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

So, uh, are we all ready to get started?

Yeah! Woo!

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

Hi, everyone. Who here is starting their own company, or has their own company, or is interested? All right, great. Welcome to the long road. It's really, really rewarding and really, really hard. One of the hardest things you're going to have to do is figure out how to grow users. So Polyvore is a community site, so I wanted to talk a little bit today about community hacks, how to grow a community. So just before I get started real quick, I'm Jess. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Polyvore. My story is a little bit unusual because I started as a product manager. Actually, I started as a user of Polyvore who was really in love with the product, and I wrote a note to the co-founders with some suggestions on how to make the product better. Then they hired me, and after a couple of years we were all working together. They said, you know what, we think of you as a co-founder. We're just gonna start calling you an honorary co-founder, and then eventually I became CEO. CEO. So it's a pretty unusual journey. You might say I'm a hustler. And prior to that, I was a product manager at Google Maps. And then I studied computer science before that. I love manga, drawing, and bacon. I was at Comic-Con last week. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm just Jessica. Or you can check out my blog at jessyoko.com. So for those of you who don't know Polyvore, we're a new way to discover and shop for things that you love in fashion, home decor, and beauty. So what our users do is they mix and match their favorite products, real products, into collages that we call sets. And about 20 million people come to Polyvore to browse and shop those looks. We have about 20 million visitors per month. We're the second largest driver of social commerce traffic on the web. So first is Facebook, then Polyvore, then Pinterest, and then Twitter. Obviously we're much smaller in terms of user base than all those guys, but we drive really high-quality traffic that actually converts to sale. And we have a global community of users who create about 4 million pieces of content per month. That's 4 million of these beautiful collages. So that's a lot of content by a very active user community. So the topic for today is a little bit about growth hacking, but not the usual type of growth hacking that most people talk about, the viral loops, the email retention programs, but really about what we believe is that the best way to grow is actually to cultivate a really delighted community of users. So why this matters so much is because when you have people who are really delighted, who love your product, they're your advocates, what happens is they can't help but tell their friends about it, and what happens is you get this natural word of mouth. So it's very viral, and that leads to viral growth. I want to give a couple of examples of how this has helped Polyvore. Traffic growth. So much of our traffic in the early days came from blogs. And what would happen is someone would use Polyvore and find the experience interesting and unique and hadn't seen it before. So then they'd write a blog post being like, "Hey, check out this site." And that in turn would drive all of their readers and their followers back to Polyvore. Nowadays that's happening on Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest or Tumblr. But this has been the part of the— It's a huge part of our traffic growth over the years. So that's one way that delight has really led to growth. The other interesting thing is it's also led to fundraising growth or funding. So one of our investors actually called me while we were in the middle of raising our Series C and he said, "Hey, I'd like to invest." And I was like, "Great, would you like to do, you know, do you want me to come over to your office and do the pitch, show you the numbers?" He said, "No." I don't need to hear it. I'm in. And I was like, oh, that's great. Why? And he said, well, I heard about you 3 times in a very short period of time, and that's why I'm in. And so the 3 examples were his assistant uses Polyvore and told him about it. His best friend, who happens to be the CEO of a major fashion brand, mentioned it to him at dinner in Paris. And then the third was that one of his old colleagues, who is an exec at an investment bank, mentioned it to him at a conference in Vegas. 3 sort of mentions all over the world from people he knew, he picked up the phone and called. So that delight where you have someone just dropping your name in a positive way can really lead to, in this case, millions of dollars worth of funding. So it's really, really important. So I'm just gonna talk through some of the community hacks. They fall under 3 principles. The first, they're live, learn, and love, and I'll go through each of them and then talk a little bit about what we do. So live is that— what this really means is that community starts from within. So before you start thinking about how to go externally and do growth hacking and get your community first, you have to really believe in the power of your user community. You have to truly care about it. 'Cause if you don't, it'll end up showing. So your social media manager, if they don't really love and respect your user community, then they might tweet something and use the wrong tone of voice. If your engineers don't really care about the users and respect them, they might build a feature that disrespects their privacy. So it's really, really important that you start first internally inside your company and figure out how to make sure that everybody cares. So the ways that we do this— first, you have to make it part of your culture. So Polyvore's 3 core values— delight the user, do a few things well, and make an impact— the first one is basically about the user. We want to delight the user. So that's baked into the core values. The second is that we actually make everyone at Polyvore go through orientation, where they sit down with the community team, the community team walks them through and talks about how much we love the community, and how much, you know, the profiles interesting members, so that's a picture of our orientation. So you have to really start baking it into your culture very early on. Then, another thing to make sure the community all surrounds your team is we decorate the office with community memorabilia. Love letters that they send us, we post them on the wall, we decorate the office with the beautiful collages, the sets that our community makes. When we get flowers or nice notes, handwritten notes from our community, we pass them around desk to desk in the office so everyone can read the love letter. We do a weekly email update. So the community team actually writes up things like what you should know, the top community requests, a love letter each week, and a spotlight on a member so you get a sense of like, who are these people? Who's behind the user ID number that the engineers see? We also, at some point once your team is a little bit larger, I would definitely recommend hiring a community team. I think our community manager was the 6th hire at Polyvore, so that's actually fairly early on, but we wanted someone dedicated to this. The community team does a combination of customer support as well as top member outreach. A lot of companies only do the first part, the customer support, and they forget about how do you make sure you have a strong relationship with your top members who are advocates. So the second principle is learn. You want to learn a lot from your community. It's so valuable to have those users, and to get their input back into your product is really important. You have to listen to them. You have to incorporate their feedback into your product. And then you have to let them know that you incorporated their feedback into the product. So one thing we do is we try to get feedback quite early. We might do a beta test with a select group of members where they get access to a feature early, or we might do something even earlier than that where we'll build a prototype. For apps, we really like this, this tool called Flinto. Your designers can make mocks and wire them up, and you can basically click, have a click-through prototype that looks fairly polished. This is Jason, one of our product managers, holding Starbucks cards. So you can give little prizes, little gifts to people to help out, as thanks for helping out. But what we do is we get this feedback early and then incorporate it into the development process. Recently I think we had a whole bunch of our engineers and our product manager and our designers go guerrilla style into Stanford Mall and just ask people to look at things. And we got a lot of really good feedback that was incorporated directly into the product in the next revision. Then, once you're ready and you have your feature all designed, it's really, really important how you roll it out. So you have to write a really good launch announcement. We do this on our blog generally, and this is an example. And I think the most important thing is to explain why you've done something. Most companies just say, here is what we've built, love it. You should really see, this is why you should love it, here's what we did, especially in particular if you're making large changes. It's gonna be the case where you decide you discover something confusing about your interface, you discover that you wanna change something, and people tend to have change aversion. So how many of you remember when the Facebook newsfeed first rolled out, or the wall? Everybody hated it, right? There were petitions saying, "I hate this," and now it's just such a normal part of Facebook, you can't even imagine what it was like when there wasn't a wall or a newsfeed, but everyone hated it in the beginning, and that's because of change aversion. So in anticipation of that, especially once your product's a little bit more established and you have those top members, it's really important how you announce the features. So this is a post that is from earlier this week. We recently redesigned our iPhone app, so we changed from a horizontal scrolling model, swipe left to right, to an up and down scrolling model. And you know, we think it's a better design. We tested it. We found that the stats were better. But we knew that the community might be upset that we changed it, so we wanted to really explain why. So this is the post that we wrote. We said, The reason we've done this is to make it more fun and easy to find and browse what you love. We got feedback that it was confusing, and that's why we've changed it. And we mentioned that we did actually beta test it with people, and their feedback was positive. So those little inclusions of information make a big difference to your community. Then what we also do is we listen carefully to the feedback. We actually create a Google Doc, and we collect all the feedback. So our social media manager will put tweets that she's received into this doc. We'll collect all the comments off of our blog. People will sometimes comment on sets that our team has made with feedback. Put that all together, and then we tally up the top requests. And that gives us a little bit of quantitative data and qualitative comments from our users telling us what they like or don't like. So this is an example of the— feedback that we got from the beta test of that visual design change that I showed you in the previous slide, and it was overall quite positive, but you can see that there were a bunch of negative comments, and we went and tried to address as many of those as possible. While, you know, you can't respond to every little community thing, you can't do exactly what your users tell you to do, but it was good to see the feedback to validate or invalidate some of our hypotheses. Then, once you've figured out what you're gonna do, what you're gonna change, it's really important to respond back to the community with updates. So this is from a while back. We changed our messaging system inside of Polyvore, and we got some complaints about the new interactions, and then we figured out, aha, we should fix these specific things, and you can see there are 3 updates, update 1, 2, 3, where we actually wrote back to the community saying, hey, thanks for the feedback, we're working on fixing some of this stuff, then hey, we've made some changes, let us know what you think, and then lastly, we're working on more changes. And that dialogue really shows your community that it's a two-way conversation. It makes you sound human. It shows that you're listening, and it makes a really big difference. Also, when there are problems, you need to address them head-on. Don't try to bury them. So this is from, I think, yesterday. There was a user who wrote in to complain about our Android app, and it's— 'cause our Android app asks for a bunch of permissions, and she was like, "Why do you need all these permissions?" And our— our social media managers wrote back and said, "Hey, you know, we're sorry, you know, it does seem confusing and unnecessary, but the reason for it is Google has actually grouped some of this stuff under these terms and we need into these buckets and we need some of the details in there. And hey, we're not gonna prank call you, don't worry." And I thought this is a really nice way to handle it with a sort of fun human tone, like having a conversation with a real person. Sometimes you'll screw things up. You'll launch, this is one time we launched all of our A/B test experiments all at the same time. Everything was turned on, and it was such a confusing experience, we immediately turned it off, but people were really upset. They were like, "Why did you change everything all of a sudden?" So, or when there are outages, when the site goes down for a little bit, we just say, "Sorry, we're really, really sorry. Here's what we know about when it's gonna be fixed. Everyone's working really hard on it, we worked through the night. Those little bits of communication make a big difference. And also when great things happen to you, like we won a Webby Award this year, we make sure to go back and tell the community about it and thank them. Because without them, we would really be nothing. The last principle is love. You should really make sure your community knows how much you care by how much you love and appreciate them. So one easy thing to do, especially as you're starting out when you don't have a lot of budget to, you know, to share and give to your users, what you can do is just interview your top members, spotlight them, highlight them in your social media, tweet at them on Twitter. What we do is we interview our members and we'll ask them, you know, what's trending in your neighborhood in terms of fashion? Tell us a little bit about you and why you use the product. And then we'll write interviews, make content about them, and then feature them across our homepage, in the app, in our social media and our Facebook page. Then maybe once you have a little bit more budget to work with, 'cause you're starting to, you know, maybe you got funding, maybe you do it out of your own pocket 'cause you care, maybe you can partner with advertisers to do something. One thing that we've done is send gifts, small gifts that are personalized, and then most importantly, handwritten thank you notes. I can't tell you how many times we've done a meetup and we've given them gifts, and then there's a little note, There's all these presents, and the thing they're most excited about is that we took the time to write a handwritten note. People just don't write letters anymore, or notes anymore, so I think it is still something that's kind of special, and we will sometimes pass them around the office and have lots of people sign them. And it's just an easy thing to do, so why not do it? It does make a big difference to people. And then our community managers sometimes go out of the way to do personalized gifts. So this one time, that picture on the left is some of our users having received this box where they open it and they find an item that they've used in their Polyvore sets before, that our community managers dug through their sets, and then they discovered that, "Oh, my gift is different from yours," and "Oh, I used this in 4 sets," and it was, they were so happy. There were people crying, actually. And it's just that little bit of extra, when you go the extra mile, people will remember that. Then, once we got even, we got a little bit more funding, we were able to do this, we wanted to help the community actually achieve their career goals and their dreams and their aspirations. So we asked them, "Hey, who in the community is actually interested in a job in the fashion industry? What are your aspirations? What do you want to do?" So we put out— we did like a survey. We got all this feedback, and then from there we were able to figure out how to use our connections as a company and our personal network to make some of that happen. So Samara on the left, we were able to set her up with an internship at Cynthia Rowley, a fashion designer. In the middle, we sent a bunch of people to fashion shows to be our community correspondents. So we sometimes get tickets to shows to cover them, but we're here, we're mostly engineers. So we send our community members to the shows and have them create content about them. The third example is, that's Olivia Lopez. She's an amazing blogger and Polyvore user, and we partnered her with a designer to create her own design collaboration. They designed that shoe that she's wearing. They called it the Olivia Boot. And it was on sale and it sold out. So that was something that she got to do. So we definitely try to make sure that our community is really, really happy. So those are the 3 principles. Live, community starts from within. Learn, learn from the community feedback that you get and incorporate into your product. And love, show them how much you love and appreciate them. And when you do these things right, you will see growth and you will see these kinds of comments from your community. So I'm just gonna read this. This is from Heather. She's been a member of Polyvore for probably 6 years. And she said, "As long as I've been a member of Polyvore, the team has always been attentive and kept the community their number one priority. I always assumed that as Polyvore grew, the genuine concern for user satisfaction would take a backseat to company goals. Fortunately, I was wrong. I'm continually amazed at how much of a family atmosphere Polyvore is able to create all over the world. I'm so thankful to be part of this community." And I sing praises for Polyvore every chance I get. So I do really— when I look back on the history of Polyvore and how we've gotten to this point with the 20 million users, I do really feel that this and the way that our community management team treats our community has been a big part of our success. So I just wanted to share those growth hacking tips with you guys. Thank you. Woo!

I'll actually start with a question, Jess.

Hi, Eric.

So big fan of your work. And—

We went to college together.

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

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

Thank you. First question.

Hi, I'm Susan.

Hi.

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

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