Adapting Your Company From A User Standpoint | CEO of Levo, Caroline Ghosn

I completely hear the importance of deciding what you're gonna be best in the world at. For some companies, it's not enough for that to be one thing. Right? So if you're building a network, then your users are already coming with a set of expectations around what you're gonna allow them to do. And I would think about those less as one thing and more on a product grid. So we think about it as a 2 by 2. Of course, love frameworks. By 2s. And we think about it as the value to the user and the value to Levo. And the value to the user is career navigation, which basically means you're learning or you're connecting. Those are the 2 things you do in your career. You learn or you connect. And connecting can include people, but it can also include jobs, and it can include a profile that represents who you are that allows people to connect with you. And then learning is everything from understanding from role models what they did in their careers To getting advice from them, to really being inspired to be better at the job that you may have chosen. Did you narrow that down from a broader thing?

Yes. Totally.

And you look at, and, you know, all of you guys, we're not operating in a vacuum. So just look at what competitors are doing and try to understand, like, why are they doing that? Because whatever they're doing is gonna be free research for you, so use it. And don't be shy to use it. They're spending millions of dollars. giving you data. So, like, thank you. It's free, right? And if you look at every professional network that's out there— and we look at LinkedIn, but we also look at Behance. I don't know if any of you have looked at Behance and others. What we understand is that there's this really interesting intersection of learning and connecting features, and so we can start the framework there. For all of the things that you guys are gonna work on, you're gonna have similar comps that you can use to define where to start and what your next step should be.

Yeah. Can you speak to, like, your user acquisition strategy? Maybe a few of them that you've tested in the past, like what you learned and what has been the most effective method for you?

Yeah. So we're at this really interesting inflection point because we have a large network, objectively speaking, but we're a young company. So we've never spent a dollar on marketing, ever. So my answer is it should be free. But now we're going to have to. Because basically after a certain point, it's like the jig is up. People have invited everyone they know. You need to talk to new people. And so I think in the beginning, your user acquisition strategy is all about identifying with the product that you put out there who is using this fanatically despite all the kinks. And go talk to those people and understand what they're using and why they care and what's important to them. And I think about it as paving the cow path. So if you build a road and then all the cows walk off the road and all go in this one direction, Then your road's wrong. So identify where they're all walking. And instead of telling them to get back on your road and getting frustrated because the second you turn away, they stray again, just follow them and identify what is it that they're doing. So once you do that, then it's creating really easy, low barrier entry invitations. So this is something that we're constantly improving. Every single day we're thinking about how do we make it easier for users to invite their friends? How do we make the value proposition clearer? How do we move forward along this trajectory of, I love it, it's important for me to invite my friends because I get a better experience out of it, and then as a result, I'm going to invite my friends.

But how did you get that initial set of users?

So we're different in terms of some of the things that we've done because our market really needed this type of resource. And so even in the beginning, when as a CEO I can look back and say, oh my god, that's embarrassing. And the first things that we launched, which, by the way, if you're not embarrassed by what you launch, then you're launching too slowly. Like, you need to be actively embarrassed of the stuff that's active on your site, because that means if you're sitting there going, this is amazing, then you probably sat on it for, like, 3 extra months, and that's 3 extra months that someone else is catching up to you, whether you know it or not. So A, it's gonna be embarrassing. B, the way that we started is that we started out by putting forth our mission and saying, like, the goal of Layvo is to build a place that you can use to navigate your career, because we're all lost here, so let's figure it out together. And asking people, like, what that meant and working back from there, as opposed to, like, sitting in an isolated room and just, you know, divining what the solution would be for this group of people. So we run focus groups every single week, sometimes twice a week, and all over the world. So we're always talking to users and pressure testing our assumptions. So So talk to people, build something, and then listen to how they react to it. And then if they're using it in a different way, that's great data. That means your hypothesis probably failed, but that's success because you're moving forward. And then once it gets to a certain point, they're going to start inviting their friends on their own.

Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. So it seems like you have a lean approach to the way that this business works. So my question is, what's something that you've done that hasn't worked, and what did you learn from it? We've done so much that hasn't worked. I mean, again, every single day I'm actively embarrassed by something that we've done, which I push my team all the way to the limit. I think on the spectrum of comfortable to I can't hold on to the seat of my pants anymore, we're there, and probably a little further than that, as you can probably tell from my level of intensity and directness. So things that we've done that haven't worked. We've launched campaigns that we have thought were going to be amazing and that haven't driven conversion. And we just decided, like, okay, that's fine. This campaign's gonna drive buzz but not conversion. We've learned that nowhere else, no referral source whatsoever, nothing will ever get you a change in your registrations unless your product is where it needs to be. And so we've had coverage from absolutely everyone you can imagine. It's never made a difference on conversion, ever. The only thing that changes conversion or registrations for us is us changing our feature set, us clarifying our positioning, or us listening to our users and then changing something. And so it taught me the power of the internal navigation versus like, oh, well, you know, if like Good Morning America talks about us and CNN broadcasts us, then millions of people will come. No, that's not how it works. They'll be like, oh, that's great on CNN, and then they'll go back to their day. And so don't rely on anyone else except yourself to move the needle on your own user acquisition. I think that's what we learned. And instead of being like, oh, bottoms up, I'm gonna get all these incredible people to talk about me and resources to talk about me, and then somehow this will trickle down into active registered users, don't rely on that. And please, for the love of God, don't put money behind that. Do it the other way around, which is like bottoms up. I am my user. The people on my team are my user. And so if we're not using this every day, there's a problem. So we need to be asking ourselves, asking people like us, what it is that they need, and then making those changes day in and day out. And then at some point, those 2 things will magically meet, and you'll be a billion-dollar company, and then you'll hopefully, you know, buy me a gift for giving you some sort of advice. But in the meantime, start bottoms up.