Sarah Tavel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Basically, what is most causal of retention as you're describing. And I love this example from Pinterest. Any other just examples? Again, you shared a few at the beginning of just examples of great activation milestones/core user actions. I'll tell you one other one that I thought was super interesting, which is that when I initially published this post, I had assumed wrongly that YouTube's core action was watching a video. And then Shishir Mehrotra, who was the kind of CPO of YouTube, he reached out to me and he said, "That's what it was in the early days, but we started to realize that it wasn't actually our core action. And we did a lot of analysis on YouTube and what we realized was that subscribing was the core action on YouTube." And it makes so much sense when he said it, right? You're a creator, you're uploading content onto YouTube, there are a lot of other places at that time that you could have uploaded that content to, but you care about YouTube because that's where you're growing your audience, right? And so, the more people that subscribe to your content on YouTube, the more you have the accruing benefits and mounting loss of using YouTube. And so, that was super important on the creator side, which, one of the funny things that will bridge to our next conversation is that all social products are really marketplaces, right? YouTube is a marketplace. You have the creators uploading content and the viewers who are watching it, supply and demand. And so then, the subscribe button is also very interesting because then from the demand side, the viewer, why would I come back to YouTube consistently versus, again, all the other places I could spend time on if it weren't for me having found creators for whom their content really resonates with me so much so that I subscribe to their content? And so, I loved that example because it showed a little bit the evolution that can happen with these companies, but then also, just the beauty of like you know you've got something really right with the core action when it's helping both sides of your network. Awesome example. And I think it's also a good reminder people change these things. "You come up with your best bet. Okay, we tried this for six months, maybe let's try something else. We've learned something new."…

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