Mentions personal use of Instagram.

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny. You mentioned this concept of adjacent user kind of adjacently, but I think it's worth spending a little more time here. It's like this term you popularized and you explained it somewhat, but maybe explain a little bit more. I think it's really powerful for people and how do you think about growth. This was something that came out of actually my time at Instagram. It was a framework that we came up with because Instagram really was, at that time, we grew so fast that the people who were using Instagram in February were completely different than people who were using it the following October and then the next January. I think when I joined, we were at like 440 million monthly actives. January 2016, at the end of that year we were at 636 million, grew like 47% that year. And so when we talk to users, first half of 2016, when we talk to women in the US in their 30, they're like, "Why would I have an Instagram? I have a Facebook account." Literally people said that, it was that long ago. And then a year later it's like, "Of course I use Instagram. Instagram is my everything." The world changed so fast. And so when you're in a hypergrowth product, it's really, really important to understand who your users are today and the persona of the user, what motivates them, why they're using it, but then also to understand who is the next user? Who is the user who could be using this product, but for some reason it doesn't work for them, and understanding who that adjacent user is and when you are actually starting to see that adjacent user adopt the product. And one of the ways you start to see the adjacent users starting to adopt the product, especially with the data, is you start seeing cohort curves decline. You start seeing the people who sign up today, three or six months from now, they're signing up and they're doing a worse job. Nothing's changing the product, but just the understanding of how the product should work is different. They might be less tech savvy. On a scale of an early adopter versus late majority, they might be closer to the late majority. And so we saw this at Instagram. We always knew working on our registration flow, and at one point we were converting at some insanely high percent, and then three months later it would go down by 15%, not because anything was broken, but just because we'd broken into new markets. You bring on people in India or you bring on people in the Philippines, and their understanding of how it works, the phones they use, et cetera are all different. So really, the core of their adjacent news was a few things. One is like you have to understand who's using your product today and why. And when you're growing at some really strong pace, 30, 40, 50% or more per year, you've got to be on top of who you believe the next user is and why. And then you also have to be the adjacent exactly, use the product like them and see how it's working, what's broken with it. And so at an Instacart, the adjacent user, the original user might've been like an office admin who is going to buy this thing every week because of during happy hours and team staff. broken with it. And so at an Instacart, the adjacent user, the original user might've been like an office admin who is going to buy this thing every week because of during happy hours and team staff. But then the next adjacent user might've been the mom of three or four or the dad of three or four who's home with the kids and they need to depend on Instacart, versus later on it might be they're a single person in New York who does this out of convenience. But what they're optimizing for, how they use the product all changes, and the functionality and the abilities are fundamentally different. So you have to be them, you have to watch how they use the product, you have to talk to them, and then have to visit them and literally see what they're doing in real time in order to make sure that you're enabling the right jobs for them.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.