Naomi Gleit: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, I'd love to. That's exactly where I was about to segue since you brought that up. So the Facebook growth team, it's a legendary team. I think it was probably the first real growth team in tech. The team developed some of the most core growth levers and techniques that companies use today, and so I'm really excited to chat a bit about this and what you learned from that time. One thing I wanted to start with is there's this legendary activation metric that you all had, the goal was to get, I think it was seven friends in 10 days or something like that. Is that a real thing? Is that what you guys actually did? Anything more there for folks that are like, "Oh, we got to come up with something like this"? Sure. So yes, seven friends in 10 days was a thing. 10 friends in 14 days was also a thing. They're the same thing, they're just different points on a retention curve. I would say the key insight here is when we started the growth team, I think we were pretty focused on acquisition. We had a notion though of growth accounting, which looks at what's our net growth every day? And that would look at the number of new users that registered minus the number of users that actually went stale. So after a 30-day period, that's how we define it, they no longer logged in. And then plus the number of users that resurrected, which is after 30 days they came back. And what we found was the churn in resurrection lines were actually much larger than the new user line, which implied to us that retention and driving those two lines was actually our biggest lever to drive net growth. And so while we were focused on acquisition, a lot of our focus shifted to be around engagement and retention. How do we drive engagement and retention? We look at the variables that correlate most with that outcome. What we found was friending. And so those two magic moments, having seven friends in 10 days or 10 friends in 14 days really just map to when we feel like your likelihood of being a retained user goes up because you've seen the value in Facebook. And it makes sense, Facebook is much more compelling if you have 14 friends. And the other thing around 10 or 14 days is we wanted it to happen quickly, we wanted to have you experience the magic moment soon after you had registered on the site to prevent you from churning and then us having to resurrect you again. One of the most interesting lessons from this activation metric that people talk about, because right now everyone's like, "Yeah, of course retention is what you need to focus on. That's what product-market fit is." I think right now that's what everyone knows. I love that you guys basically figured that out, was one of the first times of, "Here's how we understand if our product will last and how to grow retention because it matters most." And retention cohort curves I think was one of the innovations y'all thought about early of just like, "Here's how we track retention, people joining at a certain time, how long do they stick around?"…

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