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It's harder than you are suggesting to find a leading indicator of future engagement. You want to find a metric that is relatively foundational, and is going to
by RichardPrice 14y ago
It's harder than you are suggesting to find a leading indicator of future engagement. You want to find a metric that is relatively foundational, and is going to produce engagement across a variety of dimensions later on (visit frequency, tendency to pay, tendency to add content, tendency to invite others etc).
For instance, when signing up to Facebook, there is a bunch of stuff they want you to do: add friends, invite people, add content like photos, and come back on day 1, day 2, and so on. It turns out that it's the first activity that is more predictive of future engagement than the others, and specifically 7 friends in 10 days is an important threshold. You can't figure that out from your intuition alone, and you definitely can't get the values of # of friends in # of days just by consulting your intuition, or your sense of what's obvious.
At the same time Chamath from Facebook was keen to point out that there was nothing mystical about what the growth team at Facebook did. He said the best way of describing what they did on the growth team is that they:
- Measured things
- Tested things
- Tried things
His main take-away was that one should be extremely rigorous and analytical when thinking about what drives engagement, and not rely on your gut, or company lore.
- moe 14y agoone should be extremely rigorous and analytical when thinking about what drives engagement, and not rely on your gut, or company lore. Except the end result is usually the exact same. A wildly inaccurate model for the sole purpose of impressing advertisers|investors|stakeholders with fancy, meaningless charts. The conclusions you can draw from these models are either utterly obvious, or false. I'm looking forward to hear about a single example of the opposite.
- RichardPrice 14y agoEvery company at the conference was an example of the effectiveness of growth teams. Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, Twitter and so on have all found that being rigorous about optimizing their growth models has increased growth and engagement. They were also at pains to mention that you cannot A/B test your way to a great product. You need deep insight and intuition to build a great product. But once you have a great product, you can help it grow faster by being rigorous about optimizing the drivers of growth.
- moe 14y ago"If, on a graph, the plotted data does not match the initial hypothesis, make the line fatter." -- J. Meals Or, to repeat myself, yes, it's rather easy to come up with these models and tweak them to sell your team|book|conference|etc. I'm still waiting for an example where such a model predicted something non-obvious.
- RichardPrice 14y agoAn amusing quote, but I don't think Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Pincus, and the CEOs of the other companies are all being deceived by fatter lines on a graph!
- moe 14y agoWell, since you seem reluctant to provide an example, I'll try it with a question: Did Myspace have growth hackers?
- RichardPrice 14y agoReluctant to provide an example? In my comment above I said that all the companies at the conference were examples of effective growth teams. I suggest that we respectfully agree to disagree.
- moe 14y agoExcept I didn't ask for "effective growth teams" but for instances of successful "growth hacking" (where the conclusions were not utterly obvious to begin with).