Special Season: Inside Summit 2024 The Future of Platforms Panel ft. Beli, Saturn, Landing, and Diem

Hi everyone, so excited to sit down today to get started on our INSIDE Summit miniseries.

We're so excited to have had our first ever all-day conference event just last week in New York City with over 120 innovators and founders in In the room where it happens. If you want to hear more about our vision behind Inside Summit and some of our learnings of hosting our largest scaled event yet, listen to our opening episode of this mini-series. But what you can expect next is a recap of the conversations that we had in the room from the actual guests themselves. You can expect our opening fireside with KJ Sidbury, the partner over consumer investments at GV, our next-gen GenAI panel, which was curated by the GenAI Collective, our Future of Platforms panel, which was moderated by the associate editor at Forbes, and two more. Claudia, you want to fill our listeners in?

Yeah, absolutely.

The future of direct-to-consumer with some incredible brand founders, operators, and agency partners. And then we ended the day with a recap episode, um, our fireside chat with Kashish Gupta, co-CEO of Hightouch, a previous podcast guest.

So without further ado, Let's open the door. Hello everyone, how are y'all doing? Can you hear me okay? Yes? Okay. Well, thank you for joining us for the Future of Platforms panel. I'm up here with some really cool founders. A little about me, like Madison said, my name is Alex York. I work at Forbes and I oversee the 30 Under 30 list. I work really closely on the media list and the marketing and advertising list, but I oversee all the categories. So I'm I'm always looking for young founders, up-and-coming creatives and leaders in the business space, and these four are definitely examples of that. So I will let them all introduce themselves one by one because they can do it better than I can for sure. But I hope that we have a really fun conversation about all that they're building. So thank you guys for being here. You can kick it off, Dylan.

We'll start with me. Hey guys, Dylan Diamond, co-founder, CEO of Saturn. We are a calendar for young people.

Hi guys, I'm Judy. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Belly. It's a social restaurant list keeping app.

Hi everyone. Um, good. Uh, I'm Miri, co-founder of Landing. We are Gen Z Pinterest.

I'm Emma. I'm co-founder of DM. We are Reddit meets Perplexity, but for women.

I love how like quick those were. I feel like sometimes people go on, so perfect, you guys. Well, we're gonna be talking about the future of platforms today, so before I get into your guys' background and your journeys to today, I want to start with the question, can you guys briefly describe to me what you see as the future of platforms in your own eyes?

I think the thing I'm most excited about is platforms centering user consent more at the heart of their social experiences and also the impact that having more community tooling rather than just posting into the ether will have.

Yeah, I think similarly for me, big focus on community and how we can build like social platforms for more genuine connection and genuine authenticity. I kind of hate using that word, but better connection than what we see online today. And then also centering around like the everyday creator. I think we've seen a big trend towards normal people having access to distribution and audiences and influence in the last 5 to 10 years. So I think we'll continue to move in that direction away from kind of walled gardens of brands or like massive influencers, being the only ones with a voice.

For me, so with Belly, we think a lot about the dining out journey. And it's social, personal, and it happens in real life. So we think the future of platforms has to have those three things. It has to be social. It has to be with your friends. It needs to be personal. The scores I'm receiving aren't the same as the scores other people should be receiving. And then it should be in real life. Like, we shouldn't be having you scrolling all day. It's really to get you to go do things in the real world.

I agree with the community and the point around in real life. I also think every platform needs to be rooted in utility. If you are not a daily utility, you will become displaced. And if you are not solving a single-player problem in addition to connecting you with others, which a lot of platforms can do, you won't have staying power. So at Saturn, we think not just about how do we connect you with friends, but what is the utility? How do we be the best calendar for you? And that's a high bar, but we seek to achieve it.

Yeah, I love all of those points. And I think the bit on utility is super important in such a saturated space. There are so many consumer social platforms out there, so many apps and digital spaces in general. In general, I'd love to know from each of you what gap you were trying to fill when you founded these companies in such crowded industries. How did you notice that this was something that was missing for each and every one of you that you really felt had place in the market for you guys to build out?

I'm happy to take this one. So for us, being a sort of search-forward product, obviously, we are dealing with very large incumbents like a Google. But the reality is that search is not one size fits all. We've seen a decline over the last 5 to 10 years in people being satisfied with their Google results. And so for us, as we started exploring this opportunity, we looked at, OK, well, who is being most underserved? And actually, 95% of women and girls state dissatisfaction with their search results most of the time. And there's a couple of things that play into that, one being the gender data gap. Due to this gap, women and girls tend to turn to more social experiences to try and fill those gaps with human stories, to validate their experiences with others. And then second to that, actually search engines and the logic they use. Uh, so Google uses Boolean logic, uh, is actually designed, uh, to better serve, uh, shorter search queries. And studies have found that male searchers actually, uh, write shorter search strings versus female searchers. And so those two things together, there's less data and the search engine doesn't work as well for you. You are most dissatisfied with the search result. And so, As we were thinking about, OK, well, what's our go-to-market wedge, it was really around that. It's like, how could you build that more social search experience to make not only a 10x product for this demographic, but also a place that feels less lonely while you're doing it?

Yeah.

Dylan, I want to go to you next. Similarly to Emma, the calendar space has pretty large incumbents that run this. It's maybe the calendar on your phone or Google Calendar. How did you get your foot in the door and discover what part of that industry was really missing for your target consumer base?

Well, I was the target consumer base. I didn't set out to build a company. I didn't set out to build an app. Started off as a website I built that connected me with my classmates.

Everyone in the audience probably remembers being in high school, getting your paper class schedule and posting it on Facebook or running around the hallway trying to figure out who your classmates were. So I solved that problem with a website. Everyone in my school used it. Later made it an app that also was a calendar because high school calendars run on letter days and number days. They don't run on weekdays. And there was no calendar that worked for high school. And it turns out it didn't just help me, but it helped the 2,000 kids in my school, and now it helps millions of high schoolers in the country. Uh, so that was kind of the wedge, and it was just about building for myself tools that I wanted, that my friends, you know, looked behind my shoulder seeing me use this product, also wanted it. Uh, and I do think that the vision has evolved in that Google and Microsoft are enterprise products. Their R&D is all about enterprise SaaS. The more seats at a company, the more revenue they make per company, uh, like Google Workspace or Outlook. Uh, but no one is building for, uh, the consumer in this case. And we believe at Saturn that time is your most valuable resource. You can't buy more of it. It's what democratizes every single person in this room and every single person on this planet. But then why are the calendaring products that we use just single-player byproducts of enterprise tools, right? They run on email, not phone. How often do you text your friends, what's your email, I'll send you the calendar invite? You can't put a phone number in a calendar. So what started off with this wedge in high school has now become the next calendar for Gen Z. And we are millions of users' first calendar, but we also want to be your last calendar and work alongside these other products.

Uh, but I do think that it was that, that unlock building for myself that led me onto this journey now into building a calendar.

Definitely. Judy, what is your origin story? What showed you that Belly was something that was necessary for consumers?

Yeah, so I'm looking for Elliot, my husband co-founder, is here. Probably no surprise, we're restaurant obsessed, always have been. And so our whole upbringing was built around restaurants. And then when we started seeing each other, like so many people do, we built a relationship around finding new restaurants. So we had a massive Google Map, ranked, color-coded, notes, favorite dishes. If you're on Belly, it probably sounds pretty familiar. But it was really clear to us that wasn't built for what we were trying to solve. And then when we started exploring the problem, what we realized is everyone had some sort of restaurant note, but it was in your notes, Docs, Excel, Google Maps. There was no centralized place for it. The other thing we realized is that none of these people had ever written an online review in their lives. And so we thought, why not make a great utility? The utility aspect is so, so, so important. And then through that, become the best review platform.

Yeah, that's super helpful. And I want to talk about landing as well, because you guys started as a very different platform than you are today. Madison, can you walk me through what you guys first started as and what that evolution looked like? What pointed you in the direction to evolve?

Yeah, we started as a completely different company. I think we've always had this thread of empowering creativity. And like Dylan was saying, we started with this solo player utility of how do you help people design a physical space that they love? So we built an interior design collaging tool, a marketplace that allowed you to put your couch with your rug with a lamp from all different brands and then purchase it. And we never actually set out to build Gen Z Pinterest from the beginning, but our users really led us there. So we've always built super flexibly and in ways that allow our users to show us what they actually want to do with the product rather than assuming we know best. So in that first interior design product called the Landing Home back in 2020, we built a button that allowed people to upload anything to the collage. And we thought that they would put like a couch they already have or a pink color they love in there. And they actually put like wacky stickers and like really cool background colors and then fashion items. And almost overnight, they turned an interior design platform into something so much bigger than just interior design. So we just pulled that thread and we kept following them and building what they were showing us that they wanted, not what they were telling us that they wanted, which I think is an important distinction. And eventually, over many years, basically pivoted to where we are today. It wasn't one big switch. It was a lot of small changes just following what the users were showing us that they wanted. And really first, as we were saying earlier, solving for that solo player utility of, I want a place to create something, to express myself, to feel more creative than other places on the internet. And it's just evolved from there into landing today.

I love that, being led by what people are showing you as opposed to what they're telling you. And we were speaking about yesterday too, sometimes the least vocal users are the ones that have really big opinions on what should be a feature on the app or something that changes. And you guys all have very community-driven platforms. How much have you leaned into what consumers are telling you, whether it's like a comment on Instagram of something new they want, something in, you know, like a chatbot reaching out to your guys' teams? How much are you relying on user feedback to determine what's next or what you guys are going to build out with your platforms?

For us, we definitely take into account like feature ideas or like the larger concepts that people suggest to us. We tend to skew more, to your point, on the actual data of what they're doing when we make choices around the actual tweaks in the platform to the existing— be able to tell you that people don't tell the truth. And it's just kind of a waste of time otherwise.

Yeah, for us, if they're telling you they love your product, but they're not sticking around and using it every day, then they don't actually love it. So for us, I think that's an important lesson really to learn. We try to really balance it. We think a lot about how we can give to our community and fill up their cup and then ask from them. So if they've been begging us for a crop tool in the studio and we can give that to them pretty easily, we'll do it. But we won't necessarily build our product roadmap feature by feature based on what they've asked for. So we have to have our North Star and be able to listen to what they're saying, read between the lines, pair that with data, and then make a decision on how we— build the bigger product changes?

I would say it's all we care about. We spend all day talking to our users and actually looking at the data. The data part is so important, and we don't build anything until we hear it 5 times. And then once we hear it 5 times, we're like, okay, people actually want this. But yeah, I think for me, building a social media platform, I kind of thought it'd be heads down behind the computer and I would never hear hear from my users. It's just been the opposite of the case. We hear from them nonstop all the time. And I think for our employees, the hardest thing is they come in and they're huge Belly users. And they're like, I have all these ideas. And I'm like, sorry, you can't build any of those. We got to make sure people actually want them. But yeah, what our users think is very, very important to us.

I think in the beginning it was what I wanted, what friends wanted. As we've scaled, we have a very strong DS team that does a lot of A/B testing. Things like that. But when looking at, uh, leading indicators, we will host events at our campuses and we'll have thousands of kids per school come and we'll talk to them and, and we'll actually engage and see, oh, you know, what we use in a New York office with fiber internet is very different than in high school hallways or on a college campus. And we want to make sure we build products that don't just have new features but things that are offline first, lower payload sizes, and actually build an app that is easier for them to use, not just solving new problems. I think that the best products augment existing behaviors. They don't invent new behaviors. So we really try and balance that approach with DS and with qualitative user research.

Yeah. Judy, I want to ask you, in terms of the community engagement part of the platform— and if anyone else has thoughts on this too, feel free to weigh in— food is inherently communal. We often go to eat together. It's something that friends do with one another to connect. It's also a really big benefit benefit for companies to have a really communal user base to be sharing it and to be referring other people to it. How did you go about incentivizing that for your users when you were building the platform to encourage growth or encourage whatever else you wanted to with that sort of platform?

It's a very important point. I think people are like, are you social media, are you utility? And part of the utility is the socialness of the app. Um, so for us, it, it started with just like the most basic social media and gamification news feed, leaderboard, likes, comments, all of that good stuff. And that actually goes a long way. And then I think what we try to do within that's unique to Belly is we insert ourselves. And I think it goes to your point along the dining out journey. Like, what are they actually doing? And where can we insert ourselves such that you pull out Belly when you're with other people? And so things like dish racks, planning meals with friends, those types of features we lean into.

Emma, for Diem, In terms of like what people are searching or building out the platform for what people are looking towards, you said you look to a lot of data. Has there been anything particularly surprising that people have either searched or have wanted to start conversations around that you have like found a huge runway with?

Um, I think the, the way, like the best description of, of Diem in general is like think of the best girl group chat you've ever been part of and the conversations that happen in Diem are like basically that times 100,000. And it's really cool seeing the diversity of conversation that has started. And I think that— I mean, like, when we started Diem, it was very central to, like, health conversations, well-being conversations, based off of my own experience trying to, like, find answers to what the experience of taking Plan B for the first time would be like. And over the sort of course of that beta product, everyone was like, 'Hey, I've actually got this dating issue,' or like, 'How do I ask for a promotion?' Or, um, people start spiraling about some, like, something that happened in their friendship group. And, um, really it's like very interesting because of the search functionality. People, I think, have freed of their inhibitions in typical, uh, social spaces. And so the posts that you see are really, really raw, and they're really very funny a lot of the time. I think it's like people are asking questions knowing that their situation is maybe entertaining to others. So I would say I'm not surprised given that I have been in however many group chats since I was 12, 13 years old. But it is fascinating just to see how someone can go from asking a very personal health question to being like, hey, who's listened to the Charli XCX album? Can we talk about it in 3 minutes?

Yeah. Mira, have you been surprised by any use cases for you? I mean, I know you guys have pivoted because of it many times. So what's been the most surprising thing as you guys have built this in terms of like how people are using it, what they need and want it for?

I mean, we're always surprised, I would say, um, constantly by different use cases. I think just like the breadth of things that people create, um, people are so creative. And like each day, I mean, I was telling you this last night, I saw a board the other day that was just like cow appreciation day and just like a bunch of cows on a board, like just for fun. I was like, I was like, cool, love that for you. We often see obviously trends like Barbiecore or album-related vision boards or artistic expression. So it really runs the whole gamut. And I think I've just loved really seeing how a platform that has quite a broad use case can then be home to so many very niche interests, like from the most obscure fan fiction trilogies that maybe 10 people on the platform are obsessed with to like people talking about like Charli XCX.

Yeah. Dylan, how about you? Has there been anything surprising, especially with something like a calendar that might seem straightforward? Have you been surprised by your users at all?

Our roadmap journey has been a bit like a boomerang in that we started off very utility. Uh, we built a lot of social features and partnered with the top companies out there. Uh, but kids really want a better calendar and they just want to do the routines that they do every day. Accelerated with AI, easier to connect with others. They don't need another messaging app.

So we've learned a lot actually that with the distraction of the venture capital world and the hot new thing, every social app since we've started Saturn and has, you know, been top of the App Store with us has died basically since starting the company. And in the last 10 years, there've really been maybe 2, I guess we're maybe at the 12-year mark with Snap and Instagram, but, uh, there've only been a couple that have stuck around. So our entire business is built on retention. You must be an everyday tool, otherwise you are nothing. And I think that, uh, that's always grounded us and not trying to chase the new shiny object, uh, or try and go after a space that we don't think we have a competitive advantage in or a data moat, uh, because otherwise I, I think it's, it's a waste of time. And we did learn that the hard way and spending a lot of cycles on product features that weren't as differentiated. So it has been more refreshing to double down as a calendar. Not just a generic social platform.

Definitely. I would love to know that from each of you. Has there been any decision that you've made that you feel like you had to either backtrack or like it was not the right decision for you? Or just a mistake that you feel like you had to then course correct afterwards from based on either investor feedback or community feedback or something, or it just took you off course a little bit? Have there been any of those moments that you feel like were like, OK, we need to step back and get back to our roots here?

Well, with us, it was messaging. We wanted to— You know, we got distracted and said, okay, calendar will be one component of what we do, but we're gonna be a messaging product. Uh, and we had a lot of people using our DM and our group chat feature, but it's not unique, right? One, it's really hard to monetize, but also they are in need of a calendar and that's why they come to us. They're not in need of yet another messaging tool. So I think that was something, uh, that we spent a lot of time on and realized the product—

we don't have any algorithmic feeds. It opens to a calendar, right?

And it always has to be that way. And we want to make sure our business model is accretive to that goal, uh, and that the, the interface caters to, uh, the story the product tells, not trying to just cram a bunch of generic features down your throat.

I'm trying to think of a specific example. I think it happens all the time. I think what I tend to regret the most is when we don't put out a true V0 and we spend a lot of time heads down and invest in something that no one wants. And so kick, kick myself every time that happens. But yeah, I'm sure there are 100 different times we've done that.

Yeah, I think for us it's very similar to sticking to your core utility that Dylan was talking about. So we were a website for a long time because we started in interior design. We didn't have an app. All of our users, as they became much younger and on LANDING for more social reasons, they wanted an app. When we originally built the app, we took a lot of inspiration from our Discord, which was like a bunch of different channels based on different topics where you could chat about and share your boards. And that was the only functionality we initially built into our mobile app. And we basically hoped that people would use web to create and mobile to chat. And I think what we missed was the fact that like the creation was a really core part of unlocking the chat and you couldn't just like split those things across platforms. So a couple of months later, we end up launching the studio and creation on the app. And it just unlocked community on the app in a way that would never have happened without it there. But we kind of jumped the gun. We didn't put out v0 of creation, which is almost the most obvious thing to do. We tried to get a little bit too clever, I think.

Yeah, I was— said I feel like there's 100 different things that I could list off. The one that came to mind was, is we started experimenting with voice noting essentially as a way to reply to people. And that just unlocks a lot of moderation issues and things that we just weren't set up for at the time from a moderation perspective. And so I think that we went too hard into that, similarly not the V1, and had to roll that back. I think we will bring it back, but it just wasn't the right thing for that time.

Yeah.

You guys are all also venture-backed, so the investment road is something that not all founders go down, and it's not right for all founders. I'd love to know what showed you guys that investors and raising money was something that you thought would be great for your company, why it's benefited you. Dylan, you've particularly raised a pretty decent amount of money for the company. Why was that something that you guys looked at in the first place as you were building Saturn?

We were, we were pulled into it. My co-founder Max, we were at Penn, uh, we took this product I had started in high school and I was working full-time at Tesla. He was working for a marketing agency. Uh, we were working on this project on the weekends, but my, I think it was my cousin at a different school, uh, wanted the product because he knew I built it for my high school. And then we took it from Weston to Greenwich to Darien to Ridgefield to Stamford, all these towns in Connecticut where I grew up.

Uh, and we were doing it, we were working and we had, uh, some income. So we didn't need to raise venture capital. We had, I think it was some college funds like Rough Draft Ventures and others were pitching us to take money. We didn't want like a $20,000, $25,000 check for some high percentage of the company. We kept funding it. We had each put total like 6-plus figures into the company. And then General Catalyst, we were connected with them, and it was a really good partner. And Nico from there who runs a lot of consumer, he did Snapchat, Series B, and we, uh, we thought it was the right decision. And then, um, over the years we have raised a lot of capital, but I think that we've also hired an incredible team. And recently we've hit a significant scale in the demo. And I think that, uh, would I have raised this much talking to myself 4 years ago? Probably not, because the path would be clear. But you do need to iterate a lot. I think the low-interest climate and in 2021 was, you know, a tailwind in why we made those decisions. But, you know, the New York engineers, product cycles are expensive. And if you want to outcompete in certain verticals, the big players, you need to do it. And I don't have any regrets in that side, but it has been a distraction at times.

The benefit, of course, is we've gotten to work with some amazing partners, whether it's General Catalyst, Coatue, Insight, Dick Costolo, very close mentor who ran Twitter.

So I think you can do it either way, but it's been helpful for us.

Judy, what has the funding that you guys have brought in gone towards? What were you guys trying to either enhance or build out with that investor backing?

For sure. My team would joke that we run as lean as possible, so we don't spend hardly any cash. We keep the team really, really small. We don't spend anything on marketing. And so for us, it was really, really important. We had a similar start where we bootstrapped into friends and family for as long as possible. And if Belly isn't viral, if it's not product-led growth, Belly doesn't work. And so we are afraid that having cash would make us spend on things that wouldn't actually be long-term sustainable growth. And so we try to avoid that at all costs. So where we do spend money, it's where we lean into into things within the product that are actually working. So I think it mostly comes down to people and resources around that.

How about you, Mary?

What led you down this path for investing? And knowing that you guys had pivoted and continued to pivot, how did you navigate that with investor conversations?

Yeah, we were similarly pulled down the path. I think we'd started landing while we were at business school, my co-founder Ellie and I. Angel round first and tried to bootstrap it for as long as possible. It was literally just the two of us driving U-Hauls around San Francisco delivering furniture. It was a really different business at the time. And we got pulled into fundraising. Our first fundraiser was with Cowboy Ventures. They had been looking for something in this space around interiors and design and empowering people to feel creative for a while. And so they kind of pulled us into the round. And I think the decision for us was, is there a reason for us to move a lot quicker right now and to have the resources to scale up the team and to really grab this market opportunity. Is there a timing component here? And it really felt like there was. And so that's the reason that we brought on extra capital. But I think it's a really, really important question to ask yourself of why do you need that capital then? And what are you actually going to do with it? The fundraise is not the milestone and not the goal. The goal is actually building the thing and making the progress. So what do you need? To get there is how I would think about it. And I agree, I think the market's changed a lot. And I don't know if we would have exactly the same decision-making matrix now as we did then. And then for the point around pivots and how we keep moving and despite having raised money as a different company, I think it's really important that our pivots are not plucked out of thin air. We didn't wake up one morning and say, oh, now we're building Gen Z Pinterest. It was a whole journey of— iterating, experimenting, learning, gathering the insights, and then changing what we were doing very gradually along the way. I think that's really important, not just for yourselves and for your team, but also to bring your investors along with you. And I think most investors who invest at the very early stage, like pre-seed, they know that that happens a lot. And your goal is not necessarily to build the thing that you say you're going to build when you're writing your pre-seed deck. To like build the right thing that's really going to scale to a massive business, because that's what you have to do if you're a venture-backed company.

Definitely. And I think in what all of you guys are saying, like finding the right investors, people who like understand that, is key. And I'd love to ask you about this, Emma, because as we mentioned last week when we were speaking, your consumer base being young women are very overlooked in the business community, especially from like the venture funding side. It seems like such a like obsolete and unimportant group of consumers for some reason, despite the spending power and all those sorts of things. How did you go about pitching your company and your consumer base and finding the investors that really understood the power there?

I think that anyone— any investor that doesn't value a teen girl or a young woman doesn't know how to invest in consumer. So that weeds out quite a lot to start with. And then beyond that, it's really like teen girls, young women, women in general are such a valuable consumer spender. They control 85% of the consumer economy. Like, put that on paper and make it very obvious that like these people are very powerful and they have a lot of power when it comes to generating revenue for your company. I think also precedent, like look at every— consumer internet, consumer social platform, most of them grew via teen girls, young women who were jumping on the bandwagon first and defining the product and defining the product experience. Look at like TikTok, Pinterest, all of them. So if you need to, pulling those examples. But for us specifically, like we have a private data set and in the world of like LLMs and the value into the future, licensing that data, is very, very important. And I think that investors understand that we have this data set which is very novel on the internet in that it is central to female experiences and that is so lacking online. So that was a big thing over the last couple of years, last 2 years specifically, that was very interesting to them.

Yeah. Another thing I've been talking with a lot of venture-backed founders lately is the recent investor push to profitability or making money or not just having, like you guys were saying, The metrics of having an investment deal are, like, in some ways less important now than having the, the profits or the revenues to back it up, especially in today's investing environment. And in the online digital platform landscape, like, there are so many ways to approach earning money, bringing in revenue streams, all those sorts of things. For all the founders out there, especially, like, the tech platform and digital platform founders, can you guys walk us through what are some of the things that you've tried out, what has worked in terms of actually making money as a founder today?

We haven't made any money. We are concept testing two things though, which I'm really excited about. One is enabling people who run sub-communities to profit off of advertising and marketing activation. So kind of like a distributed ads network. And then the other is longer term around the data licensing. So opting in for your data to be used for consumer insights reporting or anything like that. And we're getting a lot of user feedback on really liking those approaches. So I'm excited to launch them later this year.

Yeah, similarly, we haven't actually monetized yet. So I do think the landscape is changing on that. But for us, we're actually in the middle of going through another pivot right now. So you heard it here first. But we're focusing again more on the fashion vertical, so doubling down there and really going in on commerce and how you can make the collages and the content that's being created on landing really shoppable. So that opens up a whole new stream of monetization for us, particularly around brands like commerce and fashion brands and how we're partnering with them, how they are getting their products in the platform, not through ads, but through creative ways where people can engage with and create with their products. So more to come. On that in the next few months? Exciting.

So yeah, we're very early in our monetization journey. We've tested user subscriptions and a lot of promising results there. I think the data will come into play, but we think about it in terms of what we won't do too. And I think for us, Belly is all trust-based and we never want anyone going in the app being like, was this paid for or is this actually recommended to me? So we tend to skew away from in-feed ads and things like that, but we're still very early in testing.

It's been, uh, we started this monetization journey earlier this year, uh, and it's been very exciting because I think Saturn is the first, uh, new type of ad unit since, uh, you know, story ads. And we want to build something that is accretive to the user experience, uh, that doesn't matter how many minutes you're on the platform. So those are minutes taken from the real world and spent scrolling. And the top social platforms, they get higher ARPU the more inventory they serve you when you're scrolling, and that's a great business model for them, but it's terrible for the consumer, especially for Gen Z and young people. You're seeing all the mental health crises and things like that. So with us, it's important that we build something, one, that brings you together with other people. And we've done a lot of work and, um, have started to, to do a lot of these activations where we bring people from, say, one high school or dozens of campuses to an in-person location together. And Saturn's the only platform that can do that. You can shove ads down people's face on Instagram feeds or TikTok, and they will look at them for on average under 3 seconds, and maybe they'll click online and, you know, they'll get the conversion, but they certainly won't get up and go somewhere. Uh, and if you, everyone here were to pull out their feeds, you would all see different ads, which is great for one type of business model, but it doesn't start conversations. So with us and the calendar, we really create conversation around the content, and that connects the community to whether it's a creator, whether it's a brand, whether it's a sport team, Uh, so I'm very excited about the monetization results and we have, I think, a best-in-class team that's been building it.

Yeah. And I think this is a super important conversation in terms of like success metrics. If it's not revenue or it's not money coming in, which it's not for all companies and maybe it is down the road, or maybe that's just not the point of the company in general. What are the other success metrics that you guys are looking at to determine like, are we growing? Are we succeeding in the ways that we've set out for ourselves? And I think that especially in the new wave of digital platforms, it's very different in terms of trajectory and growth and speed versus the Facebooks of the world. So how are you guys defining success today? How do you know when you have met a milestone if it's not those funny numbers or those revenue numbers?

Our three are time spent in app, so average session times, illness curve, and then K-factor.

Yeah, very similar. I think retention is the most important for us. So North Star is how many actively engaged users do we have on the platform. Most important below that are retention, so how sticky is our platform, and are users organically sharing it, so K-factor. I think those three things are what we care about most, much more on the organic and sustainable and sticky growth side of things than the growth at any cost or costs. I think nowadays, people expect you to grow with zero marketing budget. But that doesn't just mean hacking the App Store rankings and going viral on TikTok and getting a bunch downloads of people who don't actually stick around. So you have to pair that with retention, which is a whole new challenge and difficult. But I think that's what will give platforms staying power versus a lot of the what I call pop and fizzle apps of the last few years that have really hacked the rankings and then aren't really around anymore.

Yeah, I think we look at a lot of similar things. So what's been said, I think retention is very important. And then K-factor, invites per user, we think a lot about. And then specific to Belly, we're looking at engagement and how they're actually engaging with the utility aspect of the product, like how many restaurants are they rating, bookmarking, how many friends are they following, things like that.

Yeah, these guys have all nailed it with the metrics.

I think that we don't look at aggregate time spent. We look at number of sessions and frequency. If you think about a calendar product, you want to be checking it many times throughout the day. And you want to be using it every single day. Right now we're at around 5 days of usage. I think the chasm to cross for us is go from 5 to 7, then use it on your breaks, use it during the summer, and then it's really your calendar. And then I think with growth, K-factor is really important, making sure that it's organic invites. We do get to the top of the App Store each year, and that's great, but I think that's a vanity metric. And what we really should be looking at is do we do that year on year? Do those users stick around, right? So not just D30, not just D60, not just D90, right? But what's the year-to-year return rate? And that's the harshest metric we can look at, but it's what we look at a lot internally.

Emma and Miriam, I want to ask you guys about the changing landscape. So much has changed in the past 5 to 10 years, and so much will continue to change in the next 5 years. What would you both say has been the biggest change as you guys have built your companies, and how are you kind of navigating that as you move towards the future?

The most immediate thing that comes to mind is similar to what you were saying earlier, is that a lot of these sort of social community spaces are actually rooted in utility. And I think we'll increasingly see that. Like, sure, there are ways that you can entertain yourself online, and like the TikToks and maybe the Instagrams of the world and YouTube are all sort of fulfilling that. But a lot of these like new or like up-and-coming platforms that have all launched in say the last 5 years, uh, that have stuck around are actually rooted in a lot of utility and solving like real problems for people rather than just sort of like, oh, a new like photo sharing app kind of thing.

Yeah, I think similarly it's all about like, are you creating something that's truly novel and value-add? So just like another spin on how you share a photo I think is like not necessarily going to have the same staying power and is is, again, going to just be copied by a bunch of other people where all your friends are already spending that time. So I think it's got to be that pairing of a truly novel format or way of connecting or expressing yourself with the community piece that makes it— gives you a reason to actually be on that platform, not just sharing that thing to every other social app that you're already spending hours on every day.

And my last question for you two is, in terms of both of your platforms that are obviously digital but have such an in-person component to it as well, Well, what do you see as the future of community for platforms like yours? How are you going to continue to like walk that line between digital virtual things and in-person experiences?

I think it has to do a lot with how the product is designed. Is it designed to get you to scroll and to stay on your little glass box all day? Uh, is it designed to connect you with a graph that you already are connected with? With your classmates, your high school, your college, your friends, or is it designed to transport you to a fabricated graph of people that you have weak ties with that are an interest-only connection? Uh, and I think we've seen the rise of the friend-finder products, uh, during the pandemic when people were lonely. Uh, those have mostly gone away, and we want to build something that whether you are on Saturn or not, you have to meet new people. Everyone remembers, uh, the beginning of college, beginning of high school, living in your 20s in New York. And the product has to not be made or broken on you using it. That to me is, is it helping you do things that you would want to do if you were not on the product? And then I think, you know, to your earlier point on what's changed and that focus is on how do you create competitive unit economics and, and ARPU while building something that doesn't require that scrolling, uh, which is a losing battle if you are up against TikTok and Instagram.

And that's been a real challenge, but I think we've, we've built something unique in that space.

Yeah, I would say mostly the same thing. We also don't look at time spent, uh, in the app. We think it's important that, uh, we get you out doing real things. If we were to look at time spent, it'd be like, are we doing something wrong? Like, if you're here for a long time, we're probably not getting you to the solution. And the answer you need. In terms of how we think about product, very similarly, I think for us when we think about Explore and restaurant discovery, it's more than just restaurants. It's also people. And so we know how similarly you are matched to all these people you don't know. And so that will be a big part of Explore when we do launch that.

Do you guys have anything to add to that? OK. Well, thank you guys so much for joining me up here. I think we have time for a couple audience questions. But thank you for answering mine. Any questions out there?

Thank you so much. This panel has been so informative and just great all around. I'm curious of— obviously, community has been a big part of this conversation, right? And I think we even talked about marketing. And I can't remember who said it, but like no money spent on marketing maybe. And so I'm just curious, right, like as you're thinking about growth, how do you rely on your community for like either word of mouth while also managing either zero marketing, so maybe organic growth, or even a little bit of relying on marketing and the community?

Okay, so for us, it's a lot to do with like we have an ambassador program for our most engaged DMers, and there's like a multiple different ways that you can be an ambassador. One, we call it the DiEM Oracle. So that's people who write tons of responses, reply to people in the platform. Another is a DiEM creator, so people who make content about DiEM on their other social channels. The third is called a DiEM host, which right now is that you host salons like IRL grassroots events around the world, or about to be people who run sub-communities in the platform itself. All of those things invite attention to the platform a lot of the time, and we don't pay for any of it. They're all people who have put their hand up or have been super engaged in the DiEM platform, for some people for years at this point. And we really like over-index on like making sure that they're happy and setting them up for success in getting what they need from DiEM. So that's been a big thing for us. And then also like nailing your own, content engine. So we have like multiple social series, like ones like Women's History series, which goes viral like every single time we post it. And so stuff like that where you just really start to nail brand awareness with your in-house content creator. The combination of those two things is how we've done it.

Yeah, I think it's very similar for us. And shout out to Greta from my team who's here in the audience and is the mastermind behind our owned content at Landing. You may have seen her. On our socials. But a lot of it is own content and then treating everyone in our community as basically an ambassador for Landing. So we do a lot to make it really easy for them to share. So Landing boards are super visual. They're really easy to share to your socials. We make that flow in the product really easy and really fun for you. We literally have confetti that comes down on the screen when you share something. So we do that and then we do a lot of reposting people, validating them when they take the actions we want them to take. But we also just really try and listen to what they value that isn't just cash. So they actually really love getting to learn about how we're building the business. So we've invited them to all hands. We have Zooms where they just come on and ask us questions. We do a lot of online events. Our user base is super international, like 190 countries in the world. And so we have to do a lot of online. But we do a lot of Discord events, online events, helping them get to know us and get to know each other and really just trying to fill their tank before we ask anything of them. We have also, when I say zero paid marketing, we don't do any paid PR or anything like that or any paid ads. We have experimented with some creator incentives. So we built a whole program, Liz on my team and Greta led it called Landing University. And our users have been asking to go to landing university for a long time, which we thought was funny. But we built this program where we trained them in how to go viral talking about landing on social media, on TikTok or Instagram Reels. And if they did that and they hit certain views, we would pay them like, you know, a small bonus. And for these young people who were creating content about landing, that was like super meaningful and like a really strong incentive. But the only reason they did it was because they already loved They already loved the team. They trusted us. And we were able to have the kind of relationship with them where we could teach them and could incentivize them in that way.

One more or done?

OK.

I think we're out of time. Getting the cutoff. Well, thank you guys so much for joining us today. Thank you all for sitting up here and answering these questions. It was super insightful and helpful for founders or just consumers in the room. So thank you all so much. And thank you all for listening. And thank you, Room Podcast, for hosting.