Sarah Tavel: belief

Transcript context

…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. Yeah, I know. That's absolutely right. The importance of it is I can't emphasize enough how important focus is when you're building these companies. It's so hard. There really isn't a playbook. Every company, the ones that succeed have to be fundamentally different from anything that was before it. But there are these first principles of the ingredients that they all share, and you can use those ingredients to really focus you when you're going through the inevitable growth curve and wanting to know, "Well, how do we maximize this moment? How do we really focus on the things that will set us most up for success?" That's where I think a framework like this can be really clarifying. There's a lot of depth behind each of these things that you're being modest about. One is, with the top of this pyramid of making it self-perpetuating, the reason that's really important is for a consumer app to work well most of the time, it has to be able to spread really cheaply. The cost of acquisition needs to be very low, unless you somehow figure out some paid ad strategy where you can make money with paid ads, which is very rare. So maybe speak to why that's so important to a consumer product.…

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