Bangaly Kaba: belief

Transcript context

…One thing that's actually, I think, interesting, as an interesting story that doesn't get talked about a lot is I think the early Instagram was built where... it was built in a way where every follow was created equal. And what I mean by that is if I followed you, Lenny, or if I followed Kim Kardashian, I followed Selena Gomez, all follows were treated like they were equally important. And this is actually a really important fact. It was a really important factor for a couple of reasons. One, early celebrities who were adopting Instagram obviously benefited from that, because a celebrity is going to get a follow before an average person does. It doesn't mean that their followers weren't meaningful. It's just that when you have a machine learning that's just optimized for a click through a follow, then that matters. But what ended up happening is we ended up looking at the data, and I can't take credit for this. My colleague at the time, Rob Andrews, had identified this. He was the head of growth marketing. He was a peer of mine that basically, this is 2016-ish days, the average person would come on Instagram and retain, but then leave after 7, 8, 9 months. We'd see a flattening in a retention curve, but then we would see it dip again, which was very weird. And we're like, why is this happening? And it turned out that what was happening anecdotally is that people were revving up Instagram, following a bunch of people, following a lot of celebrities, actually, because the celebrities were being shown, and then when they actually went to make their first post, a few months later- ... being shown. And then when they actually went to make their first post a few months later, none of their friends were following them. And so there was posting into an echo chamber and anecdotally people would stop using the product because they felt bad. We hypothesized that no one was liking or following or commenting on their posts. And so we had to do this thing. We called it the connections pivot, right in like 2016 ... Actually, 2017, where we had to convince Kevin and Mikey that it was actually not the right thing to do to prioritize celebrities to everybody because we were basically biting bite your nose to spank your face, whatever that is, because the regular person wasn't having a great experience. And so it doesn't mean that we shouldn't recommend celebrities, but Jeff recommended celebrities to people who are already on there. They already have their graph. And the most important thing to do is actually get regular human-to-human connections in the first whatever, when people first sign up so that when you let me actually go make your first post, your friends would see it and you would be validated and you would feel like, okay, this is a police for me. I have a community here. And so that connection pivot was critical. It changed ... Literally, angle-changed the retention on Instagram. alidated and you would feel like, okay, this is a police for me. I have a community here. And so that connection pivot was critical. It changed ... Literally, angle-changed the retention on Instagram. And so if you about Instagram's growth, there was a TechCrunch article about Instagram's growth at I think 2017, 2018 when we were going 40, 50% year over year. And obviously, there was a lot that went into that skyrocket. People think that stories was the sole reason why we grew and story brought us a lot of people, but we literally, our attention doubled over the course of a year and a half. If you could imagine, imagine if your bank account, the interest rate doubles every month, you know what I mean? It was incredible. This shift in making sure that people got connected with their friends early on changed the way that people perceive the value. And so a lot of the top-of-funnel work that we did, a lot of the activation work that we did really paid off in spades ultimately. Wow. I'm curious, what's the most impactful thing you've shipped/led to in terms of impact and experiment launch?…

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