Josh Elman, Greylock Partners (prev Twitter, FB, LinkedIn) on 4 keys to crush product growth

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On today's show, Josh Elman, partner at Greylock and longtime product manager at Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, talks to the Launch Incubator class about the 4 key aspects of growth to crush your product. Thanks. And look, I always say thanks for having me because literally, like, you know, when I graduated from college in 1997, so I'm probably older than most of you in this room, if not everybody. But, you know, all I've ever wanted to do is go try to work on products that make a difference in people's lives. That was even like my little resume objective when I graduated from college. And unlike all of you, I was never brave enough to be a founder. It just wasn't something that— I was never attracted to the idea of starting scratch, blank sheet of paper, and going to make something in the world. So I have like mad respect for everybody who does that, because there's nothing like starting on day zero and going, I'm going to start a company. and I'm gonna go make this thing and it's gonna be great. But I was always attracted to like, whenever I was figuring out what I wanted to do, I was attracted to like big ideas and people who were trying to do these things that would change the world and hoping I could go get a job to help them. And this is kind of how I represent my career, 'cause I think our lives are really the experiences and the people and the things we collect over our lives, and it's a network. And everything I think about growing things and thinking about products, it always turns out to be networks and systems that really matter. But kind of my life network, I started a company called RealPlayer. I started working at a company called RealPlayer as my first job. Do you guys remember RealPlayer? The idea was audio video on the internet. And I think audio and video on the internet really worked, although Real might not ultimately be the company we still use for that. I went to LinkedIn, was about 15 people with this idea that if we connected everybody in the world professionally who's like worked with each other, maybe we could transform jobs and recruiting and business development and sales. Lo and behold, you look at LinkedIn now, and it's just incredible what they've been able to do to really reinvent this professional network. I got to work at a company called Zazzle for a couple years that makes on-demand t-shirts and greeting cards and postage stamps. The idea there was anybody with an idea can upload a design, and you can have a physical product made with that within 24 hours. This idea of turning bits to atoms, and any brilliant thing could be a physical product, is kind of this amazing power of a marketplace of designers and community. They haven't become a company, I think, like Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter, but when I was at attracted and joined them, I thought it had just as big of potential, and I still think it does. And maybe their story just has even more to play out. They're still doing actually quite well, and they're the number one shipper out of San Jose Airport. Then I went to Facebook in 2008 when the platform and the company was in this really interesting state, which is like everybody thought, okay, Facebook might be a big deal. MySpace was much, much larger, and we thought, oh, maybe there's a chance that Facebook could actually become this and the platform that every consumer internet company is based on. And now, you know, how many apps and products do you use that have Facebook login in them? And I got to help launch Facebook Connect. And then I went to Twitter. And I'll tell the story of— I'll tell a couple stories of Twitter through this talk. But when I joined Twitter, it was about 80 people. Tons of people were coming in and signing up and trying out Twitter because they'd heard of it. But nobody was actually really— not enough people were using it. And that's kind of what Ev Williams said. Everybody signs up. Nobody sticks around. Help us fix that. And I started a little team there called User Growth. And we got it from about 10 to 100 million users. And it's turned out from there. So this has kind of been my story, you know, and I think a lot about user growth. And I think if you think back to 1995, this was the state of the art in user growth. I don't know who remembers getting CDs, you know, at their home every day. We had literally hundreds and hundreds of these CDs from like magazines and everything else because, you know, to get users you spent money. You spent money on marketing. You spent money on getting out there in the world and just every time you could do things and these things cost real money, but you could get more users that would pay you. But I think most of us think about growth today a little bit differently. We think about growth as virality. We think about growth as this idea that if I just tell 5 people and there are 3 people and each of them tells 6 people, all of a sudden you'll have this exponential growth. And we do look at companies like Snapchat and Facebook and LinkedIn, you know, that have really grown this way. And that's a pretty attractive model. It can be pretty inexpensive, but it's hard to light up. And it really takes a lot of careful thought for how you light it up. And companies like Uber and other things have done this incredibly well. So, oh, I'm sorry, I hit the wrong button. And so I'm just gonna wanna talk through a little bit of how do you get from there to there. And this is the other thing people think about growth a lot is how can I get featured in the App Store? And this turns out, this is sort of like empty calorie growth. Everybody's like, oh, how can I meet somebody at Apple? Or how can I meet somebody at Google? And you get featured and it's really exciting and you get all these downloads, but they're not people who are really coming to your product. to use it and know what it's about and really want to do it. And so this is sort of a nice to have, but this isn't really what's going to make you grow. And so we'll talk through that. And so when I think about growth, I think about sort of 4 key things that you really want to ask and understand for your company. The first is the problem. And I heard several of your pitches tonight did a really good job sort of just starting with, here's this problem that people have. Like, what do they want? Why are they even in a mindset where they could be attracted to your product to solve it for them? Once you understand that problem and you think you have an answer, the second question is what I call inception. How do you go make people aware that your company and your product exists to solve that problem? Once you get them there, they've now been incepted and they're like, okay, maybe I'll go try this thing out. Then I think about adoption. How do you get them going? How do you get them from that moment of interest to somebody who comes back again and again and again to your product? And then retention is really how do we make it a habit? How do we get them from thinking about it, wanting to try it and start to adopt it to just coming back time and again. So let's go back to thinking about the problem. And the first thing I like to think about is, you know, when we're designing our products today, a lot of times people look at these like really successful iconic products and they try to design to meet them. And they say like, well, everybody knows Google. When you have a problem, you don't know where to find something, you open up Google and it has one beautiful clean box and you just type into it and that's just like this perfect match, right? But when you look at Google in 1999 or 2000, like, Nobody knew how to use Google or what it was, and nobody even really understood what the problem they had was. So they'd hear about this thing Google, and they'd be like, search the web using Google. They will show you a certain number of results. There's indexes containing 23 million pages, soon to be much bigger. Like, they're trying to sell you on the fact that, like, you need to find something, we have it. Like, there's a lot of text on this page right now. There's also, like, the I'm Feeling Lucky button that made it kind of fun and a little bit frivolous. But you gotta understand that, like, Google now is like, oh, we have a problem. I need to find something on the internet. I go to Google. Back then nobody knew that and it took them a lot more explanation to do it. And I also think of Uber. And like, look, Uber used to call itself a one-click car service. They used to do like expensive promotions on Groupon. Like nobody understood the fact that like Uber is now this beautiful, simple product. You know, I download the app and you just click ride now and like you jump into it. That's because everybody's heard of Uber. Before they've heard of it, You really have to think about, like, nobody understands what your product is, and you need to answer that when they come. They're like, I don't even know why I need this thing, and you have to explain it to them. And I think, you know, these are like not great examples. I led the investment in Meerkat, so I'm trying to speak from home, and Periscope's another product that Twitter has. And I think like we're getting into a world now where people kind of assume that people understand these products from the beginning. You know, it's like tweet live video, or Periscope doesn't even describe what it is. Or if you show up on one on the web, you see a little bit around the context, it's like download the app, or Periscope's, you know, get the app. But none of these really do a good job of like, why do you need it? Or what is the problem? And try to rearticulate it back to the user. And so I just encourage you when you're starting your products, don't look at Apple and Google as your models, unless you're looking at like the very first version of Apple or the very first version of Google, because you really want to communicate back out. Like, I assume you have this problem, here's what I can do to help you solve it.

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So at Twitter, when I joined Twitter, this was one of the web pages too, and I'll walk you through how we got to really understand the problem for Twitter and expressing it much better. So when you get to Twitter back in— this is like 2008, 2009 version— what is Twitter? And we'd actually try to describe it for you. Twitter's a service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: what are you doing? And if you read all that, that seems like pretty hard, and you go, why wouldn't I just use Facebook for that? Twitter doesn't really sell itself very well on this. So then they changed the homepage, and it was share and discover what's happening right now anywhere in the world, and we put a big old search box. And so this I think does an even worse job saying like, why should I use Twitter? And you want when somebody comes to your product, they're like, Why should I use this? What is a problem I have that you solve for me? So back in 2010, if you search I don't get, we were number one. We were I don't get Twitter. We finally did beat I don't get drunk, I get awesome. And so, and so like nobody understood it, and we weren't doing a good job helping you understand why you'd want Twitter, what the problem you might have. So we went through this exercise at the company. We said, who wants Twitter? What is the problem they have? Is it for someone who tweets? And we're like, no, because most people in the world don't even know they wanna tweet. Is it for someone who wants to stay up to date with friends? We said, like, that's what the webpage actually said in that first version. We said, no, it's not for them because they have Facebook for that. Is it someone who cares about real-time news? And we started to actually get excited about this. We're like, oh yeah, Twitter's for real-time news. And then we looked around and started asking our friends. We're like, who cares about real-time news? Crickets. Like, nobody cares about it. Nobody, I mean, like, really thinks they care about real-time news. It's like, it's not that, it wasn't that relevant. So we said, is it for someone who wants to know what their friends had for breakfast? Because if you go into the media at the time, that was pretty much what they were saying.

Twitter's so stupid, it's what people, like, say that they had for breakfast.

Right. or even worse, someone who wants to tell everyone what they had for breakfast. And we're like, there's no way that that's what Twitter's for. We think Twitter's much more profound. So we really tried to figure out, like, what is the problem that we're solving with Twitter? And we came up with this phrase, and we said, look, for anybody who wants to know what's happening in their world, they should use Twitter. So if you don't know what's happening in your world, if your problem is you don't know what's happening in the world right now, and you want a product that just tells you that, we wanted that product to be Twitter. And maybe the answer to this before was like, go to CNN.com or go to the New York Times, but we wanted that to be Twitter. And so once we understood this, we could then turn around and re-communicate it back out and say, we know the problem that we solve for people is they say, what's happening? And if they got their Twitter set up right, we deliver them the best possible answer for that every single time. And so from that, we actually came up with a company mission statement. Our mission, to instantly connect people everywhere to what's most meaningful for them. And once you have this kind of like clarifying statements, you can really design the whole product and design the entire communication back in order to do it. And what I'll show you next is the newest homepage for Twitter that they just launched today. today that still echoes exactly that same theme because we got it so crisp and so clear. This is what— they literally just launched this homepage today. If you go to the LogdotTwitter, see what's happening right now. Find community conversation and inspiration about the things you love. And again, this just comes back, and this is now 3 or 4 years later than the exercise I just showed you, but how crisply and clearly you want to communicate that problem that you solve for people so that they can really connect with it. And when you're doing an investor pitch, everything else, you really want to start with that same core idea. You know, here's the problem people have, and then my product is the answer. So once you can articulate that in 30 seconds, and I like to say you should be able to do that over 30 seconds at lunch with a friend, and if they can't walk away kind of being excited about the problem in 30 seconds, you got to rework your words and simplify, simplify, simplify. Because everybody should be able to get their friend excited about something in 30 seconds. And, you know, as a game later, you know, you should do this on like any product that's out there now and try to figure out how to do it. And I do this a lot of time with friends. Okay, it's kind of weird, but. So once you have that problem, then I talk about inception. How do you make sure that every single time you're talking about your product or people are learning about your product or people are discovering your product, they are incepted with, that is the product that solves that problem that I might want to do. And so I'm going to go through a couple different just methods for growth that people are pretty familiar with, and we'll talk about how you use inception in them. So viral invites on LinkedIn. I mean, everybody does viral invites now. But back in 2004, when I first joined LinkedIn, virality was not a particularly known thing on the internet, and we weren't inundated with these all the time, except for maybe Plaxo and LinkedIn. And we were just starting to discover what that was about. And so in this viral invite, we were trying to figure out how to explain LinkedIn to you in a way that incepted you with the ideas that would work. And what the default text would say is, I've invited you to become a connection. I found you when I was looking around the network. Let's connect directly. I'm happy to help you with requests and forward things incoming to you. It'll make both of our networks bigger. And this doesn't do a perfect job of explaining LinkedIn, but what it does do is it incepts with a couple of ideas. You want to help each other, so you should connect so that we can help each other. You should only connect with people you want to help. And then you want to have a bigger network. And it turned out— this is going to sound crazy— but that last sentence, it'll make both of our networks bigger, when we did A/B testing, people who received that invitation were more likely to invite more people to their network when they signed up than people who— excuse me— who didn't receive it, who received other invitations. So having the little phrase, it'll make both of our networks bigger, drove downstream virality. And we were actually able to measure it, that this was actually the one that caused the most downstream virality. So by sending out this invitation as our default text, we got actually more people to grow in the network over time, because the people that they invited that responded invited more. Now this one actually had a slightly lower acceptance rate, So it was actually like we didn't get quite as many new members when this was sent out, but because people who did sign up sent more invitations, it actually worked better for our long-term growth. And that was the kind of research that we did and the kind of like planting little seeds that really do harvest over time. The second thing I like to talk about is SEO. And I think companies— I mean, SEO is sort of a hard thing to game right now or a hard thing to kind of really achieve greatness right now unless you have a really good product and really good content. And Jason, I think, has more stories on SEO than than anybody in the room. But I think when you think about SEO, you really want to understand how you can optimize your page and your experience for this. Yelp, I think, did a great job in the way that they originally worked with SEO, where every time you would type in a name of any local business, they would come up first or second. You'd click through, you'd see this great page on Yelp, and you would just start to get in your head, well, Yelp is a much better place. I should just search on Yelp first instead of to keep searching on Google. And go over to Yelp, and you think about like that little snippet, like you can actually control the little snippet that Google shows by getting your HTML right. And that little snippet is a very big part of the inception that actually happens there. Um, and I think this one for Yelp, you know, I'm really close to giving it 5 stars. My only negative is like it's putting a little review there makes you start to incept like, whoa, Yelp, this clicking on this link will get me real personal reviews out of it versus just hours and time, which, you know, Google has started doing kind of in the link above. So you really want to think about, like, again, how can you kind of convey what you're doing in as many places as possible? And people are going to search on your name, you know, search on other things, you know, every one of your company names, you want to make sure you're coming up as high as you can in Google, because that's going to help people kind of discover it. So the third thing is social. And on social, what I like to talk about is like, You need to figure out how the tweet or the content that goes sharing out to Facebook or whatever starts to pass the message about the product that you do and the landing page. And I think people sort of underestimate how powerful Instagram was at what I call this kind of same inception. Like, in the early days of Instagram, it was almost the only great way to get a picture out of your phone and onto the internet. But what kept happening was you would click on somebody else's picture and you'd be like, that's a really cool photo. It looks different. It's square. And it would have a little thing up there, look at that, 5-star reviews, download the free app for iPhone and Android. Like, they were pushing this pretty hard to get you to download Instagram back then. And you would constantly be trying to figure out, like, how do you, you know, what should I do with this product? And you would start to realize, like, I want pictures like that, I'm gonna go download it too. So the power of social is you can figure out how to get other people to carry the message for you, but you wanna make sure that you are in control of that message and that you're conveying it back onto all of your all of the users who are gonna see you. For Instagram, it was a big, cool square photo with comments and other things. You'd be like, whoa, I really want that product. And then the last thing I talk about is PR. I think people underestimate just how powerful PR is as a channel, as a way to get your message out. People think that, oh my gosh, I really want the reporter to write about me. They're gonna ask a few questions, and then they're gonna print whatever they want. And the answer is, that's not really true. What they are looking for is a really authentic story to understand from the person, then to be able to write about a product that they think will be interesting to their readers in a way that's like really whole and authentic. And it turns out that if you tell a great story and you give them some of the keywords you want them to spread, and you give them some of the messages, they will often spread that for you. Now, it's not like they're just gonna like give them a press release and they rewrite it. Like, they are reporters who care about telling you a good story. But they really do listen and learn and really will convey kind of the key themes that you do. And I think about it at Twitter a lot. We had a big challenge in the early days that I think a lot of our PR was backwards. So we'd have people talking about, Twitter's this amazing place 'cause I can get on Twitter and I can blast out all my thoughts and I can blast out all of my tweets and I'll get all these followers. And like for most users, that wasn't that relevant of an experience. For most users, they had a very different experience. On Twitter, much more about listening, discovering interesting content that they wanted to see. what was happening in their world. And so we had this challenge when this story came out. Do you guys remember when Conan O'Brien got fired from NBC and he went on a tour? And he tweeted, and he sold out the whole tour in like 3 hours on Twitter. So like all the press stories were like, awesome, Conan O'Brien with one tweet sold out his whole tour. And that's kind of a cool message, but it doesn't really convey to most people that I should be on Twitter more. And so we started going to all the press and we said, wait, you actually got the story backwards. If you were on Twitter from 2 to 4 PM on Thursday afternoon, you might have had a chance to buy tickets if you followed Conan or saw the tweet. When you hear that second message, you're like, oh my gosh, I have to be on Twitter all the time, or I'm gonna like miss out the chance to buy tickets. If you hear the first message, you're like, ah, why do I need Twitter? What's it for? Well, it's not for me. I can't sell out a tour in an hour. And so we really want to spend all this time going, how do we get the right message out? And how do you make sure that you control it?

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I think another interesting example is Snapchat. How many of you use Snapchat? It's actually pretty good for this age group and demographic. But in the early days of Snapchat, all their press was about sexting. And it was Snapchat's for sexting in the mainstream press. And you have to really think about it from the company's perspective. Is that a good or a bad thing? And the answer is both. It's actually, it's a bad thing because you obviously don't want your product to be associated with inappropriate behavior like that. But on the other hand, it made Snapchat a little bit of a subversive thing for people to adopt. So if you're a 16-year-old and your parents are afraid of you using the texting app, does that make you want to use it less or more? Right? And if you're a parent, you're like, oh, don't use that Snapchat thing. It actually makes the kids have all this great thing. And then they just go like, come on. Nobody really uses it for texting, or it happens a teeny bit, but we're just having fun all day long on Snapchat. So that was actually a good thing in the press, and they did nothing for it, and they weren't controlling the message. And they were just kind of hiding and sort of letting the product really grow and scale. But now they have figured out that actually controlling the message for Snapchat gets them to a whole other level. And this just happened over the weekend. Coachella on Snapchat, you know, said that they had over 40 million people look at Coachella through Snapchat Live, and the CEO tweeted that out. So now they're really being careful to kind of like give the press the message they want. And as founders, What you forget is once you get in the limelight at all, and a guy like Jason is super in the limelight now, when you tweet, when you say things in public, you're continuing to build on your same message and your same company, and that is part of that same story that you do. So you really do have a chance to control the narrative, but you need to be careful about it and think about it. And the founders who are out doing really silly things, that often doesn't bode well for the narrative around the company, and the ones who sound serious and figure out how to balance that all in, it can really pay off. And you can see here, how Snapchat's really using that to their advantage. Now I've used big company examples, but every time you get a chance to talk to the press and get any story out or to be part of a conference and a write-up, you really wanna get your narrative just right and really crisp. And then the last thing I talk about for how our products get incepted is this brand new thing that we have in mobile, which is truly in-person. The best thing about all of our products, and I'm sure that's super true for the Crux guys among all these things, is you pull out the product and you show it to somebody else and you teach them things when you go. And that's what will stay. The trick is like, how do I get you as a user to teach the next person how to use this in a really cool way? And we're seeing all these new gestures. Tinder with its swipe left, swipe right. Mailbox, which is like swipe left to archive. Like, the first time I learned about both of these things was not watching a video, was not downloading an app and going through a tutorial. It was literally watching somebody else who already had it going, dude, this thing's so cool. Check this out. I can like swipe and then like she might message me and I can swipe left and then like it's, you know, one that I don't like. Or like Mailbox, people were like, oh my God, this thing's amazing. Like, mail's reinvented. Check this out. I'm like, I'm like so much more efficient. You know, and then I get to, you know, and then they would also then tweet out that they got to inbox zero, which is a way to keep learning about, it's a great tool to get you to inbox zero. Like, design these things into your product from day one. Figure out what are the cool things you would want somebody to show off, and then like, you know, make them interesting. And don't be afraid, you know, I think we used to have this fear that most people had to try software the first time by themselves, so we wanted to make Make it as simple, as intuitive as possible. Things like Snapchat, things like Tinder, like these aren't necessarily intuitive that you would just learn on your own, but we're now social creatures and our devices are social. We can actually do things like this. So don't be afraid to push the limits either. So these are all the ways that I think about growing and kind of incepting these ideas in people to get them more excited. Then you want to think about what I call adoption. And this is a really important moment for every product. And I think this is what like most founders and most companies get wrong. First impressions matter. You really want to be at that moment where they come to your product, they've heard about it now, they're receptive, they're like, oh, that Tinder thing's pretty cool. You can swipe left or swipe right. But like, what is it going to mean for me? Or, you know, that Twitter thing sounds cool because if I'm on it from 2 to 4 PM, I can get tickets to like Conan O'Brien or other things. But they still don't quite know what the product's going to be until they put it in their hands for the very first time. And so I think about a game like Othello. And if you— who here has played Othello? Good, that's most of the room. It's, you know, a minute to learn, a lifetime to master. It's a great, like, moment that they make it sound so simple, and then they show you, like, 18 pages of instructions. But the irony here is it actually is pretty simple. And you really want to make the first moment of your product feel as simple as Othello. But the fact is, none of our products are— is like, all of our products are actually this complex. And they're not a minute to learn, a lifetime to master. And so, you know, if anybody here thinks their product can just be learned and you can be an expert in a minute, you're nuts. And so I like to think about onboarding as what I call sort of the learn flow. The moment that you show up to a product, how do you actually get the hang of it? And so when somebody signs up, they have a bunch of stuff in their head, but none of it is like, I'm here to use Twitter to find out what's happening in my world. Like, that's not why they're there. They're like, I've heard about it. Kim Kardashian was talking about it. Everybody else is on it. I keep hearing about it. I gotta figure it out. So this is your moment. And just like, I'll beat this over the head. Like, you have more attention now than you ever will again from their time to really try out and experience your product. So I'm gonna go back to the story of Twitter and kind of talk about what we changed in kind of the first, you know, over the first year or 2 that really helped change our activation rate for growth. And so when you'd sign up for Twitter in those early days, it was a big search box and a green sign up now. And if you've ever searched on Twitter, it is such a horrible experience even for somewhat experienced users on Twitter that you can imagine sending any new user down that rabbit hole, we probably lost them forever. But we did get some to click sign up now, and then the next thing we'd ask is, hey, find your friends on Twitter. Now, we already talked about at the beginning, Twitter's not about finding your friends, it's about figuring out what's happening in the world. So you're already confused, you're like, well, I don't really wanna find my friends. So most people skip, there's a teeny little skip link at the bottom. And then we'd be like, look who else is here, go follow them. And there were like 40 random people on this list, and you had no idea what was going on. You might recognize CNN, but most of these others were not that recognizable, and you weren't really making conscious decisions. Most people actually skipped this as well, but a bunch clicked finish and they'd follow exactly 20 people and have no clue what was going on. So if you skipped it, you'd end up on a page that looked like this, which is like the white screen of death and doesn't actually help you. use the product, or if you didn't skip it, you'd look on a screen that looked like this. It's a big old box to get you to type something and a whole bunch of random stuff, people who you don't even know, you don't know what's going on, you didn't do any follow actions, and so now you're confused. And so this is the challenge of Twitter, that we really didn't teach you the product at all, and we had a massive leaky bucket. And if you think through most of your things, most onboarding flows leave somebody with a really leaky bucket. And so I'm like, stop, hold on. This is your best chance. You can actually help somebody understand your product, so actually teach them. Now, I'm really careful about teaching. Teaching is not explaining or lecturing. Those little tours that people do, you just go flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. People don't really read those. I've done a bunch of studies and I've talked to a lot of developers who've actually tracked the amount of time spent on those things, and it's as little as possible. But what you can do is create a series of steps to let people take conscious actions that end up with the chance of them having the product set up and really kind of get going. So I'm gonna show you 3 or 4 different examples now, kind of what this is about. So this was Twitter Now about 2011, and you can see, find out what's happening right now with people and organizations you care about. It's very similar to the wording that they're still using today, kind of after that first revision. And then the very first step on our new flow, I said slow down. Like, we actually explained what was going on. We told you this is a tweet, Tweets are short messages that can have up to 140 characters and contain links like this. So you're like, whoa, okay, now you're telling. But actually, we're just— even if you didn't read anything on this page, I was just trying to say like, pause, you're here, sign up, breathe. Okay, now we're gonna take you into the flow. And then we'd lie and say it'll take you less than 60 seconds, because it didn't. The people who really tried to sign up for Twitter, it always took them more than 60 seconds. But we wanted to make you feel like you had a chance of it being fast. Okay, so then this is really where the building started and the teaching started. We'd show you a bunch of things on your left, and we were encouraging you to follow a few things. Whenever you clicked the follow button, it would show up on the right-hand side under the preview. And so we were basically saying, go try to follow at least 5, and we're trying to nudge you along. And these were pretty well-known people at this point that we figured you'd be, you know, you would recognize most of them. We had this personalized at least by country, and over time they even got better personalizing it on some of your history on coming into the product. And then the next thing we'd say is, okay, now you got the following thing going, and this is the example where I'd followed like Jennifer Lopez and Ellen DeGeneres. And then we'd show you categories. And again, I wasn't expecting you to find everybody you might be interested in in these categories. I was expecting you to know that these categories existed and were relevant and were useful on Twitter. Music, sports, entertainment, fashion, design, politics. And you would start to realize, whoa, I can use Twitter for all these things. And there's all these people here, and I'll bet you there's a lot more. There was a little search box if you wanted to type in there too. And then finally, we would go and ask for friends. Remember that very first flow I showed you, friends first? For Twitter, we want to show you that there's all this other stuff in the world, and then by the way, you want to add your friends too. And what was great was the same number, or actually more people on Twitter added their friends at this step than used to add it when it was the very first ask. Because now they had all this context. They found a bunch of people. They were ready to go find their friends. And so we kind of made it— we deferred it to the right point in the flow. And then we'd end up on a page that looks like this. And what was important about this page was you had manually selected each one of these people. So I wasn't surprised by anybody I'd seen. I'd click follow, they'd show up on the right, and I had a lot of context about what was going on. And then on the left-hand side, we started adding the who to follow stuff. So we're constantly reminding you, follow, follow, follow more. And our real goal there was if you follow more people on Twitter, you'll have a better Twitter experience. And if, you know, if we just got you into that rhythm, You'd have a good Twitter experience, then you might tweet, then you might reply, then you might participate and really get hooked in, you know, over time. And so by redoing it this way, we really changed the trajectory of how many people stuck around Twitter. As I said before, the best learning comes from making conscious decisions. Each one of those steps creates a little idea in their head of what Twitter's about. So if you go back through the steps, tweet, follow, news, sports, entertainment, friends. That's actually a really good description of Twitter. That's what you want Twitter to be about. Tweets and following and news, sports, entertainment, and friends. And so each of those steps kind of really adds that value. So that's kind of the Twitter example, but I'll show you a couple mobile examples that I think are amazing too. Who here has tried Lumosity? Okay, so it's most of the room. So Lumosity, the inception moment for Lumosity is like, you see ads, here's what we talk about. It's like, it's a game that will make your brain smarter. And if you're like me, you're like totally skeptical on this. Like, like, oh, come on. There's no game or there's no silly thing to make my brain smarter. So you're like, okay, I'm gonna try. I'm gonna sign up. Challenge your brain. It's got memory, attention. Let's get started. Okay, so I click through. And then this is where it scares me and like gets you really excited about it. Select all aspects of your memory you'd like to train. Lose fewer objects. Remember people's names. Learn new subjects quickly. Keep track of multiple ideas. Like, who in the world doesn't want like all these things better in their brain? Right? And so you're like, oh my gosh, maybe this isn't this stupid thing about brain training, it's real. And they're like, wait, avoid distractions, concentrate better, improve productivity and precision, focus longer on important tasks. You're like, oh my gosh, maybe I really want my brain to get better at these. And you keep going, react quickly, speed up your cognitive processes, make better decisions under stress, multitask efficiently, communicate clearly, think outside the box. Like, if you get to the end of this flow— sorry, if you get to the end of this flow and create an account, you're like, oh my gosh, if I don't create an account right now, like, my entire brain is gonna decay. Because they've given you just step after step where you actually had to make very cognitive decisions and select which ones of those you want to do. And I've never talked to somebody at Lumosity about this, but I can't imagine people go through and don't select every one of those on every single screen, because now you're really thinking about how to make your brain smarter. And then finally they're like, okay, now tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found Lumosity. And then you're in and you begin testing. By this point you're so stressed, you're in and you're going to do it every day. and like keep coming back because of the way that they onboarded you from like, this sounds stupid, to like, oh my gosh, my brain is gonna fall apart if I don't use Lumosity every day. So I just find that like a very, very powerful, very powerful onboarding process. Now let's look at Foursquare, which, you know, I think has been sort of maligned and they've changed the product a little bit. But I think right now they have like an onboarding experience that for the first time, if you didn't have any preconceptions about Foursquare and check-ins or anything else, It actually does a really interesting job helping you find stuff around you. So you go to Foursquare and you're like, you don't— let's assume you don't really know what it is versus the old check-in stuff they have to overcome. So it says, look, Foursquare is always on the lookout for places you'll like. So you say, neat. And like, again, not saying just okay or next, but like the word neat at least makes you think a little bit and react to what the screen is about. And then they tell you one more thing, love a good fish fritter. At this point I started skipping ahead.

Sounds good.

Get started. Okay, great. Now they say, okay, they want my location. And if anyone's doing location or iOS preferences and iOS permissions, always have a screen where they have to tap something and then pull up the permission. Turns out that you just radically increase the rate of people actually accepting it in the app. And getting them to do it again and have to go to the settings page and change it, it's actually really hard. So try to get it right the first time. Rather have them skip it in your app, or you say, okay, you can't really go on unless you do this. versus have them dismiss the permission and then get stuck. Now they start saying, just tap a few things you like. And like, if you go through this list, I'm sure that over half the list everybody likes. You'll find all these things that you really like. That's kind of fun. And you don't realize it. You're like, whoa, wait, Foursquare will help me find all these things that I like, and I'm going to keep telling it because I know the more I tell it, and it's kind of a fun little game, it'll do it. Then they get you to turn on notifications, which is that permissions thing I talked about again. And then they get you to sign in. And then they kind of say, hold on, we're going to go find places you'll love nearby. And people think that apps should be really fast. I'm actually a big believer that sometimes taking a little moment to pause on this stuff, even if it's fake, actually makes you think, oh, it's going to go do some work on my behalf. And it's talking to the servers and there's some complex machines doing it and actually draws you more into the product instead of thinking it's slow, up to a point. I don't know if I'm not going to wait 30 seconds for this. But I might wait a few seconds and actually feel better than if it's like, oh, look, we got recommendations. Because when it's too fast, you're like, oh, they didn't actually do anything, right? And so it's an interesting sort of balance. And then it comes to this screen where it's showing me great coffee places, work with Wi-Fi, and these are based off all the preferences that I made in the product. So it's this really interesting flow that kind of takes you through all this. I'm going to show you one more example, which is Thumbtack. Who here has used Thumbtack?

I have.

Cool. So it's a pretty amazing product. Now when I opened up Thumbtack, it was kind of one of these mildly annoying tours, like accomplish your personal projects for your home, and then I swiped right, and it was like hire the right professional for you. I just skipped to the end because I literally just swiped through them all and hit done. But then it was like, okay, accomplish your personal projects, get started. So I'm like, okay, this is neat. What's Thumbtack about? Now what was interesting was, and we can argue whether or not this is good or bad, It took me right here. It was like, what service do I need near which zip code? And like, I'm not sure that I actually needed a service yet. I was just checking out Thumbtack because I'd heard about it. So this is a good question you have to think about for your app is like, how much do you take you into the task versus just doing it right away? But I just typed in plumber, which, which, you know, was like, ah, you know, I often need a plumber and it's good to know that the service can do it. And then it said near which zip code. And just the reason I showed this screen too, is it pulls up the number pad. And doing little touches like this actually makes a difference. If you ever have a field that's just gonna be numbers, pull up the number pad and people actually enter it much more easily than when it's the keyboard and they have to hit the little screen and switch it to numbers. These little things, I was like, oh, that was actually, it made a difference to me. Very soft, but I figured sharing that with the group was a good tip. Now, what really then impressed me with Thumbtack and said, I'm gonna come back to the service and use it later, is I went on this questionnaire for my job. And I just said plumber, and now it's like, oh, we're gonna ask you all these questions. So it was like, what type of plumbing do you need? What, you know, I said shower. What shower or bathrooms do you have? How long has this problem existed? What kind of shower do you have? How many showers need repair? We provide the necessary parts. What kind of property do you have? Do you need, you know, when do you need this? Anything else the plumber should know? Now go set up an account. And I was like, whoa, just with a couple taps and a couple survey questions and filling in a couple things, I could just go get a plumber. Now I'm like, okay, at this point I stopped because I didn't have a project to actually submit, but I'm now in mind, I'd heard of Thumbtack, I was exploring going through the flow, I'm like, oh my gosh, this thing, if I really did run into a pinch, in my head I have like, whoa, they're really thorough, they know what they're doing, it's pretty likely that they'd be able to help me. And it was like, again, everybody thinks flows should be short, the Lumosity flow, the Foursquare flow, this Thumbtack flow, even the Twitter flow looks short now in comparison to these. Like speed and shortness is not the essence. It's the depth of commitment and explanation and learning and conscious actions that get me totally hooked that make a huge difference. That's why I kind of went through a bunch of examples so we'd really kind of see that. So the best learn flows, and I just like to summarize this, they take their time, they break the product down into discrete steps, they ask questions instead of explaining, they start with the easy questions first, so that you can get pulled into it all the time. And they put the user in the product only when ready, but they do allow skipping. And so if you wanna skip ahead, you can. Most people who skip ahead either do know what they're doing, or will never figure it out anyway and don't have the time or patience to do it. But everybody else, I think we can really help them take all these steps to get there. I'll let Brian take a picture before I go on. You were making out on the deck to everyone. Yes. And then the last thing I talk about is retention. I wish I could stay here forever. How do we get everybody to have that feeling about our product? And the reality is some people do. What's amazing with all of our products that we build is if you get in the right people's hands. What I like to say is if you as a founder can't convince a friend when you're hovering over them to use your product and nudge them and can't get your friends to a point where they keep using your product, product, like the product, you know, for like a consumer product, like the product might not quite be right. So you want to get to the point where you can do that. But if you know that you can do that, and that they use it, and some of their friends use it, then you know that you have something. Then the question is, how do you clone that behavior? How do you clone you chirping over their shoulder to get everybody in the world kind of on your product? And so once you have a few people doing it, you've gotten some press, you've gotten some downloads, you know, you guys You guys have 2,000 people at Irvine who are already using your product. Oh, I hope that doesn't screw up the video, does it?

No.

No, okay, cool. You guys have people actually using your product. How do you start to figure out who's really using it or not? And so I'm just gonna walk you through a quick exercise we did at Twitter. I'm gonna go way too fast, 'cause it's reasonably complex, but I'm happy to answer questions or talk about it kind of as you guys launch and get more data. But we basically did a month-over-month analysis. Who used it in the first month? Who came back in the second month? And it was how many days did you visit in the first month, and the percent who visited that many days in the second month. So if you visited 5 times in the first month, and 30% of those people visited 5 times in the second month, you'd have 30% in that box. So we did this massive analysis across our user base, and then we charted it. And what we figured out was, if you, at Twitter, if you used the product at least 7 times in a month, used it 7 or more times in the next month. And this chart was really this, like, really important thing because what it told us is there's certain people who get it and they come back at least twice a week. 7 days is about twice a week, a little bit less, but about twice a week. They somehow get Twitter and they're gonna keep on using it over time. And everybody else who doesn't even come back that much, they just don't get it at all, and it's not meaningful to them, and we have to do a lot of work to make it meaningful. So we said, okay, now that we can figure out who's it meaningful for and who it's not meaningful for, What should we do next? We figured out that this is how many people signed up and where they ended up in sort of the curve. So I called the first group who came back 7 or more times a month core. I called people who came back 1 to 6 times a month casual. People who didn't come back at all, I called them cold, or we actually called them comatose inside, but I think cold is a slightly friendlier word to use now. And so we were basically trying to understand when people signed up, which of these buckets did they land in, so we would know what we had to fix. And to me, looking at this chart, it was super simple. If we don't get more of our new users to Twitter into the core group quickly, we're never going to keep growing because when we get them into anything else, they just get stuck and they don't come back, and maybe they come back later because they heard of Twitter again, but we aren't in the right retention cycle. So we spent all of our time going, how do I get more new users into core? And so we figured out what was different about them, and we figured out 2 big things. We did this kind of analysis of all of our users to figure out who was core and who wasn't. Users figured out themselves how to follow more than 30 accounts, and core users had this ratio of sort of 1/3 mutual follows, 2/3 one-way follows, which is they followed somebody who didn't follow them back, but 1 out of 3 people who they followed did follow them back. And that was just unique to Twitter. Those learnings aren't applicable except for the fact that you should find the learnings that are useful for your own product. For cakes, it might be order it once a week or once a month or get birthdays. There's a lot of things you can do in each of your different products. But it was very important for us to kind of understand that that was really unique for Twitter. And we said, how do we just go and get more people there? And so we started building features. Once we knew who got it and who didn't, we got creative. We started using all of our data, and we started building a lot of features and learning. And really, if you're thinking about how do you make your products better, there's no holy grail. There's no magic. There's no secret formulas to do it. The only things there are is exactly why we're all starting this stuff. You gotta be creative, and you gotta look at your data and really understand it and have these insights like, these people get it and these people don't. How do I get more people to look like these people? What features should I build? Ship those features, test those features, learn. And that's the only way that you really ultimately get growth after all of it. So that's kind of a very quick sort of overview on growth. I'm gonna have to take a few questions.

Thank you.