thank you / so thank you cool so you
guys uh this is awesome I've been
watching the lectures in this course
isn't it absolutely amazing good content
and now you're stuck with me to see how
that goes so unlike Paul when he was
talking in the Q&A and you guys asked
him what he'd do if he was a college
today and he said physics I actually
indulged myself I went and I went and
did physics did physics at Cambridge and
I think physics is an amazing class to
give you transferable skills that are
really useful in other areas but I guess
that's not that's not why you're
listening to me today like physics isn't
the class like so I paid for college
doing online marketing director son's
marketing I started with SEO in the
1990s I created a paper airplane site
I had a monopoly in the small niche
market of paper airplanes globally which
you know when you want to start a
startup also see how big the market
could be in the long term it wasn't
great but what that taught me was how to
do SEO and back in those days it was out
of ister and the way to do SEO is to
have white text on a white background
five pages below the fold and you would
rank top of Alta Vista if you just said
paper airplanes 20 or 30 times in that
text and that was how you want an SEO in
the 1990s like it was a really easy easy
skill to learn when I went to college
being a physicist I thought paper
airplanes would make me cool and I was
actually the most nerdy person in the
physics class so I created a cocktail
site which was how I learnt to program
and that grew to be largest cocktail
site in the UK and that really got me
into SEO properly when Google launched
so with Google you had to worry about
PageRank and you had to worry about
getting links back to your site which
basically at that stage meant one link
from the Yahoo directory got you to the
top listing in Google if you had white
text on a white background below the
fold as well when Google launched
AdWords that's when I really started to
learn how to do on my marketing and that
was buying paid clicks from Google and
reselling them to eBay for a small
margin of like 20% using their affiliate
program and that was what really kicked
me into overdrive into doing what
everyone nowadays talks about its growth
or growth hacking or growth marketing
and in my mind is just internet
marketing using whatever channel you can
to get whatever output you want
that's how I paid for college and how I
ended up going from being a physicist to
a marketer and transitioning to the dark
side of the force so what do you think
matters most for growth you've had loads
of lectures and people have said it over
and over so what do you guys think
matters most for growth someone give me
an answer are you brother great product
I agree great product what is great
product lead to customers and what do
you need those customers to do spread
the word
someone said stay on your site someone
step back that's it retention retention
is the single most important thing for
growth now we have an awesome growth
team at Facebook and I'm super proud to
work on it but the truth of the matter
is we have a fantastic product but
getting to work on growth of Facebook is
a massive privilege because we're
promoting something that everyone in the
world really wants to use which is
absolutely incredible if we can get
people on and get them ramped up they
stick on Facebook so many times like
I've advised multiple startups my
favorite was working with Airbnb but
with Coursera I've worked with other
ones that haven't done as well as those
guys but the one thing that is true over
and over and over again is if you look
at this curve the cent monthly active
versus number of days from acquisition
if you end up with a retention curve
that asymptotes to a line parallel to
the x-axis you have a viable business
and you have product market fit for some
subset of market but most of the
companies that you see fly up who talk
about growth hacking and virality and
all of this other stuff in a trice so
hard not to swear but it'll happen their
retention curve slopes down towards the
x-axis and in the end intercepts the
x-axis now when I show this chart to
most people they say that's all well and
good you had a million people a day in
terms of growth when you started the
growth team at Facebook or you were at
50 million users you had a lot of people
joining sites so you had a ton of data
to do this we use the same methodology
for our b2b growth getting people to
sign up as self-service advertisers we
used this analysis to understand how
much growth we were going to have in
that market as well and in that
place when I joined Facebook the product
was three days old and within 90 days of
the product launching we were able to
use this technique to be able to figure
out what the one-year value of an
advertiser was and we predicted it for a
full of the first year to 97% of what
the number turned out to be so I think
it's very important to look your
attention curve and this is how we did
it if you see here this red line is
number of users who have been on your
product for a certain number of days so
a bunch of people that should say zero
but a bunch of people will have been on
the product all of your users will have
been on at least one day but if your
products been around a year or whatever
you will have zero users who've been on
it 366 days make sense a curve sensible
cool so what you then do is look for all
of your users who have been on your
product one day what percentage of them
are monthly active 100 percent for the
first 30 days obviously because monthly
active they all signed up on one day but
then you look at 31 every single user on
their 31st day after registration what
percentage of them were monthly active
32nd day 30 third day thirty fourth day
and that allows you with only something
like 10,000 customers or whatever to get
a real idea of what this curve is going
to look like for your product and you're
going to be able to tell does it
asymptote it'll get noisy out towards
the right-hand side like I'm not using
real data it'll get noisy out towards
the right-hand side but you'll be able
to get a handle on does this curve
flatten out or does it not if it doesn't
flatten out don't go and do growth
tactics going to undo virality don't
hire a growth hacker focus on getting
product market fit because in the end as
Sam said at the beginning this course
idea product team execution if you don't
have a great product
there's no point executing well on
growing it because it won't grow number
one problem I've seen inside Facebook
for new products number one problem I've
seen for a startups I've advised has
been they don't actually have product
market fit when they think they do so
the next obvious question that people
ask over and over and over again is ok
what does good retention look like sure
I can have 5% retention but I'm guessing
that Facebook had better than that so
that's not going to be a successful
business
I get really pissed off when people ask
me that question because I think you can
figure it out and I love this story and
this is like my one gratuitous story
that I love that I'm throwing in here so
the rest of it may not be as as
gratuitous but this is a picture that
was published in Life magazine in 1950
of one of the Trinity nuclear bomb tests
and there's a guy Jeffrey Taylor who's
heard of Jeffrey Taylor awesome yes
someone's heard of him
Jeffrey Taylor was a British physicist
who ended up actually winning the Nobel
Prize and he was able to figure out from
looking at this picture what the power
of the atomic bomb was the u.s. atomic
bomb and Russians were publishing
similar pictures just using dimensional
reasoning and dimensional reasoning is I
think one of the best skills that I
learned during my time studying physics
back in the UK and what dimensional
reasoning is is you look at the
dimensions that are involved in a
problem so you want to figure out energy
Newton's meters Newtons are kilograms
meters seconds to minus 2 so you've got
kilograms meters squared seconds to
minus 2 and then you try and figure out
how you can get each of those numbers
from what data you have so the mass is
the volume of this sphere so that's a
meter cubed you throw in there so you've
got meters the 5 over seconds to the
minus 2 and he was able to use that to
just figure out what the power of this
atomic bomb was what the ratios of the
power were between the Russian and u.s.
atomic bomb and essentially reveal one
of the top secrets that existed in the
world at that time
that's a hard problem figuring out what
Facebook's retention rate is is not a
hard problem how many people are there
on the Internet give or take someone
throw something out will be the 2.4
billion to one three billion something
like that right okay Facebook's banned
in China so what now about two billion
two billion so two billion people on the
internet Facebook in our last learning
school said something around 1.3 billion
in terms of number of active users you
can divide those numbers by each other
and yeah that won't give you the right
answer of course it's not going to give
you the right answer but it's going to
give you close enough to a ballpark
figure of what the retention rate looks
like for Facebook if we've signed
everyone on the Internet up and then you
will know it's higher than that
similarly if you look at
what's that they've announced 600
million active users how many people
have smartphones you can figure out that
number that numbers out and knocking
around it can give you an idea of how
many users there are Amazon has had a
pop at signing up almost everyone in the
United States you know how many people
are online in the US and you've got a
good idea of how many customers Amazon
are from the numbers they throw out
different verticals need different
terminal retention rates for them to
have successful businesses if you're in
e-commerce and you're retaining on a
monthly active basis like 20 30 percent
of your users you're probably going to
do pretty well if you're in social media
and your first batch of people signing
up to your product are not like 80
percent retained you're not going to
have a massive social media site and so
it really depends on the vertical you're
in what the retention rates are what you
need to do is have the tools to think
about who out there is comparable and
how you can look at it and say am i
anywhere close to what real success
looks like in this vertical so retention
is the single most important thing for
growth and retention comes from having a
great idea and a great product to back
up that idea and great product market
fit the way we look at whether a product
has great retention on our is whether or
not the users who install it actually
stay on it long term when you normalize
on a cohort basis and I think that's a
really good methodology for looking at
your product and saying okay the first
hundred the first thousand the first ten
thousand people I get on this will they
be retained in the long run so now how
do you attack operating for growth let's
say you have awesome product market fit
you have built an e-commerce site and
you have 60% of people coming back every
single month and making a purchase from
you which would be absolutely fantastic
how do you then take that and say now
it's time to scale now it's time to
execute was the last thing in your fault
right and that's where I think growth
teams come in like my contrarian
viewpoint or whatever is if you're a
start-up you shouldn't have a
growth you shouldn't have a growth theme
dammit
so close halfway through an ad I failed
you shouldn't have a growth team
startups should not have growth teams
the whole company should be the growth
team the CEO should be the head of
growth you need someone to set a
Northstar for you Richards a shot of the
you know masa page you need someone to
set a Northstar for you about where the
company wants to go and that person
needs to be the person leading the
company in my opinion for what I've seen
and Mark is a fantastic example of that
back when Facebook started lots of
people are putting out their registered
user numbers right you'd see registered
user numbers MySpace you'd see register
use numbers for compact you can see
registered user numbers mark put out
monthly active users as the number both
internally he held everyone to to and
said we need everyone on Facebook but
that means everyone active on Facebook
not everyone signed up to Facebook so
monthly active people was the number
internally and it was also the number he
published externally it was the number
he made the whole world hold Facebook to
as the number that we cared about if you
look at what Yan has done with whatsapp
I think it's another great example he
always published send numbers if you're
a messaging application sends is
probably the single most important
number if people use you once a day
maybe that's great but they send one
message there you're not really their
primary messaging mechanism so Yan
published the sends number right inside
air B&B they talked about nights booked
and they also publish that in all of the
like infographics that you see inside
TechCrunch they always benchmark
themselves against how many nights book
they have compared to the largest hotel
chains in the world they have each of
these companies a different North Star
the North Star doesn't have to be
monthly active users for every different
vertical for eBay when I was there it
was gross merchandise volume how much
stuff did people actually buy through
eBay everyone externally tends to judge
eBay based on revenue actually Benedict
Evans has done this amazing breakdown of
Amazon's business which is really
interesting to look at their marketplace
business versus their direct business
eBay is all marketplace business right
so eBay is being judged by its revenue
when it actually has ten times or
whatever more grow
merchandised volume going through the
site and that was the number that eBay
looked at when I was inside there and
optimized for so every different company
when it thinks about growth needs a
different Northstar but when you are
operating for growth it is critical that
you have that Northstar and you define
it as a leader the reason this matters
is the second you have more than one
person working on anything you cannot
control what everyone else is doing
right I promise you having now hit a
hundred people I'm managing I I like
have no control it's all influence yes I
can say to one person do this one thing
but then the other 99 are going to do
whatever the hell they want and the
thing is it's not clear to everybody
what the most important thing is for a
company it would be very easy inside
eBay for people to say you know what we
should focus on revenue or you know what
we should focus on the number of people
buying from us or you know what we
should focus on how many people list
items on eBay and Pierre and Meg and
John those guys as various leaders
always said no it's the amount of gross
merchandise volume that goes through our
site it's the percentage of e-commerce
that goes through our site that is what
really matters for this company which
means when people are having a
conversation you're not in a room or
when they're sitting in front of their
computer screen and thinking about how
they build this particular product or
this particular feature in their head
it's going to be clear to them that it's
not about revenue it's about gross
merchandise volume or it's not about
getting more registrations registrations
don't matter unless they become
long-term active users a great example
of this was when I was at eBay in 2004
we changed the way we paid our
affiliates for new users and affiliate
programs are a bit out of fashion these
days but the idea of an affiliate
program is essentially you pay anyone on
the internet a referral for sending
traffic to your site but it's mostly
about getting access to like big
marketers who do it on their own by
accepting some really good stories - we
were paying for confirmed registered
users so all of our affiliates were
aligned they out getting confirmed
registered users to the eBay site we
changed our payment model to pay for
activated confirmed
users so you had to confirm your account
and then bid on an item or buy an item
or list an item to become someone that
we paid for overnight when we made that
change we lost something like 20% of
confirmed registered users that were
being driven by the affiliates but the
AC I use only dropped by about 5% the
ratio of CI u to a CI you went up and
then the growth of a CI use massively
accelerated the cause of this was if you
want to drive CI use if someone searches
for a trampoline you land them on the
registration page because they think
they have to register and confirm before
they get that trampoline if you want to
drive a CI use you land them on the
search results page within eBay for
trampolines so they can see the thing
they want to buy get excited about it
and register when they want to buy it
and if you drive just see I use people
don't have an amazing magic moment on
eBay when they visit the site and that's
the next most important thing to think
about is how do you drive towards the
magic moment that gets people hooked on
your service so in the lecture notes for
this course I've stuck in a bunch of
links to people I think are brilliant at
all of this stuff that retention curve I
showed earlier there's a link to this
guide Danny Ferrante who's incredible
talking about retention curves the magic
moment there are two videos linked one
is shamov talking about growth who was
the guy who set up the growth team at
Facebook and one is my friend Naomi and
I talking at f8 four years ago about how
we were thinking about growth back then
and in both of those men both of those
videos we talked about the magic moment
so what do you guys think the magic
moment is for when you're signing up to
Facebook you hit that big green button
what is the moment when users are like
haha mark even talked about it at the
startup school few years back see your
friends see your friends simple as that
and usually it is very simple I talked
to so many companies and they try and
get incredibly complicated about what
they're doing but it is as simple as
just when you see that first picture of
one of your friends on Facebook you go
oh my god this is what the site is about
and Zach's talked at Y Combinator about
getting people to 10 friends in 14 days
that is why we focus on that match
the number one most important thing in a
social media site is connecting to your
friends because without that you have a
completely empty newsfeed and clearly
you're not going to come back you'll
never get any notifications you'll never
have any friends telling you about
things they're missing on the site so
for facebook the magic moment is that
moment when you see your friends face
and everything we do on growth and if
you look at the LinkedIn registration
flow you look at the Twitter
registration flow or you look at what
whatsapp does when you sign up the
number one thing all these services look
to do is to show you the people you want
to follow connect to send messages to as
quickly as possible because in this
vertical that's what matters when you
think about Airbnb or you think about
eBay it's finding on eBay that unique
item that PEZ dispenser or broken laser
pointer that you really really cared
about and wanted to get hold of like
when you see that collectible thing that
you are missing that is the real magic
moment on eBay
when you look on Airbnb and you find
that first you find that that first
listing that's like a cool house that
you can stay in and when you go through
the door that's a magic moment and
similarly on the other side when you're
listing your house the first time you
get paid is an amazing moment when
you're listing an item on eBay the first
time you get paid is a magic moment you
should ask Brian what he thinks because
they've done these amazing storyboards
which I think has been shared of like
the journey through a users moment a
life on on Airbnb and how excited is and
he's talking in like three lectures time
the guy's awesome are talking about the
magic moment and getting his users to
feel love and joy and all this stuff so
think about what the magic moment is for
your product and get people connected to
it as fast as possible because then you
can move up where that blue line has
asymptotes it then you can go from 50%
retention to 60% retention to 70 percent
retention easily if you can connect
people with the thing that makes them
stick on your site the second thing to
think about is everyone in the valley
gets wrong that we optimized when we
think about growth for ourselves so my
favorite example is notifications again
talk to lots of companies advise lots of
companies every single company when they
talk about notifications goes oh I'm
getting too many notifications I think
that's what we need to optimize for our
notifications okay are your power users
leaving your site because they're
getting too many notifications
then why would you optimize that they're
probably grown-ups and they can use
filters what you need to focus on is the
marginal user the one person who doesn't
get a notification in a given day or
month or year our experience of our
products and by the way like building an
awesome product is all about thinking
about the power user right building an
incredible product is definitely
optimizing for the people who use your
product the most but driving growth
people who are already using your
product all the time and not the ones
you have to worry about
so in this Danny Ferrante video there's
also that's linked from the lecture page
there's also talk about our growth
accounting framework that we used to
think about for growth and we looked at
new users resurrected users people who
weren't on Facebook for 30 days and came
back and churned users and the
resurrected and churn numbers for pretty
much every product I've ever seen
dominate the new user count once you
reach a sensible point of growth a
couple of years in whatever and all
those users who are churning and
resurrecting had low friend counts and
didn't find their friends and so weren't
connected to the great stuff that was
going on on Facebook and so the number
one thing we needed to focus on was
getting them to those 10 friends getting
them to whatever number of friends they
needed so think about the user on the
margin don't think about where yourself
when you're thinking about growth so
operating for growth what you really
need to think about is what is the North
Star of your company what is the one
metric where if everyone in the company
is thinking about it and driving their
product towards that metric and their
actions towards moving that metric up
you know in the long run your company
will be successful and by the way
they're probably all correlated to each
other so it's fine to pick almost any
metric whichever one is like the deepest
like that you feel the best about that
aligns with like your mission and your
values probably go for that one but
realistically daily active users fairly
correlated to monthly active users we
could have gone with either one amount
of content shared also very correlated
to how many users there are because
guess what you add a user they share
content so lots of things end up being
correlated pick the one that fits with
you and that you know you're going to be
able to stick with for a long time but
have a North Star have a North Star and
know the magic moment that when a user
experiences
they will deliver on that metric for you
on the North Star and then think about
the marginal user don't think about
yourself those are I think the really
important points when you're operating
for growth everything has to come from
the top so the last area here is tactics
and my hope was that I could hit a few
of these and then I've got a list of
tactics I want to go through that I'm
better talking with the white board and
whatever on but you can ask me questions
as I'm going through on those about how
they work and what goes better
but the important tactics that you need
to think about how ah this is great guy
by the way Tom Fishburne he looked he
lives in the Bay Area and he does these
really cynical cartoons that I love so
let's say you've found your niche market
that you're going to have a monopoly on
inside the mousetrap market it's a
silenced mousetrap for sitting under
beds so that if the mice come to your
bed overnight like they can be killed
without waking you up so that's your
niche market and your your mousetrap is
better than anybody else for that market
what typically happens in Silicon Valley
is everyone think mark thinks market is
a useless
like I thought marketers we useless when
I was a physics student so I'm sure as
engineering students you must think
we're awful awful people who aren't
useful to have around like build it and
they will come that is something that is
very much the mantra in the valley and I
don't believe it's true I believe you
actually have to work there's a good
article again in the lecture page from
interviewing Ben Silverman we talks
about how the growth of Pinterest was
driven by marketing it's a really good
article to read into I'm biased of
course so the first tactic I want to
talk about is internationalization
Facebook internationalized too late
Sheryl said it broadly in public and I
definitely agree with that one of the
biggest barriers to our long term growth
and one of the biggest things we had to
deal with was all the countries where
they were clones famously studi felt
said had fake book CSS in their in their
HTML and there were a ton of sites like
that out there whether it was studio
outside as a clear clone contact your
mixi Cyworld
orkut there were all these different
social networks around the world that
grew up while Facebook was focused on
the US and so internationalizing was an
important barrier we needed to knock
down and
and down barriers' is often very
important to think about for growth
Facebook started off as college only so
every college that it was launched in
was knocking down a barrier when
Facebook expanded beyond colleges to
high schools I wasn't at the company but
that was a company shaking moment where
people questioned whether or not
Facebook could actually survive the
culture of the site could survive then
expanding from high schools to everyone
that was like just before I joined and
that was a shocking moment and that
spurred the growth on to 50 million and
then we hit a brick wall and when we hit
that brick wall that was the point when
a lot of existential questions were
being asked inside Facebook about
whether any social network could ever
get to more than 100 million users which
sounds stupid now but at the time no one
had ever achieved it everyone had kind
of tapped out between 50 and 100 million
users and we were worried that it wasn't
possible and that was the point at which
the growth team got set up Jim auth
brought a bunch of us together it was a
he said very publicly that he wanted to
fire me on multiple occasions and he
probably should have done but without
Jamar's I think none of us would have
stayed at the company we were a really
weird bunch of people but it worked out
and the two things we did I think that
really really drove growth initially was
number one we focused on that 10 friends
in 14 days and getting users to the
magic moment and that was something Zack
drove because we were all stuck in
analysis paralysis saying is it
causation is it correlation so it was
like you really think if no one gets a
friend that they'll be active on
Facebook are you crazy
the second thing was
internationalization it was knocking
down another barrier and when we
launched it I think there were two
things that we did really well number
one was even though we were late and we
were stressed about being late we took
the time to build it in a scalable way
we moved slow to move fast and you can
actually hear the full story from Naomi
in one of the videos linked from the
lecture page but what we did was we
wrapped all the strings in the site and
FBT which is our translation script and
then Oryx translation extraction script
and then we created the community
translation platform so that we didn't
just have professional translators
translating the site we could have all
of our users translating the site and we
got French translated in 12 hours but we
managed to get to this
104 languages translated by Facebook for
Facebook 80 plus 70 of those are
translated by the community and we took
the time to build something that would
enable us to scale the other thing is we
prioritize the right languages so back
then the right languages the big four
languages were French Italian German and
Spanish fix and Chinese but we were
blocked in China so we focused on French
Italian German and Spanish now look at
that list that's today's distribution of
languages Italian isn't on the list
anymore French and German are about to
fall off in the last year we quadrupled
the number of people on Facebook in
Hindi quadrupled and so building for
where the world is today is an easy
mistake to make and it's what a lot of
the other social networks did we built a
scalable translation infrastructure that
actually enabled us to attack all of the
languages so we can be ready for where
the future is going to is going to be
and you'll probably be able to see some
stuff from our internet org summit in
India about where we want to go with
language translations later today
because I think they're talking about
that stuff there so these are the
tactics I want to go through now and
I'll stick with the white board for that
stuff but I'd really encourage you guys
as I go through these if you've got any
questions about them let me know I think
this should be like a more freeform time
anyway but I think some of these tactics
quite interesting so virality yes I
think there are two ways to look at
virality there's a great book ah whoops
the book on the right here by Adam
Penenberg viral loop goes through a
bunch of case studies of companies that
have grown through viral marketing and I
strongly encourage you if you're
interested in viral marketing together
book
I think Ogilvy and advertising is great
as well because chapter 7 he's like if
you can't think of anything else stick a
car to a billboard with superglue and
people who buy your superglue and he's
got some really it's got some really
good creative tips in there lately the
guy's been dead 20 years and I think
he's still iced I buy every one of my
team gets both of these books when they
start on my team so virality so Sean
Park has this model that he taught or he
told us about when he when when I joined
Facebook
which is to think about virality for a
product in terms of three things first
is payload so how many people can you
hit with any given viral blast second he
had cooler words for these I'm not quite
as cool second is conversion rate and
third is frequency payload frequency and
conversion rate whatever that would so
how many people can you hit at once as
payload how many times can you hit them
per blast is frequency and what are they
going to convert that and that gives you
a fundamental idea of how viral a
product is so hotmail is the like
canonical example of brilliant viral
marketing right back when hotmail
launched there are a bunch of male
companies that have been funded and that
were throwing huge amounts of money at
traditional advertising how many people
know the hotmail story virality awesome
great new audience sorry just two or
three people will be bored but hotmail
back in back at that time people
couldn't get free email clients they had
to be tied to their ISP and hotmail and
a few other companies launched and their
clients were available wherever you went
you could log in via library internet or
whatever school internet and be able to
get access to that which is a really big
value proposition for everyone who
wanted to access it most of the
companies went out there and did big TV
campaigns and billboard campaigns and
newspaper campaigns and things like that
bought a lot of advertising off Yahoo
all of those things but the hotmail team
didn't have as much funding and so they
had to Scrabble around to figure out how
to do it so what they did was add that
little link at the bottom of every email
that said sent from hotmail get your
free email here now the interesting
thing is that meant the payload was low
right you email one person at a time not
necessarily going to have a huge payload
maybe you send around some of those
viral spammy emails but then I'm not
sure I'll click on your link the
frequency is high though because you're
emailing the same people over and over
and over which means you're going to hit
them once twice three times a day with
that same link and really me
up the impressions and the conversion
rate was also very high because people
didn't like being tied to their ISP
email and so hotmail ended up being
extremely viral because it had high
frequency and high conversion rate
another example is PayPal PayPal PayPal
is interesting because PayPal has two
sides to it
PayPal has the buyer and the seller side
the other thing that's interesting about
PayPal is its mechanism for viral growth
was eBay and so you can use all kinds of
things for reality that may not look
necessarily obviously viral so PayPal if
you sent money if you said to a seller I
am going to send you money like I can't
think of a higher conversion rate
frequency was low payload was low but
PayPal did this thing where they gave
away money when you got your friends to
sign up for PayPal and so that's how
they went viral on the consumer side
they didn't have to do that for sellers
because if I said I am going to send you
money via this you will take that and
even on the consumer side they went
viral because someone said sign up for
this thing and you'll get 10 bucks why
wouldn't you so they were able to go
viral but in both cases it was because
their conversion rate was incredibly
high on the buyer and the seller side
not because their payload in frequency
was high makes sense so this is a really
good way to look at virality if you want
to say is this product viral Facebook
was not viral via email sharing or
anything like that Facebook was purely
viral by a word-of-mouth because the
interesting thing about PayPal and
hotmail is to use them the first person
had to send an email to someone who
wasn't on the service with Facebook
there's no native way to contact people
who aren't on the service and everyone
thinks of Facebook is like viral
marketing success and that's actually
not how it grew it was word-of-mouth
virality because it was an awesome
product you wanted to tell your friends
about how's everyone doing is this
interesting great question yes you're
talking about this low payload in both
other examples in the later rounds as
this sort of campaign or whatever you
want to call it it's going
have a much higher pillar there's more
and more people are sending out there
the more and more folks and that way
your payload grows and grows and grows
so the question in the first round it
makes sense that it has a low payload
but in later rounds on you're going to
have higher payloads as people send more
and more and more emails I guess in my
head well first and foremost I think you
actually only send emails to a small
number of people so compared to like the
massive viral engines that exist today
where you import someone's into our
contact book and send them all send them
all an email or where you post to
everyone's friends on Facebook the
actual payloads are still very small
even if it's everyone that you email on
a frequent basis you hit and I'm also
thinking really per email sent out how
many people are on it but it's a fair
point like yeah as more people get on
again on hotmail they'll send more
emails as more people use email the
product actually grows more and more
successfully so that's a fact fair point
go for it conversions Mangusta Lakeland
but really just click in sign up give in
four days completely agree that's why
I'm sorry doesn't point of conversion
matter as well so on hotmail you click
to sign up but on a billboard you have
to remember the URL go to the website
type it in find the registration button
click register and sign up yes yes
anything you can do to move friction out
of the flow and going from an offline ad
to an online ad removes huge amounts of
friction from the flow obviously totally
agree with that one more at the back
will you do on frequency and conversion
regulators absolutely if you hit someone
with the same promotion everything -
that aren't frequency and conversion
regulated if you hit someone with the
same email over and over and over again
or the same banner ad this is one of the
things that's fundamental about online
marketing the same rules apply to every
channel if you hit someone with the same
Facebook ad over and over and over the
more times you hit them with the same ad
the less they'll click that's why we
have like creative exhaustion you have
to rotate creatives on Facebook
same with banner ads same with newsfeed
stories the 50th time you see that IQ
story in your newsfeed you are not going
to click on it if you haven't clicked on
the 49 before you're not going to click
on the 50th the same is absolutely true
with these emails so if you send the
same email over and over and over to
people for an invite then or if you send
the same little link at the bottom over
and over and over to people for hotmail
or I mean the paper one's different
because people just signed up but yes
you will get lower conversion rate and
that impress the more you hit someone
with the same message the less they
convert is fundamental across every
online marketing channel every online
marketing channel cool second way to
look at virality which i think is
awesome is by this guy Edie
and EDD runs the growth team at uber now
he was at the growth team at Facebook
and he was a Stanford MBA student did a
class similar to this where they talked
about virality and they all went and
built viral products and there was there
was a bunch of press about that actually
and he's brilliant of this stuff the
interesting thing about uber is if you
look at their growth team they're
incredibly focused on drivers because as
a two sided marketplace they need
drivers that's a huge huge chunk of
their focus as a team even though
they've got like probably the best viral
guy in the world
at the company so with virality you send
out you get someone to contact import
let's say then the question is how many
of those people do you get to send
imports then the question is - how many
people then how many click and you can
put extra steps in this you could put
how many open how many click whatever
how many click how many sign up and then
how many of those import so essentially
you want people who sign up to your site
to import their contacts you want to
then get them to send an invite to all
of those contacts you want to get it to
all of those contacts not just one of
them then you want to get up sent those
to click and absentia those sign up if
you multiply out the per sensor every
point in this this is essentially where
well this isn't a percent this is a
number if you multiply those out that's
essentially the point where you get to
the question of what is the k-factor
so if you have when someone imports if
on average they send invites to a
hundred people sorry doing that wrong
let's say a hundred people get an invite
per person who input imports and then of
those 10% click that gets you to ten and
then of those let's say 50% sign up
that gets you to five and then of those
only ten to twenty percent actually
subsequently import you're going to be a
point where you're at point five to one
as your k factor and you're going to not
be viral so a lot of things like vide
are very good a pump it or were very
good at pumping out stories that got the
K factor over one and it's perfectly
doable to get the K factor over one but
if you have something that doesn't have
high retention on the back end it
doesn't really matter so you should look
at your invite flow and say okay what is
my equivalent of import how many people
per import are invites sent to how many
of those receive clicks how many of
those convert to my site how many of
those then import to get an idea of your
K factor but the really important thing
is still to think about retention and
not to think about variety and only do
this after after you have a large number
of people retained on your product per
person who signs up so couple more
things we were going to touch on SEO
email SMS and push notifications so on
SEO there are three things you need to
think about first one is keyword
research people do this badly all the
time so I launched this cocktail site
they talked to you about I spent a year
optimizing it to rank for the word
cocktail making turns out in the UK no
one searches for cocktail making about
500 people a month I dominated that
search time it was awesome 400 visitors
a month that's amazing everyone searches
for cocktail recipes in the UK and in
the US which is the biggest market
everyone searches for drink recipes so I
optimized for the wrong word so you've
got to do your research first about what
you're going to go after so research
consists of what do people search for
that's related to your site how many
people search for it how many other
people are ranking for it and how
valuable is it for you
supply demand and value simple economics
I guess so you do your keyword research
you figure out which keywords you want
to rank for there are great tools out
there to enable you to do that honestly
the best is quite often the Google
Adwords Keyword planner tool really once
you've done that the next most important
thing is
so PageRank is how all of SEO
essentially is driven and Google is
based on Authority now there's a lot of
other things in Google's algorithm now
like do people search for your website
there's a lot of stuff about the
distribution of what the anchor text is
this sent to your site so that if you
abuse it and spam it they can pop up
with spam white on a white background
five pages below the fold doesn't work
anymore but the single most important
thing is to get valuable links from high
authority websites future ranking google
most important thing then you need to
distribute that love inside your site by
internally linking effectively and when
I joined Facebook we'd launched SEO in
September 2007 which was before I joined
I joined November 2007 and we'd launched
it we were getting no traffic from the
the pages we'd launched public user
profiles so when I went in and looked at
it the only way you could get to any
public user profile was to click on the
footer of the page for the about link
then click on one of the blog articles
then click on one of the authors and
then spider out through their friends to
get to all their friends
turns out the Google was like they've
buried these pages they're not very
valuable I'm not going to rank them we
made one change we added a directory so
the Google could quickly get to every
page on the site and we hundred XD Co
traffic very very simple change drive a
lot of upside about distributing the
link club internally and then the last
thing is there's a bunch of table steak
stuff XML sitemaps making sure you have
the right headers it's all covered
really well online for what you want to
do I'm going to stop now and make sure
because we had a few questions but what
other questions are there go for it
that's going to email okay great
email email is dead for people under 25
in my opinion right young people don't
use email they use whatsapp they use SMS
they use snapchat they use Facebook they
don't use email if you're targeting an
older audience email is pretty
successful email still works for
distribution but realistically email is
not that great for teenagers especially
and even people University you know how
much you use instant messaging apps and
how little you use email and you guys
are probably on the high
to the scale for email because you're in
Silicon Valley that being said on email
the things to think about email SMS and
push notifications all behave the same
way they all have questions of
deliverability so to finish first first
you have to finish your email has to get
to someone's inbox so if you send a lot
of spam and you end up with dirty IPS or
you send spam from shared servers where
other people are sourced you send email
notifications from shared servers where
other people are sending spam from you
are going to end up being put in the
spam folder consistently and your email
will fail completely you may end up
being blocked and have your email
bounced there's a lot of stuff around
email where you have to look when you
receive feedback from the servers you
are sending email two 500-series errors
versus 400-series errors you have to be
respectful of how those are handled if
someone gives you a hard bounce retry
once or twice and then stop trying
because if you are someone who abuses
people's inboxes the email companies
spam fold you and it's very hard to get
out if you get caught on a spam house
link or anything like that it's very
hard to get out it's really important
with email that you are a high class
citizen that you do good work with email
because you want to have deliverability
for the long run that counts for push
notifications and SMS to with SMS you
can go on by SMS traffic via gray routes
with people where they're having air
phones strung up attached to like a
computer and pumping out sms's that
works for a time but it always gets shut
down and I've seen so many companies
make these mistakes where they think
they're going to grow by using these
kind of tactics if you can't get your
email your SMS or your push delivered
you will never get any success from
these push you spam your power users I
know that's slightly different i said
earlier but you actually spam your power
users and give them notifications they
don't care about and make it really hard
for them to opt out so there's no
settings where they can opt out and they
start blocking you you can never push
them once they've opted out of your push
notifications and it's very hard
actually to prompt them to turn them on
once they've turned them off so number
one thing to think about about email SMS
and push notifications is you have to
get them delivered beyond that it's a
question of open rate
click-through rate so what is the
compelling subject line you can put
there so that people are going to open
your email and how can you get them to
click when they visit everyone focuses
towards doing marketing emails that are
just spam in my opinion newsletters are
stupid don't do newsletters because
you'll send the same message to everyone
on your site
someone who signed up to your site
yesterday versus someone who's been
using your product for three years do
they need the same message no the most
effective email you can do is
notifications so what are you sending
what should you be notifying people off
and this is a great place where we're in
the wrong mindset as a Facebook user
I don't want Facebook to email me about
every like I receive because I receive a
lot of likes because I've got a bunch of
Facebook friends but as a new Facebook
user that first like you receive as a
magic moment turning on that
notification across all of our channels
increased the click-through rate on our
emails SMS and push notifications but we
only turned it on for low engaged users
who weren't coming back to the site so
it wouldn't be spamming for them
spamming them so it's a great experience
so think about that
what notification should you be sending
is the first thing that you need to
think about on email SMS ambush and then
the second thing you need to be thinking
about is how can you create great
triggered marketing campaigns so when
someone created their first cross border
trade transaction was one of the best
email campaigns I was ever part of an
eBay in terms of click-through rates it
was awesome
because it was really timely really in
context the right thing to do for the
user so I'd say make sure you have
deliverability most important thing
focus on notifications and trigger based
email SMS and push notifications beyond
that so I think we're out of time
there's one thing I wanted to finish
with which is and if you guys have any
questions I guess like you can reach me
and if I get spammed I just won't reply
we have great spam filters no my only
favorite quotes is from General Patton
and it's so cliched it's crazy but it's
awesome a good plan violently executed
today is better than a perfect plan
tomorrow and one of the things Chamath
instilled in us and javi
then stills is us and market stills
across the whole of Facebook is this
move fast and don't be afraid to break
stuff ethos if you can run more
experiments than the next guy if you can
be hungry for growth if you fight and
die for every extra user and you stay up
late at night to get those extra users
to run those experiments to get the data
and do it over and over and over again
you will grow faster mark has said he
thinks we won because we wanted it more
and I really believe that we just worked
really hard it's not like we're crazy
smart or we've all done these crazy
things before we just worked really
really hard and we executed fast and I
strongly encourage you to do that growth
is optional thank you
yeah