Gina Gotthilf: belief

Transcript context

…It's good to be Google. But yes, it's good to be Facebook. I'll share what I think is most useful here, and also what my experience ended up being. Which is, they brought together a lot of great talent from across the US, especially in terms of tech. This is an organization called Hawk Fish, that they started working with the Mike Bloomberg. Basically, he created it. I don't know, it was embedded in there. There were a lot of us who had large eagles, and had been sharks in our previous organizations, who had to figure out how to come together and work and in a very short amount of time. That was a very interesting experience, because it's hard to do that. It's not just important to be great and smart, but it's also important to understand how to most effectively deploy your resources and talent across an organization. And that sort of takes a little bit of time to happen. And for a presidential campaign, I find that very hard to do, from that one experience. That said, it also meant that when you're looking at the paid ads, and the fact that we were deploying this massive amount of money, there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen when it came to figuring out exactly what we were going to do with those ads. And how we were going to target them, and what are the campaigns we're going to run, and what's the copy, and what's the design? And after maybe a few days there, I realized that my best bet in terms of actually adding value was not to be another cook in the kitchen trying to figure that out, but to move into the next step of the journey, which nobody was paying attention to. Which is, once you click on an ad, you land somewhere. And then whatever happens there is super important. Because if people then take the action you want them to take on that landing page, or don't, is definitive. But everyone spends all of their effort and money on the ads. And I think that this is true of almost everything. We forget to think about the step-by-step in growth, and what that experience looks like. And even just the second or third screen in an experience are as, if not more, important than the first one. Because that's where your "leaky buckets" can happen. So if you're able to 2X the effectiveness of a landing page, you are able to actually, in a compounded way, increase the effectiveness of that first ad. So I spent a lot of time going rogue and figuring out how to make landing pages. Because the designers and the copywriters were all allocated to the actual ad. So I was just there being like, I'm going to do copywriting and design, and figure out how we can increase these conversion rates. And the cool thing about that level of dollar deployment is that you're able to reach statistical significance very quickly. ting and design, and figure out how we can increase these conversion rates. And the cool thing about that level of dollar deployment is that you're able to reach statistical significance very quickly. Whereas in a company like Duolingo, where you already have a lot of users and you can reach statistical significance on an AB test within two weeks, at the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign on a landing page, we could see that three times a day, so four times a day. So I would be able to do something and be like, oh wow, this has a 3% conversion rate. And then get approval for a new version and deploy it and then be like, okay, we're at 6% now. And then actually improve. There was one day where I brought one page from three to 12% conversion rate with statistical significance. So that's, I think, the biggest benefit of having those dollar amounts. I think the drawback, and that's the same for startups that have a lot of money to spend, is you start going a little wild in terms of like, oh, the world's our oyster. We can do whatever we want. And you lose sight a little bit about effectiveness, which is where growth is so magical. What was that change on the landing page you did that increased conversion so much, do you remember?…

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