Defining growth | Yash Nelapati

I kind of define the growth into 3 different things, which is pre-product, early traction, and growth phase. Like pre-product, I don't even need to tell you, kind of like going through it right now. You just have a vision in your mind, and all you do is like sell that vision. And even if you have a prototype or something, you kind of want people to understand your vision, like, hey, this is where I'm going to. to, and this is where I am right now today. So that is challenging, as you know. It's not easy to communicate what you're thinking, and where do you even start? I mean, I can't imagine starting something like a Facebook or Pinterest, because it's just like the vision is something like, hey, I want a global portal where I can save my stuff. That is the user's pitch. But as Ben can say, I want a place where the brands can pin stuff and brands can get value back from users saying like, hey, we're going to make 80 different hoodies, but we don't have the money. So I just want to figure out which of these 80 hoodies should I even try to prototype and manufacture. So you could just pin 80 pins and see the engagement on top of those. It's just like the same thing with Facebook. What is getting shared is what people care and give a shit about. The same thing. So how do you start when you have a grand vision like that? So when Ben started, maybe actually 7, 8 years ago, he kind of built a startup called HelloTote, which was basically like, hey brands, why don't you come and pin stuff here? Hey users, why don't you just click the like and provide the signal back to the manufacturers or brands? And the brands were like, why should I pin? How many users do you have? They're like, well, if you pin, we're going to go get the users. They're like, ah, we don't give a crap. And like, hey users, can you guys come and like this thing? Like, what brands do you have? And like obscure brand names. I'm like, I don't give a shit about any of that. So the entire model just fell through. The idea didn't work out, which is why we had to invert the plan and like, hey, how about we let users pin stuff and tell what they like, and let's bring the brands later in the game because we have some boot— we bootstrap the content. We have something to take off and like we'll take it off, which is— That's a good idea. Which kind of worked, as you can see, Pinterest is a big company now. So that is what I would say is the pre-product onto early traction. So once the product is there and pretty much the first 500, 600 users, I can relate to every single user. Oh, that's Ben's mom. Oh, that's my friend's friend. So it was just beautiful. Oh, I know every user and what they're trying to do, and I would like— Ben would reach out to them. Hey, thanks for using the product. I know it's bad. It's going down, but we're going to fix things. So it was a very carefully nurtured community. And we had invite only, not because we knew that, oh my god, that's going to totally work. But it was just like we just didn't want any bad people pinning bad shit, because we really wanted to control the experience of what every user sees on the product. So things worked out really. I mean, I don't know if Ben had that vision, but it really had amazing content. And I was never into some stuff. I was like, this is beautiful. I need to get origami. And I did origami for 6 months. Like, oh, that's awesome. I'm going to pin this to my board. So I could see myself doing a lot of projects that I would have never cared or picked up just because of this product. So I knew there was something here. And we just need to like figure out how can we like scale it up because we are not going to know every user in the Pinterest ecosystem. So when we like actually land real users, what's going to happen? So we used to do a lot of experiments. Like I used to carry a laptop and like Ben used to like go to coffee shops in Palo Alto and like, hey, like would you like to try out this product? We'll buy you some coffee and like muffin and like would you try this? And people are like, nope. They'll put the headphones and stuff. So kind of got turned down a lot, but some people were gracious enough, like, yeah, sure, I'll do it. So we used to do a lot of user research, and Ben would like, here's this landing page, just go around, play with it. And they'll click around and stuff, and I used to just take notes. So we used to build a register screen, and the user cannot find the register button. And I'm like, that's so obvious. It's right there. So we used to get a lot of feedback, like obviously that's a very bad design because the user is not able to see the obvious register button. So kind of used to do this, and now it's like a big team inside Pinterest, like 40 people invite pinners all over the world from different core, hardcore Pinterest pinners to people who just signed and never came back. So they just reach out and we invite them. So we sit behind an investigation glass and just see how user is interacting, what they're clicking. So as you can see, we did something super unscalable, is like, hey, taking laptops out to people and like, hey, can you work on this, to bringing people in, which is a more scalable solution. And we have people in São Paulo and France, all the 8 countries that we launched, doing the same thing, and we get valuable reports back from it, like people do not understand follow model, or people do not understand this, and when we search, why are we doing this, why not this? It's like a lot of beautiful collaboration. So like right from early on, it was pretty much like Ben deciding like this is how the product should be. To today, it's like Ben does not decide anything. It's pretty much every employee feels like I'm part of this company and I give a shit about it. So I think we should do this. So I'm gonna talk about how like every employee can contribute to the product in a little bit. But yeah, that is like the most painful growth phase. Yeah. figuring out stuff. So I mean, like, I have a few examples here, like how some companies grew. I'm sure, like, people remember Hotmail. They were trying to scale, like, the service up, trying to get users, but nobody cared. But it just took one line of code to actually take off, which is like under every email they just had that small one text footer, which is like, hey, get your free email at Hotmail. And just like 3 weeks they just had millions of users. And then within no time they sold to Microsoft at 12 million users. So stuff like that, you just don't expect it, but stuff like that really works. But nobody knows what exactly works. I mean, a ton of people ripped that off. Even the iPhone is like sent from iPhone, so now go buy an iPhone. That does not really work. But if you, yeah. And also similarly Dropbox, you invite a user, you get 500 megs, he gets 2 gigs. And Twitter, knew like if you follow 20 Twitter users, you are 100% bound to be an active user for the next couple of years. So that is why they incorporated like this, the second you sign up, they show you like a ton of people like, hey, here's 100 people, just follow one or two. And they always nudge you to follow more people because there's always more content you can come back and consume. And they can email the shit out of it like, hey, you missed these 1,000 tweets, you missed these 100 tweets over the weekend, you didn't come back. So That's how they grew. And Airbnb, super funny story, they just used to write a script to cross-post all their listings to Craigslist, and like they got a ton of traffic, and like slowly they just started. Phenomenons like this doesn't happen, like nobody's gonna say like, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna get $10 million. Nobody can do that, but simple things like this actually change your entire life forever, which is why like You can like figure out, like, I mean, it's good to experiment. Like the first guy who sent this became a growth hacker, and every, like even sent from Gmail, sent from iPhone, everybody became like a spammer. Like it doesn't matter, like it's done. That gate is closed forever. That tunnel has been explored. So it's important for you to like figure out like what is your value proposition as a business? Like if you're providing like a free hosting or like a free cloud space, you should kind of leverage it through the right channels. You can't put it on a billboard like, come get— like, grab your 5 gigs of space. But like, it's always about like the right moment. Like, I want to share a file to my friend, and like when he looks at the file, like, you want to share files like this, you can get 2 gigs. So those are like the most opportune moments that kind of matter for you to like grow the product. And that's what exactly like companies like Airbnb Twitter, Dropbox did.