty, and home decor. Jess is here to talk about how Polyvore has grown to a community of 20 million monthly users by building a very delighted community of. Building a community of delighted users. So, please, let's give a warm welcome to Jess Lee.

Hi, everyone who here is starting their own company or has their own company or is interested. All right, great. Welcome to the long road. It's really, really rewarding and really, really hard. One of the hardest things you're going to have to do is figure out how to grow users. So Polyvore is a community site. So I wanted to talk a little bit today about community hacks, how to grow a community. So just before I get started real quick, I'm Jess. I'm the CEO and co founder of Polyvore. My story is a little bit unusual because I started as a product manager. Actually, I started as a user of Polyvore who was really in love with the product. And I wrote a note to the co founders with some suggestions on how to make the product better. Then they hired me, and after a couple of years we were all working together, they said, you know what, we think of you as a co founder. We're just gonna start calling you an honorary co founder. And then eventually I became CEO. So it's a pretty unusual journey. You might say I'm a hustler. And prior to that, I was a product manager at Google Maps, and then I studied computer science before that. I love manga, drawing, and bacon. I was at Comic Con last week, and if you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm just Jessica, or you can check out my blog@Jessyoko.com so for those of you who don't know Polyvore, we're a new way to discover and shop for things that you love in fashion, home decor, and beauty. So what our users do is they mix and match their favorite products, real products, into collages that we call sets. And about 20 million people come to Polywarf to browse and shop those looks. We have about 20 million visitors per month. We're the second largest driver of social commerce traffic on the web. So first is Facebook, then Polyvore, then Pinterest, and then Twitter. Obviously, we're much smaller in terms of user base than all those guys, but we drive really high quality traffic that actually converts to sale. And we have a global community of users who create about 4 million pieces of content per month. That's 4 million of these beautiful collages. So that's a lot of content by a very active user community. So the topic for today is a little bit about growth hacking, but not the usual type of growth hacking that most people talk about, the viral loops, the. The email retention programs. But really about what we believe is that the best way to grow is actually to cultivate a really delighted community of users. So why this matters so much is because when you have people who are really delighted, who love your product, they're your advocates, what happens is they can't help but tell their friends about it. And what happens is you get this natural word of mouth. So it's very viral, and that leads to viral growth. I want to give a couple of examples of how this has helped Polyvore traffic growth. So, so much of our traffic in the early days came from blogs. And what would happen is someone would use Polyvore and find the experience interesting and unique, and they hadn't seen it before. So then they'd write a blog post, hey, check out this site. And that in turn would drive all of their readers and their followers back to Polyvore. Nowadays, that's happening on Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest or Tumblr, but this has been part of the. It's a huge part of our traffic growth over the years. So that's one way that delight has really led to growth. The other interesting thing is it's also led to fundraising growth or funding. So one of our investors actually called me while we were in the middle of raising our series C, and he said, hey, I'd like to invest. And I was like, great. Would you like to. Do, you know, do you want me to come over to your office and do you know the pitch, show you the numbers? He said, no, I don't need to hear it. I'm in. And I was like, oh, that's great. Why? And he said, well, I heard about you three times in a very short period of time, and that's why I'm in. And so the three examples were his assistant uses Polyvore and told him about it. His best friend, who happens to be the CEO of a major fashion brand, mentioned it to him at dinner in Paris. And then the third was that one of his old colleagues, who is an exec at an investment bank, mentioned it to him at a conference in Vegas. So three sort of mentions all over the world from people he knew he picked up the phone and called. So that delight, where you have someone just dropping your name in a positive way can really lead to, in this case, millions of dollars worth of funding. So it's really, really important. So I'm just going to talk through some of the community hacks. They fall under three principles. The first they're live, learn and love. And I'll go through each of them and then talk a little bit about what we do. So live. Is that what this really means is that community starts from within. So before you start thinking about how to go externally and do growth hacking and get your community first, you have to really believe in the power of your user community. You have to truly care about it, because if you don't, it'll end up showing. So your social media manager, if they don't really love and respect your user community, then they might tweet something and use the wrong tone of voice. If your engineers don't really care about the users and respect them, they might build a feature that disrespects their privacy. So it's really, really important that you start first internally inside your company and figure out how to make sure that everybody cares. So the ways that we do this, first, you have to make it part of your culture. So Polyvore's three core values delight the user, do a few things well and make an impact. The first one is basically about the user. We want to delight the user, so that's baked into the core values. The second is that we actually make everyone at Polyvore go through orientation where they sit down with the community team. The community team walks them through and talks about how much we love the community and how much profiles interesting members. So that's a picture of our orientation. So you have to really start baking it into your culture very early on. Then another thing to make sure the community all surrounds your team is we decorate the office with community memorabilia, love letters that they send us. We post them on the wall. We decorate the office with the beautiful collages, the sets that our community makes. When we get flowers or nice notes, handwritten notes from our community, we pass them around desk to desk in the office so everyone can read the love letter. We do a weekly email update so the community team actually writes up things like what you should know the top community requests, a love letter each week and a spotlight on a member. So you get a sense of, like, who are these people? Who's behind, you know, the. The user ID number that the engineers see. We also, at some point, once Your team is a little bit larger. I would definitely recommend hiring a community team. I think our community manager was the sixth hire at Polyvore, so that's actually fairly early on. But we wanted someone dedicated to this. The community team does a combination of customer support as well as top member outreach. A lot of companies only do the first part, the customer support and they forget about how do you like, make sure you have a strong relationship with your top members who are advocates. So the second principle is learn. You want to learn a lot from your community. It's so valuable to have those users and to get their input back into your product is really important. You have to listen to them, you have to incorporate their feedback into your product and then you have to let them know that you incorporated their feedback into the product. So one thing we do is we try to get feedback quite early. We might do a beta test with a select group of members where they get access to a feature early, or we might do something even earlier than that where we'll build a prototype for apps. We really like this tool called Flinto. Your designers can make mocks and wire them up and you can basically have a click through prototype that looks fairly polished. And this is Jason, one of our product managers, holding Starbucks cards. So you can give little, you know, little prizes, little gifts to people to help out as thanks for helping out. But what we do is we get this feedback early and then incorporate it into the development process. Recently, I think we had a whole bunch of our engineers and our product manager and our designers go gorilla style into Stanford Mall and, and just put that all together and then we tally up the top request and it gives us a little bit of quantitative data and qualitative comments from our users telling us what they like or don't like. So this is an example of the feedback that we got from the beta test of that visual design change that I showed you in the previous slide. And it was overall quite positive. But you can see that there were a bunch of negative comments and we went and tried to address as many of those as possible. While you can't really respond to every little community thing, you can't do exactly what your users tell you to do. But it was good to see the feedback to validate or invalidate some of our hypotheses. Then once you figured out what you're going to do, what you're going to change, it's really important to respond back to the community with updates. So this is from a while back. We changed our messaging system inside of Polyvore and we, we got some complaints about the new interactions and then we figured out, aha, we should fix these specific things. And you can see there are three updates. Update 1, 2, 3, where we actually wrote back to the community, hey, thanks for the feedback. We're working on fixing some of this stuff. Then hey, we've made some changes, let us know you think. And then lastly, we're working on more changes. And that dialogue really shows your community that it's a two way conversation. It makes you sound human, it shows that you're listening and it makes a really big difference. Also, when there are problems, you need to address them head on. Don't try to bury them. So this is from, I think yesterday there was a user who wrote in to complain about our Android app and it's because our Android app asks for a bunch of permissions and she was like, why do you need all these permissions? And our social media managers wrote back and said, hey, we're sorry, it does seem confusing and unnecessary, but the reason for it is Google has actually grouped some of this stuff under these terms and we need into these buckets and we need some of the details in there. And hey, we're not going to prank call you, don't worry. And I thought this was a really nice way to handle it with a sort of fun human tone, like having a conversation with a real person. Sometimes you'll screw things up, you'll launch. One time we launched all of our AB test experiments all at the same time. Everything was turned on and it was such a confusing, we immediately turned it off. But people were really upset. They were like, why did you change everything all of a sudden? Or when there are outages, when the site goes down for a little, you know, we just say sorry. We're really, really sorry. Here's what we know about when it's going to be fixed. Everyone's working really hard on it. We worked through the night. Those little bits of communication make a big difference. And also when great things happen to you, like we won a Webby award this year, we make sure to go back and tell the community about it and thank them because without them we would really be nothing. The last principle is love. You should really make sure your community knows how much you care by how much you love and appreciate them. So this is from a while back. We changed our messaging system inside of Polyvore and we got some complaints about the new interactions and then we figured out, aha, we should fix these specific things. And you can see there are three updates, update 1, 2, 3, where we actually wrote back to the community saying, hey, thanks for the feedback, we're working on fixing some of this stuff. Then hey, we've made some changes, let us know what you think. And then lastly, we're working on more changes. And that dialogue really shows your community that it's a two way conversation. It makes you sound human, it shows that you're listening and it makes a really big difference. Also, when there are problems, you need to address them head on. Don't try to bury them. So this is from, I think yesterday there was a user who wrote in to complain about our Android app because our Android app asks for a bunch of permissions. And she was like, why do you need all these permissions? And our social media managers wrote back and said, hey, we're sorry, it does seem confusing and unnecessary, but the reason for it is Google has actually grouped some of this stuff under these terms and we need into these buckets and we need some of the details in there. And hey, we're not going to prank call you, don't worry. And I thought this was a really nice way to handle it with a sort of fun human tone, like having a conversation with a real person. Sometimes you'll screw things up. You'll launch. One time we launched all of our AB test experiments all at the same time. Everything was turned on and it was such a confusing, we immediately turned it off. But people were really upset. They're like, why did you change everything all of a sudden? Or when there are outages, when the site goes down for a little bit, we just say sorry. We're really, really sorry. Here's what we know about when it's going to be fixed. Everyone's working really hard on it. We worked through, through the night. Those little bits of communication make a big difference. And also when great things happen to you, like we won a Webby award this year, we make sure to go back and tell the community about it and thank them because without them we would really be nothing. The last principle is love. You should really make sure your community knows how much you care by how much you love and appreciate them. So one easy thing to do, especially as you're starting out, when you don't have a lot of budget to to share and give to your users. What you can do is just interview your top members, spotlight them, highlight them in your social media, tweet at them on Twitter. What we do is we interview our members and we'll ask them what's trending in your neighborhood. In terms of fashion, tell us a little bit about you and why you use the product, and we'll write interviews, make content about them, and then feature them across our homepage, in the app, in our social media and our Facebook page. Then maybe once you have a little bit more budget to work with because you're starting to, you know, maybe you got funding, maybe you do it out of your own pocket because you care, maybe you can partner with advertisers to do something. One thing that we've done is send gifts, small gifts that are personalized, and then most importantly, handwritten thank you notes. I can't tell you how many times we've, you know, we've done a meetup and we've given them gifts and then there's a little note and they. There's all these presents. And the thing they're most excited about is that we took the time to write a handwritten note. People just don't write letters anymore or notes anymore. So I think it is still something that's kind of special. And we will sometimes pass them around the office and have lots of people sign them. And it's just an easy thing to do. So why not do it? It does make a big difference to people. And then our community managers sometimes go out of the way to do personalized gifts. So this one time, that picture on the left is some of our users having received this box where they open it and they find an item that they've used in their Polyvore sets. Before that, our community managers dug through their sets and then they discovered that my gift is different from yours. And I used this in four sets. And they were so happy. There were people crying. Actually, it's just that little bit of extra. When you go the extra mile, people will remember that. Then once we got a little bit more funding, we were able to do this. We wanted to help the community actually achieve their career goals and their dreams and their aspirations. So we asked them, hey, who in the community is actually interested in a job in the fashion industry? What are your aspirations? What do you want to do? So we put out, we did like a survey, we got all this feedback, and then from there we were able to figure out how to use our connections as a company and our personal network to make some of that happen. So Samara on the left, we were able to set her up with an internship at Cynthia Rowley, a fashion designer. In the middle, we send a bunch of people to fashion shows to be our community correspondents. So we sometimes get tickets to shows to cover them. But we, you know, we're here, we're mostly engineers, so we send our community members to the shows and have them create content about them. The third example is that's Olivia Lopez. She's an amazing blogger and Polyvore user. And we got. We partnered her with a designer to create her own design collaboration. They designed that shoe that she's wearing. They called it the Olivia boot, and it was on sale and it sold out. So that was something that she got to do. So we definitely try to make sure that our community is really, really happy. So those are the three principles. Live community starts from within. Learn. Learn from the community. Feedback that you get and incorporate into your product and love. Show them how much you love and appreciate them. And when you do these things right, you will see growth and you will see these kinds of comments from your community. I'm just going to read this. This is from Heather. She's been a member on Polyvore for probably six years. And she said, as long as I've been a member of Polyvore, the team has always been attentive and kept the community their number one priority. I always assumed that as Polyvore grew, the genuine concern for user satisfaction would take a back seat to company goals. Fortunately, I was wrong. I'm continually amazed at how much of a family atmosphere Polyvore is able to create all over the world. I'm so thankful to be part of this community. And I sing praises for Polyvore every chance I get. So I do, really. When I look back on the history of Polygor and how we've gotten to this point with the 20 million users, I do really feel that this and the way that our community management team treats our community has been a big part of our success. So I just wanted to share those growth hacking tips with you guys. Thank you.

I'll actually start with a question. Jess.

Hi, Eric.

So big fan of your work.

We went to college together.

I'm actually crashing in her house right now. Thank you. Jess, you've done a great job in cultivating the Maven community. You know, getting your top users to get together, meet in person, you know, get them excited about Polyvore, show how much that you guys love them back. And I was wondering, what are your thoughts in terms of extending that relationship a bit further? In terms of when you guys have a huge release, leveraging those bloggers to talk about it or seeping it with them first, Is that something that you guys actively pursue or how do you view that relationship?

Yeah. So we Definitely think about that. When we have a bigger release, what we like to do is have a beta test group where they get early access. We hey, you're invited to a special sneak peek of this new feature, this new app that we're working on. We'd love your feedback. It's still a work in progress. Your feedback means a lot to us and will help us make the product better. So you phrase it that way so that they don't get pissed when they see all the bugs because it's early. Right. And then you actually do incorporate their feedback and make sure that group in particular, you respond to their emails and say, hey, thanks for that, or oh, sorry, that was a bug. So then they feel like part of this, you know, they feel like they're really contributing because they really are. And then when the feature is ready to go, you can email them again and let them know that to tell their friends as well as what we've also seen happen is because of change of version. Sometimes the rest of the community who hasn't seen it before will be like, oh, I hate this, like, why did you change this? I liked it the way it was before. And then those people who were in the beta test, sometimes they come out of the woodwork and comment back for you on your behalf and say, hey, I, I thought it sucked at first too, but then I played for it for, played with it for a week and now I love it. And that is much, much more powerful than you saying, hey, just wait a weekend, you'll love it too, right? It's better when the community comes out and says that for you. So I think that's a big part of our release strategy. Thank you.

First question.

Hi, I'm Susan, I am the head of community for a community oriented healthcare social media company. And we have same sort of situation, a really strong community of really big fans and then a couple of outliers that are still part of our community but are maybe a little bit higher maintenance. And I was wondering if you have some insight into how you've trained your team to handle those kinds of folks within the community and sort of when to draw the line on engagement and when to pull back and how you handle just those people that need a little bit of extra attention and Maybe aren't necessarily 100% negative, but are really challenging in their own way.

I think we've been lucky to have not a lot of people who are super challenging. Like, we do have occasional incidents where someone's really angry about something and I think we sometimes send them flowers after we've resolved the issue. Even then, even with those challenging people, I still think it's important to go that extra mile. And then you do have to use your best judgment. So I think we just tried to find a team that genuinely cared and just said, hey, treat them like you would treat a real, just a real human right. And then they've written internal guidelines for themselves on how to do that and it's fairly self regulating.