Alex Schultz built Facebook's growth team in 2007 when signups stalled. Mark Zuckerberg cut through endless debate by setting one goal: get users to 10 friends in 14 days. That focus on a single metric, plus improving People You May Know, transformed retention and growth.
Questions this video answers
At the end of 2007 / beginning of 2008.
Get everyone to 10 friends in 14 days.
"People You May Know".
Landing paid-search clicks on the search results page instead of the registration form.
Chapters
Now, we created the growth team at the end of 2007, beginning of 2008, because Facebook stopped growing. And one of the things we did when we set it up was understand what was that moment where you went, okay, I get it, I love Facebook. And for us it was the moment when you found your friends. And we had this huge discussion internally because we saw a strong correlation between number of friends and percent active. And there was this huge conversation internally about whether it was causal or whether it's correlated. And again, the most valuable thing we did was very, very simple. It was zuck again, which is we had this huge fight going on between sort of data science, data analytics, engineering, products, marketing and like, couldn't get to a decision and couldn't do anything. And Mark simplified down and said, get everyone to 10 friends in 14 days. And when we took on that problem, we significantly moved by a double digit percentage the number of people who got to 10 friends in 14 days and retention. And so we clearly moved the numbers we cared the most about. But we've been arguing tremendously about whether even to move that number first. And I love the show house. Do you guys like the Show House? It may be because there's a British person in it, but I love the show house. And he's got this whole thing test by treating. Well, it turns out making that change happen was the thing that told us whether the change mattered. When we broke People youe May Know and growth went negative, we finally realized people you may know really mattered for Facebook's growth. And fine, every social site does it now. LinkedIn, Twitter. But like cutting the Gordian knot and making the decision to move forward was the most valuable thing that Mark did for the growth team. Because it took the shackles off us and allowed us to just say, fine, we're going to get people connected to their friends. And that was the magic moment for Facebook. The magic moment for ebay is when you find that one item that you're looking for that you couldn't find on any other site. And we actually shifted when I was at ebay from landing paid search clicks on the registration form to landing them on the search results form. Because that moment that they saw the item they were looking for made them much more likely to be retained when they signed up. So even though we got net less acquisitions and less confirmations, we got net more active users and more revenue by landing marketing on search results pages rather than the registration form. Again, everywhere I have been involved in advising or working, there is a magic moment. There is a thing about your product that people love and their eyes light up, and you often find that qualitatively. And then you can back it up with correlations in the data. And it's very hard to prove causally, especially when you're very small and don't have a lot of data. And people will argue and argue and argue about it, and the best way to find out if they are right is break it or make it move up tremendously and then see what happens.
