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we really made a big shift at this time to make Twitter much much more about following
we found a bunch of users I called them bounce-back users who had signed up not gotten active on Twitter had come back and it finally gotten active on Twitter and we just called him up and we asked him these four questions why did you sign up in the first place what didn't meet your expectations when you first signed up why did you come back to give it another try and what worked the next time
if we got you to follow more than 30 accounts in your first couple sessions on Twitter we would had a much greater likelihood of getting you to core and it wasn't that we were like you must follow 30 it was it we want to keep giving you tools that helped you get there and the second thing we found was we called the 1/3 2/3 ratio which is about a 1/3 of the people that you followed followed you back
I think they need to do some of this exercise again so I think it'll help them uncover how they get to the next you know couple hundred million users
we were only getting 20% of our new users they even become these core users so we knew we had some work to do to improve that and as we did make those improvements we got Twitter's growth from about 10 200 million users during my time there
we did this chart when I joined Twitter and basically mapped out how many days a user came in the first month which I believe was February and then how many days they came what was the likely they came that many days or more in the second month and we graphed this whole thing on a chart like this and we realized that if you came about seven times in the first month at Twitter you were over 90% likely to come back seven or more times in the in the next month
Airbnb wants to have their you know rooms booked you know as many times as possible
Airbnb is not a daily habit weekly habit or even a monthly habit it's a couple times a year habit that you travel and you might need a hotel and you'd want to look for an air B&B instead of a hotel room that's what's really incredible Airbnb and they need to make sure that they're top of mind for those couple times a year now if they don't see you when you do a bunch of your travel in the year then you're not really using air B&B in the way they want you to be using it but as long as you're usin
part of LinkedIn's value was be fine to be found to be findable so that some day if the opportunity comes to you you're actually still going to respond to LinkedIn versus annoying you so much
LinkedIn is sort of a weird and bad example for many senses on this cuz LinkedIn you know I mean job networks aren't something where somebody changes jobs every year so if you're starting to get job increase every day or every week that's actually too noisy which some people complain now as a problem with LinkedIn
most people who signed up for LinkedIn we're only really signing up as a friend hit vitamin in their network and they were there to be found and if you were there to be found you actually weren't a daily active user or even a monthly active user of LinkedIn you were kind of responding to inquiries when you received them once or twice a year maybe accepting connections to build your network and that was okay but the people we really cared about the early days were the searchers as we're building
Airbnb does this with credits. And it's a really big channel for Airbnb because they say, hey, invite your friends to Airbnb. And if they book a room, you'll both end up getting a credit.
Airbnb, which was originally called Air Bed and Breakfast. That's, again, might be long, but it's actually pretty easy to remember. And they have a great phrase, book rooms with locals rather than hotels.
Google, just a better, clean search engine.
the best learning comes from making conscious decisions. Each one of those steps creates a little idea in their head of what Twitter's about. So if you go back through the steps, tweet, follow, new sports entertainment, friends, that's actually a really good description of Twitter.
And so by redoing it this way, we really changed the trajectory of how many people stuck around Twitter.
And so this is the challenge of Twitter that we really didn't teach you the product at all. And we had a massive leaky bucket.
when you'd sign up for Twitter in those early days, it was a big search box and a green sign up now. And if you've ever searched on Twitter, it is such a horrible experience, even for like somewhat experienced users on Twitter, that you can imagine sending any new user down that rattle. We probably lost them forever.
I think a lot of our PR was backwards. So we'd have people talking about Twitter's this amazing place because I can get on Twitter and I can blast out all my thoughts and I can blast out all of my, you know, tweets and I'll get all these followers. And like for most users, that wasn't that relevant of an experience. For most users had a very different experience on Twitter, much more about listening, discovering interesting content that they wanted to see what was happening in their world. And s
And what I'll show you next is the newest homepage for Twitter that they just launched today that still echoes exactly that same theme because we got it so crisp and so clear.
And so from that, we actually came up with a company mission statement, our mission to instantly connect people everywhere to what's most meaningful for them. And once you have this kind of like clarifying statements, you can really design the whole product and design the entire communication back in order to do it.
We said, look, for anyone who wants to know what's happening in their world, they should use Twitter. So if you don't know what's happening in the world right now and you want a product that just tells you that, we wanted that product to be Twitter.
Ev Williams said, everybody signs up, nobody sticks around, help us fix that. And I started a little team there called user growth. 10 to 100 million users.
when I joined Twitter, it was about 80 people.
at the very beginning like look it says one click car service this is actually from the the this is the first picture ever posted to Uber's blog so how they're like marketing themselves back then you know oneclick car service you know get started um you know and then they used to run their own Groupons like they were running Deals they had to like really do all this stuff to say Hey you probably need a ride and you know we're going to run discounts we're going to do everything else
Uber is incredible now like I need to get somewhere like I was a little bit late here because I was like oh I can keep running late because I'll just call an Uber and it'll get me here right on time
I think search is about to go some massive under change you know like massive overhauls and like it's going to be really reinvented on mobile over the next couple of years
the real trick to SEO is you're T tapping into the nice intense stream that Google and you know maybe just Google is the the Mac Master search engine have created
what you have to remember is in the early days of a product no one actually knows the problem that they have and you really have to design it to to help them solve that problem um you know this is search the web using Google you didn't know what you're doing you want to to search the web there's 25 million Pages I'm feeling lucky I want 10 results um you just you know get Google updates like like but but but we laugh but when you're brand new you actually have to explain more you have to educate
we look at Google right now and it's like this beautiful Spartan product and you just know that when you go to Google you have a problem you want to find something on the Internet you type it into Magic Box it'll give you a bunch of links that tell you that
we actually end up selling that company to Samsung
we actually get more people completing the friends activity when it's later in the flow than earlier
this is kind of where Twitter got to in like 2011 and 12 which was like a massive set of changes and really that was part of the big ramp from you know 10 million or so active users up to you know what's now 280 something um you know million monthly active users you know over 100 million every day um probably much more than that
we had a big old leaky bucket and it was terrible um
this is Twitter homepage when I joined the company and we had a nice grind sign up now button and we had a big old search box which took people into Netherland of like death where they were searching on Twitter when they were brand new and they would see all these great terms at the bottom like American Idol and Justin Bieber and they click on those and they be like Justin Bieber I love Justin Bieber like a hundred tweets and like that did absolutely nothing to teach you of like the power of Twi
um just cuz I lived it but uh you guys remember when con o Brian was like fired from NBC and he went on tour he like literally he did like one tweet and sold out like the concert tour her like that afternoon and so there was all this great press they said hey Conor bran with one tweet sold out the concert T her and everybody would to go read that article and be like oh that's cool like Twitter's cool but I don't have anything to sell so why would I use it I was like wait that's actually the wron
I do think it's a little bit overdone and there's just so much going on and getting me to Tweet stuff out is just like or you know Facebook stuff like it's gotten a lot harder
I think I feel like this is one I'll talk about the least now because it's sort of everybody gets it get other people to Tweet stuff out and they'll land on your page and then hopefully they'll download your app or they'll they'll get invited to it but I mean Instagram is like the master of this like Instagram grew almost solely in the early days on the backs of Facebook and Twitter because every time you would go to Facebook and Twitter you be like oh that's a really cool picture oh my God how'
if you look at kind of where the Twitter homepage got to this is like vintage 2013 um says welcome to Twitter find out what's happening right now with people and organizations you care about all of a sudden you show up at the homepage um we tell you what that promise is and that problem that you might have and and you start doing it and then from the entire sign up flow we try to convert you on that and so we're in a much different place than staying connected with friends sharing what's going o
I don't think that's the same thing as like the the human problem exactly that we're solving it's a little more you know fluffy than that but but I think it's important to kind of have these mission statements
dick tweeted out this mission in in um February 2011 our mission instantly connect people everywhere to most most meaningful to them
if you think about the people who really are most passionate and love Twitter and use it all the time there's a very small segment who are active broadcasters most people will say it's something around this of like I just I stay connected I know what's going on all the time I know what's happening and I think that's that's the power
we were kind of in a in a state where where we could really tell you like who wanted Twitter and what it was it for and we came with this phrase that that I really liked we someone wants to know what's happening in their world
Twitter kind of helping people just but I think it's really about understand the problem that we solved was exercise and we said like who is Twitter for like who really has the problem that we're solving in Twitter
most of the power of Twitter actually wasn't being able to communicate with your friends family and co-workers was actually being able to communicate with the world and figure out what's going on so we didn't even do a good job of the problem that like maybe Twitter really did solve kind of helping everybody else
it described itself as a service for friends and family to and stay connected through the exchange of quick frequent answers to one simple question what are you doing and if you think about that like that sounds like Facebook doesn't sound like a problem most people have and it was actually confusing
part of the reason that Twitter got you know as big as I think it is right now and it's this real big force in the world is I think we did a lot of hard work to help kind of identify that core problem that we thought Twitter solved
I think Twitter is sort of this often maligned company of like they don't know what they're solving and it like keeps coming back over and over again
something I learned way in the early days at LinkedIn as we kind of kept reordering the flow because it's such a big ask it's like go and give me all your contacts go and give me all your friends unless it's a specific app that I know I'm GNA supposed to message my friends it's a pretty big sort of like commitment to do that most are resistance they wor everyone's going to get spammed and so so you know we put it later in the flow
it says so I found you while 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'll probably make both of our networks bigger and that last sentence it will probably make both of our networks bigger sounds dumb kind of a throwaway it's a little bit awkward turns out that the number of people who invited after they received this invitation and click through to confirm were higher than when that sentence wasn't there
we would actually test like Which invitation does do you send that actually increases the likelihood that everybody else who gets them invites more people so how many two generations away are we actually getting instead of one generation
we had to figure out how to make LinkedIn viral we had to figure out every person who signs up how do we get you to invite more people to your network
where I learned a lot and really cut my teeth at LinkedIn was on viral invites and we used to spend a lot of time testing the virality of our invitations
we had this theory of like how do we get people in this network and we called it growth usage Revenue G because we had to figure out how to get people just in the network even if they didn't do that much so that the network would expand then then you know we'll figure out the products that will really start to engage people with more usage and then over time we'll we'll be able to make revenue