Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I was there at the time. Basically, even when I first started talking with Drew. Before I came in, I was like, "I think the way we're going to grow this business is by leveraging the really passionate customer base and that's what we need to double down on." And we had tried a similar kind of referral program at Zabni and a friend who actually started Ring, Jamie Simonoff, previously had a company called PhoneTag way before Ring, and he had actually done a lot of the testing on double-sided referral programs and having incentive on both sides, and he found that that worked the best. And so between what we had tested at Zabni and those conversations with him, I hadn't actually seen PayPal yet at that point, what they were doing. But that was kind of like... It seems like a referral program where we have incentives on both sides is the best way to go. Interestingly, six months before I was at Dropbox, I was at LogMeIn, and I really thought about having incentivized referrals at LogMeIn, but 80% of our new users were coming in through word of mouth. And I had a hundred million devices connected in on our system, and I was just so afraid of breaking this growth engine by adding an incentive that I didn't want to risk it. But at Dropbox it was so early. I would still say no experiment is one person. It happened to be when I was there, I had some insights that I brought in, but ultimately... The guy who built it was actually an intern named Albert Knee and he ended up dropping out, I think, out of MIT to stay with Dropbox for a few years after that. But he was kind of my right-hand guy to collaborating on growth day to day. Wow. I would say Dropbox is the referral program, and the PayPal referral program, as you mentioned, are the two most legendary, studied, copied referral programs out there. Unfortunately, I think that what they don't realize is that before the referral program, Dropbox had amazing referral rate. Companies that are trying to copy it are like, "Why isn't anyone talking about a product? Let's add a referral program with incentives." To me, I think it's a great accelerant when it's already working, but it can't fix it if people don't want to talk about your product.…

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