Leading Instacart's Ads Business

I have to tell you a little bit about the ads work that I did, you know, that I helped lead at Instacart. Instacart in 2019 had a meaningful revenue, as I've described earlier, $50 million ads product. But, you know, it was primarily being driven at the time by banner ads and other unsophisticated products. During 2020, we created or we really scaled the sponsored listings product, which is very similar to Amazon's ads product. And we created like, you know, all of the basics that you expect from an ad platform. So we didn't have like an advertiser portal previously. We didn't have, you know, a second price auction. We didn't have quality filters, relevance filters, bidding strategies, daily pacing. So we built all of that during 2020 and we were able to basically 10x that business. Obviously a good chunk of it was the GMV growth rapidly, but we also increased yield as a percentage of GMV tremendously during that time by building a product that consumers wanted. During my second, or our customers wanted, I mean, advertisers. And during my second year, as you can imagine, once pandemic was waning, Instacart was, you know, dropping year on year pretty materially in terms of revenue at the beginning of 2021. And we had to figure out how do we stabilize this forward? How do we optimize growth further? And so it was a lot of blockbly tackling, like thinking about incrementality of incentives because we would spend enormous amount on coupons and incentives as well as thinking about just ROI on paid ad spend was one big piece. Another big piece was around combating this perception that Instacart was a niche product for higher-end audiences. Because I mean, it's not cheap, right? Like, you know, the average basket size at Instacart's a little over $100. You know, everything added together, it can be up to another $15 to $20 on top of your, you know, grocery bill to have your groceries delivered. And so we did a few things to try to combat that. One is let's have more affordable retailers. Let's So like Aldi and others on Instacart. Let's have more payment options that speak to affordability. So the SNAP EBT push that we did, and then let's push our retailers to have lower prices or at least price parity with the stores, which has always been a challenge because obviously the retailers want to make up for their incremental costs by charging higher prices on the on the platform. And we tried to do that in a more subtle way by having icons that— and you can see these in the app today too, which say in-store prices for certain retailers. So it's a more subtle nudge for the retailers that they might lose demand if they don't charge in-store prices. So that was one big set of things that we did. And the third big set of things that we did is just trying to open up new use cases. Instacart historically was the weekly shop, the $100 to $200 basket size. And which is good. And there's obviously growth there, but we wanted to open up new avenues of growth. And so there's a couple things. One is some things that are simple, like adding more delivery windows, express delivery pricing, priority delivery pricing, or whatever it was called. We also created a new convenience use case. Obviously we had the deals with 7-Eleven, et cetera, but we actually created Imprints, of all the major retailers where we would have like Kroger convenience footprint. We would have basically a synthetic store with fewer SKUs, limited delivery radius, et cetera. And then overall lower basket size. And then in general, to increase more shopping, we did a lot of product things, but also we doubled down on Instacart Plus, which used to be called Express at the time. So anyway, there's a handful of things that we did. And if you look at the growth numbers, 2021 was Still a big year for us, even though COVID had pulled back.