Sarah Tavel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. Yeah, it's very true. Let's say, now, you have a product, it's growing, more people are completing the core action. When they complete that core action, the product gets more retentive for them. It gets better the more they use it, they have more to lose by leaving it. Then, your tall task, and this is the hardest thing to overcome, is how do you make the product self-perpetuating? This is where I love to think of every time a user users your product, let's say they're clicking on the mouse or they're tapping on their phone, I love to think of it as this kinetic energy that they're putting into your product. You're taking that energy, and your job with a great product, is to take that energy and, as much as possible, convert it back to the experience that they're having with your product. Now, the biggest thing that you can do is a network effect. The more I pin something on Pinterest, the better the experience for every user on Pinterest. Every time I add a pin to a board, I'm creating a new edge in Pinterest Graph, that Pinterest then uses to create recommendations and enrich their understanding of all those objects on Pinterest. The network effect is the strongest thing that you can do. And obviously, if you have that, which all social products have to in some way, you have to spend time, as much as possible, just maximizing where that shows up, fine-tuning it, removing friction so that it's a flywheel that spins faster and faster. But, there's other loops too, that you have to identify and then maximize. These are the growth and re-engagement loops. These are classic loops, you talk about these a lot, they exist in marketplaces and social products. How do you get it so that, as your users use the product, they want to share it with other people? They create metadata that you can then use for SEO. You have collaborative experiences that pull other people in. There's all different things you can do here. And then, there's also things that you can do to re-engage a user. As an example, in the early days of Pinterest, if you pinned something, you're pinning something that you found on Pinterest that somebody else pinned. So we would send a push notification, "Hey, Lenny, Sarah just pinned your pin to her art board." Now, if you were a dormant user at that point, it's been a couple weeks since you'd used Pinterest, that notification might pull you back into Pinterest and be like, "Hey, I wonder what other pins Sarah has on her art board." It's a great re-engagement loop where Pinterest doesn't have to do anything there intentional. The user is creating the action that drives the outcome that Pinterest wants in that example. Now, as much as I love Evernote, this is a place where Evernote obviously falls down. There's no loops that they can take advantage of, that when I use the product, I make it better for you. There's no loop where, when I use the product, I want to pull you into the product. falls down. There's no loops that they can take advantage of, that when I use the product, I make it better for you. There's no loop where, when I use the product, I want to pull you into the product. They tried at some point, to do collaborative journals, it doesn't work. That's a place where, because of that, Evernote had to spend money to acquire users, they tapped out. They missed that level three. There's other examples I could speak to, of companies that weren't able to transcend to level three, that you wouldn't otherwise think. I think of companies like Houseparty and Clubhouse. What was interesting about both of those products is that you would think that the more users that came into Clubhouse or Houseparty, the faster the flywheel should spin. But the challenge was that they relied on push notifications. I don't know if you had this experience, but let's take Houseparty as an example. You started to follow a lot of people on Houseparty, and then all of a sudden, your push notifications just got overwhelming. Because it was a realtime product, that you had to use push noti cations to know the moment to join the product, but when you had so many push notifications because the more people you followed, the more notifications you had, you just get to this point where you start ignoring them. It becomes this thing where, even though the flywheel should be spinning faster, it starts breaking down. That's the real tricky nuance in this level three. I think people hearing this are going to be like, "Okay, getting people to use your product more often, increase retention, make it viral basically," it's stuff they already know. But I think what's powerful about this is this is just a lens, a clarifying lens on what is most important. There's so many things you can be focusing on to increase your product's success and help it grow. What I love here is just, "Here's the three most important things, and then here's the levels." They build on each other. If you want to increase retention, get people to do the core action more often. If you want to help it grow, focus on helping it spread, self-perpetuate.…

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