TWiST LAUNCH Incubator series #2 — Josh Elman, partner Greylock & product master (ex-Twitter, LinkedIn, FB) shares secrets for success

Josh Elman, Greylock Partners

Today I’ve written down some notes for Ep. 2 of the ThisWeekInStartups LAUNCH Incubator series (links: audio, video).

The special guest in Jason’s show is Josh Elman, ex-Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter hired gun to improve the growth machine of their products where others had failed.

In this talk,he shares to the Incubators’ alumni the secrets for a successful growth cycle, including detailed & tactical advice on answering the key questions that lead to a solid growth parabole over time.

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Josh’s background

• Josh Elman is a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners
• Before that Josh was involved in growing Twitter, doing the workflow and the signup flow, Facebook, Linkedin, Zazzle and Real Networks
• He started as an engineer working at Real player
• He was fascinated by Friendsters and Linkedin, wondering what would happen if we connected all the people and what we could build on top of those connections (dating, jobs, etc)
• He dropped out of business school and joined Linkedin when there were 15 people in the company
• There were trying to figure out: “How do we get people in this network?”
• Evn if they didn’t do that much, so the network will expand

The power of networks

• Networks bring people together, those are the companies that last and thrive
• To turn an idea into a massive company you need to compound your network, users, their activities
• Virality is a cool concept (getting people to share to more people sharing to more people, exponentially) but very hard to engineer

What is growth

• Growth isn’t about getting featured in the Apple store nor getting Jason’s first tweet nor having an article on Techcrunch
• Growth is about building something so powerful that will make people talk and really excited, so much they can’t wait to go and try it
• Before mobile, you’d have to write it down and remember to go check it out later
• Now with mobile you can download the app straight away

The 4 keys of growth

There are 4 key questions you need to ask to understand the whole arc of your growth cycle:

1. Problem: what do people want? How do you simply describe they problem they have and why your product actually solves that problem for them?

• “My problem solves that and gives you this, this and this”

2. Inception: how do we make them aware that there is an app out there that solves that problem?

3. Adoption: how can we get them going? How does that product get them from the moment they are just trying it for the first time to becoming regular users?

4. Retention: how does it become an habit?

1. The problem

• When you have a new product you have to explain and educate people that they have that problem and that you can solve it right there
• Don’t look at the home of Google and believe that since their own today is so minimalist, you can as well go with the same approach and get away with it, getting traction with a bare-minimum design
• Even Google in the first days had to explain what they did
• At Twitter they had to understand the problem they were solving before
• They asked themselves: who’s is Twitter for? Who has the problem that Twitter is trying to solve
• At first it was: “Someone who wants to know what’s happening in their world” — well, everyone wants that
• Then it became “Twitter is the best way to tell you what’s happening in your world, to stay connected in real time”
• “Our mission is to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them”
• It used to be confusing and people weren’t really understanding Twitter
• It took them time to finally get to telling what its promise is and consequently, their whole flow will try to convert you on that
• Think about your product: who is it for? What do they want to do? How is — your product getting what they want?
• It should be a 30 seconds pitch you tell people that makes them excited to use your product (“Do you ever want to do this/have this problem? This product solves it in this way”)
• He calls this “atomic unit”, it’s the engine that once it gets spread generates growth

2. The inception

• How do you make people aware that your company exists to solve that problem? How do you get it to spread its usage among users?
• There are several strategies, let’s go over them one by one

a. Viral invites (friends invite other friends)

• At Linkedin, they used a lot viral invites
• They had to figure out how to get people, once signed up, to invite their whole network
• It’s interesting how they tested them: the metric they measured was what kind of invitation led to the most long term virality
• They wanted to figure out which invitation they could send that would increase the likelihood that everybody else getting those invites, invited more people (that would, again, invite even more people)
• The winning lines: “I find you as I was looking around the network, let’s connect directly. I’m happy to help you with requests and forward things incoming to you. It will probably makes our network bigger”
• When the sentence “it will probably makes our network bigger” was there, people were more likely to confirm the invitation (they wanted to make their network bigger)
• It’s important to measure what leads to more likely behaviours that you want

b. Search Engine Optimization

• Nowadays not many people think about SEO-driven growth, SEO is not dead, just harder to manipulate
• Lots of company got big in 2005–2010 thanks to SEO (Yelp, TripAdvisor)
• If you can convert people from searching on Google and landing on your site to just searching on your site, you are grand
• Yelp was able to do exactly it: after people found it several times on Google, they automatically associated their brand with local businesses searches and went straight to search on their site, instead of using Google as a bridge
• He believes that search will be reinvented for a mobile experience in the next years
• To leverage SEO, think of what kind of content you have that brings you visitors while providing a better user experience
• You need to track them so you can target specific call-to-action to them (“It’s the 12th time you land on this site looking for restaurants in SF, maybe you should download my app”)

c. Social

• Get people to tweet stuff out so others will come to your site
• Instagram was a master at this: in the early days it grew like gangbusters thanks to users posting Instagram pictures on Twitter and Facebook
• The friends and followers would see them and say “OMG what a nice pic! How did they take it? Oh Instagram…”
• Instagram made it so easy for the user to push out their pics on Twitter and Facebook
• Now it’s harder to get the same success, it’s noisier cause everybody is doing it
• Make sure what you let them share is something iconic
• When people see what’s shared should realize they want that too

d. PR

• Understand that what you say can implant ideas into the PR’s head and then what they say will implant ideas on everybody else’s
• How you tell the story, they way you talk about your company to everybody is how everybody will tell the story to others, that’s how the pitch goes around
• The stories must get inside of people mind and elicit in them FOMO (fear of missing out) — if they are not on it, they are missing out on things they would like

e. In-person

• Snapchat has spread out because people hanging out would show it to each other, tell them to download to share pictures between each other and showed how to use it and how to add each others
• How to use it isn’t so clear, so people that get it wants to show it to other because it’s cool
• Before mobile this wasn’t possible
• Engineer the way people will use your product, make it awesome and fun so they’ll want to show it to others

3. The adoption

• If you don’t get them to start using your product when they sign up or download the app, it will be hard to get them to use it later
• First impressions matter: make sure your product looks good and enticing enough for them to give it a try
• They have downloaded the app, now you have their attention and they are ready to explore it
• They don’t know how to use the app, so you have to teach them how to use it when they sign up
• Your app “sign up flow” is actually “learn flow”, you take them by the hand and show them what the product will do for them
• It’s not about getting them to use the app as quickly as possible but to get them aquainted with the possibilities your product offers and how they will be able to use it
• The best learning come from making conscious decisions
• Most apps just have 4–5–6+ screens of text that people just swipe left cause they hate reading and learn nothing (time spent on it, minimum)
• Every step should require the user to take action (so he reads the instructions and do something instead of jumping to the end in a bit)
• These are the steps to create an effective user onboarding/learn flow: take their time, break down the product into steps, break down the product into steps, ask questions instead of just explaining (start with easy questions first, then with more important ones) and put the user in the product when you think he’s ready to go solo
• If you let them skip, they won’t get the hang of it

The retention

• It’s important to tell if somebody is coming back
• That’s what you want, for them to get into the habit of coming back and use the product/app over and over again
• Define your core metrics to measure (login, postings, shares, reads) and figure how many times they do it month over month (or week over week)
• Measure of many times they use your app in the first and second month: if they have kept using it in the second month as much as or more than in the firs month, they’ll most likely keep using it
• When he was at Twitter, if you came about 7 times a month (twice a week) you’d likely been using it in the following month as much
• If people never comes back you can ask them why they don’t
• If people come back after a while that they weren’t using it, you can ask them as well, why did they stop coming back and why finally the did)
• In Twitter’s case they were coming back because somebody would say that they are tweeting stuff they are interested into and they didn’t want to miss their tweets
• Analyze user behavior, and chart it because you can find out the type of people who do and don’t understand the product
• You can then focus on how many actions do they need to take with your product per month to become someone who understands it

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