Lenny Rachitsky: observation

Transcript context

…ree days. We raised some more money based off the success of that and we started focusing a lot more on mobile after that first app, Five Labs. We launched basically every type of app you can imagine. We launched mapping apps, chat apps, event meetup apps. Basically, every consumer app on mobile that you could think of. That actually helped us build a muscle to understand what people want and how to actually make things grow and how to test them. Over time, we started focusing more on teens. A lot of people ask why Silicon Valley is so fixated on building apps for teens. One of the reasons is their habits are pretty malleable. As we get older, we get fixed into our habits of using certain communication products and we don't really adopt new things. Then the other thing that we discovered was that adults don't really invite people to new apps. We found that as a user got older from age 13 to 18, the number of people that they invite to an app just declines almost exponentially. Finally, and the most important thing is they see each other every day, and that is so critical. Consumer app developers sometimes say smokers are great for targeting an audience because they actually hang out serendipitously a lot outside of buildings. Not to say social apps are cigarettes, I don't really like that metaphor. Just on the note of you talking about why teens are important, I have this quote actually from you that I love where building on the point you made that for every social app I've ever built and the number of invitations sent per user drops 20% for every additional year of age from 13 to 18. If you build for adults, expect to acquire every user with ads, and I love that you have a very clear heuristic of per year, the amount of people they invite to the app is 20% lower. If your users aren't inviting people to your app, you're going to have to find another way to acquire them, and that most likely means ads. If you're targeting older cohorts like adults, you're going to have to raise a huge amount of venture capital to finance that user acquisition pipeline and it's going to be extraordinarily expensive. As a seed stage up, it's going to be basically impossible to grow that user base, especially to get density if you need actual network effects among users.…

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