Growth for startups

My name is Gustaf. I, I'm gonna give a talk on growth for startups. This is gonna be for, some of you guys, not super relevant right now because you might not not launched, and thinking too much about growth when you haven't launched isn't that relevant. But for those of you that launched, this is hope hopefully gonna be good talk. So I'm gonna cover three different things today.

First, I'm going to talk about product market fit and retention. The reason that that relates to growth so much is because working on growth be before you have product market fit and good retention is not a good idea. The second thing I'm gonna talk about is growth channels and tactics. These things definitely apply after you have launched and often after you have a good product market fit.

You found something that people really want, and then you wanna scale it up to the the the larger world. And lastly, I wanna talk about how you make decisions. When you have several people on your team, you wanna start redoing things, and you're not really sure exactly if you're making the right decisions or not. And these are also thing things that apply when you're a little bit bigger.

So my background, I learned most of these things I'm gonna talk about at Airbnb. I worked on the growth team for almost five years from where we were two people until we're over 100 people on that team. This is the team back in 2015. Most of the lessons I'll talk to today are things I learned there. Most of you are gonna be somewhere on this line. Most startups don't have product market fit.

Founders tell themselves that they do, and they try to convince themselves that this is working. But the truth is for most companies, it's not working. So that means you're gonna be somewhere on this line. People also have this idea that if I launch my product, it will work. Somehow, it's going to work if I just tell the world that I am I built my is not now there.

Now, unfortunately, that's not the case. The world is a really busy place, and there isn't really, lots of people waiting for you to launch your product. They're not standing there, and they're not going to try it the moment you launch it. That is unfortunately not the truth.

And for many people who've never thought of these questions before of how do I reach the world, this actually comes as as a surprise. People have been used to working in big companies where this is not a problem. People have been used to going to school or other areas where this is just not a problem.

In this case, when you launch a a startup, it's all down to you, and it's our it is gonna be a problem in the very, very early days. There's a great article that I recommend for you guys to read on this. This is called doing things that don't scale by Paul Graham. He wrote that, six years ago. It is about the early days of the Airbnb story.

And the thing that's really important about this is as a founder, you need to keep two different skill sets in mind as your company grow. The beginning of your company, you're gonna do a lot of things that don't feel right. At the when they don't feel natural to you because it's not the kind of thing that you learned in your previous jobs or in school.

It's social, like, the most kind of physical or real things that you have to do that you aren't gonna be relevant later on. But later on, as your company grows bigger, you're gonna be doing a lot of things that are are things that relate directly to software and are things that scales your company. So these are two things two skill sets that have keep in mind at the same time.

In YC, we have this thing where where we tell the companies that you just launched, you gotta do things that don't scale. And we got lots of these MBAs that goes went to school and said, well, this idea does not scale. Standing outside of this store or standing in this in this elevator to sell people something, that certainly doesn't scale. Correct. That does not scale.

But that is where everyone needs to start. And if you went to school and you learned they should only work on things that really scale, you're gonna have to unlearn that skill because when you start your company, the most important thing is going to do things that don't scale. So if you get comfortable with that idea. This is the early days of Airbnb. So this is sometimes in 02/2009.

They were just a few people. The article I mentioned earlier, doing things that don't scale, tells the story of the first year or two of Airbnb. When the founders came to YC, they had spent, almost a year trying to get Airbnb off the ground. It didn't really work. This was the first version of the Airbnb website, airbedandbreakfast. com.

In fact, the website itself didn't really speak to what the what the what the company does. It was started as a website to offer air mattresses to people that visited design conferences, and they had to navigate the way to find the place to where MB is today. When MB joined YC, the first question they got from Paul Graham was, who are your users?

And at the time, the site looked something like this. You click on a listing, and you had three different piece of information. You had a photo of the of the host. You have one photo, in this case, of the building from the outside, and then you have one map of where that place was. Now at the time, the only comparison to what a site like this would look like would be Craigslist.

So Craigslist wasn't a lot better than this, so at least it met that criteria, but it wasn't something that would make Airbnb take off. They didn't really have in the product what would make Airbnb take off. The things they were missing is, is this a good listing? How does this listing actually look like? Can I trust the host? Lots of things that were missing in that early product.

And how do you learn that? The way they learned that is they went and talked to their host. On their first week in YC, Paul Graham told the founders of Airbnb, you guys go and meet your host. Where are your host? Most of our hosts are in New York. We don't have that many, but most of them are in New York. So they flew to New York, undercover, not on the cover.

They claimed to be hired photographers for Airbnb air bread and breakfast. So when I met with all the hosts, they said, wanna come by your home and take photos. They didn't say that they were the founders because that made the company sound much smaller.

They came and met with a host, and while one of the founders were taking the photos of the listings to make this look a lot better, the other founder sat down with the host and asked them questions about how what what are the challenges you're having with the product? Like, what are the things that are not working? Can you show me how you use the product?

And by doing that, they got for the first time to meet the people that were the customers, which they really haven't done before, and they got to see how they use the products. That's doing things that don't scale, and that is nothing that scales.

You can't go and fly to meet every single one of your customers, But when you start doing that, you will learn things that you can't learn sitting in front of a computer. So they learn that this payout things didn't work or this there was a big UI bug on this page or didn't work on on the Internet Explorer. Well, all these things that you can't learn sitting in your in front of your computer.

They went back to San Francisco, back to Y Combinator, and they sent an email the day the morning after and said, here are all the photos we took of your house. They're now up on air airbnbbreakfast. com. And by the way, we fixed half of the bugs that you email us about, or we fixed the bug that you told us about yesterday.

That made the host love them, and those hosts became the reason the Airbnb eventually took off. Like, doing doing things that don't scale, fixing the product, making the product work for the early host, which which became the backbones of the early days of Airbnb. So lesson here is the founders are the ones who make starters take off.

The founders, you guys, are the ones who make the stars take off. You're going to have to do unconventional things. You're gonna have to do things that don't feel right. Certainly gonna do things that you didn't learn in in business school, and you're just gonna do the things that are needed. And this is basically what the YC batch is about.

When someone joins YC, we're gonna be like, you're gonna launch because that's the most important thing you you could do right now. But once you've launched, it's like, how do I get users? Like, you gotta figure out how to do it, and it's different for every company. For many other company, that means sales. For other companies, that means doing things that don't scale.

Typically, people start with their friends, and then friends are friends. And then hopefully, you get one step further the people that are now not your friends are friends, and they're gonna give you a true opinion by the company. Those are the people you're gonna have to reach early on.

It doesn't really start with, like, I launched my website and I put up Google Ads or I launched my website and somehow it's being discovered. That's not how companies get started. That's how they end up much later, but that's not how they get started. There's only one way to grow when you're really small, and that is doing things that don't scale. Alright. Next topic.

I'm gonna talk about product market fit. This is a terminology that probably most of you have heard of. This is a thing that's been hard to measure or hard for people to say, do I have product market fit or not? A lot of people like to tell themselves then that that they do have product market fit.

It's this thing that we throw around as a way to say, my product is great, so now I have product market fit. I would argue that there are some ways you can measure product market fit, and there are many ways that you can't. So let's talk about the one thing that I think is the best way to do that.

I think that the best way to figure out if product market fit is to use data, unbiased data, to understand if if you basically have made something that people want. The two ways that I do that or I start that, the first way is I try to figure out what is the metric, the data point that represents the value of your company. That's the first thing I do.

The second thing I do is try to figure out how often should I really be doing that. A great example might be start up school. The metric here is, like, are people showing up to the video talks at start up school? How often is that? It's every week. Alright. That's pretty easy. But most companies can be defined this way.

Let's give some example. So Airbnb, what is the the metric that represents the value? Well, it's the bookings and the stays. It's not the searches. Search is not that. It's gonna be the bookings and the stay. When I travel Airbnb, I've experienced the value. So now I know where it is about.

How often do people do this? Well, travel is actually mostly an annual thing. You don't really travel every month. Most people don't do that. So when we were measuring, retention, at Airbnb, we're looking at annual. Let's look at Instagram. What's the expected use case of Instagram? It's basically just coming back to Instagram.

Most people are not expected to post photos every day. It's just gonna be coming back to Instagram and viewing photos. That's what most people do, and that's fine. That's actually what they want. They want some people to post photos sometimes, but most of time, just coming back is is good enough. How often? Probably every day. Let's think of a b to b company, Gusto.

So for Gusto, the most valuable thing that they do for their customers is they run payroll, and they pay out money to employees that are that are the the employees of Gusto's customers. So how often do you run payroll? Well, it depends. Probably every biweekly or monthly. And by measuring these two things, how many people am I running payroll, and are they continually running payroll with me?

That's probably the best way to figure out if people enjoy using Gusto if they're gonna switch to some other payroll provider. And finally, Lyft. You might wanna think it's rides here, that rides is the best metric here. It's actually riders.

Like, the people that are taking the rides are the ones that matter because it's the individuals that we wanna measure here, and we're necessarily wanna measure the the action that they take. And that's probably weekly or monthly. So now we have these two metrics. We have a bunch of examples of those companies. Let's put in my graph.

One piece on the graph is going to be the metric, and the other one is gonna be the time window. So every single time window, we can put some percentage of those people on the graph. So let's give an example. On week zero, in the case of Lyft, you had a % drivers. So what I'm what do I mean by that?

I basically mean that if I had a like, let's say, had 10 riders this week that rode with Lyft, They will be calculated on the week zero. Now how many of the riders that I had last week are now traveling with Lyft this week? That is your week one number and the week two number and the week three number. Now why is this important? Because we're trying to measure repeat usage.

Repeat usage is the bat best, most unbiased way to figure out if someone is liking your product. It's more true than what they tell you. They might tell you things, but what they do is gonna be the most important thing. So most companies can be defined this way.

Even if you have a b to b contract company that do annual contracts, measuring, say, what do people do with my product could be a really good way on, like, this this regular basis.

So even if I pay for Gusto on an annual basis, which they don't do, measuring the activity I use in Gusto on a regular basis, let's say, biweekly or monthly, is is the way to figure out if people are actually using the product. So most of the ideas, even your b to b or consumers, could be plotted on this line. Now why is this important?

Well, if you're ever gonna raise money, this is a graph that investors are gonna ask for. Like, how much retention do you have? Like, are people actually repetitively using your product? Those are things they're really curious about because they know there are other metrics that you might have that don't matter. This is a sign of a bad product.

Basically, every single week after I started using this product, fewer and fewer and fewer people continue to come back to use the product. So this graph can be plotted and basically show that this wasn't a good product. This, however, is a good product. Every week, it eventually flattens out, and the people that stop in the product stop stop using the product.

And, eventually, here at week eight, nine, 10, we have a flat line of people that continues to use the product every single week. That means that they are retained. I they you have product market fit for those users for this product. So I'm not gonna ask you these questions, but here are two example of two companies that I would argue have product market fit.

The first one here has 30% after two months and 21% after twenty months. This is pretty good. So you kept a 50 users twenty one months later or twenty months later. DoorDash. DoorDash have a monthly retention of twenty percent two years later, a year and a half later. Here's another company, more like a b to b company. So 80% retention after one month and then 30% after sixty months.

It's really good. This is a really good product, very sticky. People like this product, and they don't stop using it. It's GitHub. So retention is the best way to measure product market fit. Let's talk about specific things you might wanna that that some people think is a better way. I'll argue that they're not. So here's some worse ways to measure product market fits.

Net promoter score. Why is it not good? Well, you can just Google the best products and best companies in the world. They all have bad net promoter score. Like the iPhone, Apple, all of them have bad net promoter scores. Like, it doesn't necessarily correlate with good products. It correlates with perceptions of companies. Surveys.

Problem with surveys is they are going to be biased. So if you ask your users, you're gonna have some level of bias. There are good ways to use surveys to improve your products, but it's not gonna be the best way to figure out this metric. There is one cool question you can ask a user, which is how would you feel if you can no longer use this product? Sometimes this works.

We can give you an idea, but I wouldn't do it instead of of of retention. I was to always try to find a way to measure retention. Alright. So what are some bad metrics for primary market fit? These are not the kind of things you wanna throw around. It's like evidence for your product is working. Registered users, really bad. Does not say anything about repeat usage or if they liked you or not.

Visitors, also bad. Does not say anything about whether your product is gonna be valuable. Conversion rate, we have this conversion rate of visitors to something else. Well, that doesn't really say much because you don't know what people you're converting. You don't know who they are. So this does not say much about product market fit either.

And finally, something that should be a paid product, you're giving away for free is not a good sign of product market fit. Like, you wanna figure out if people are willing to pay for it because price if someone says, I I love this if it's free, but if it costs money, I'm not gonna use it. That's pretty bad. Like, then they're it's not gonna work out for you.

So you wanna make sure that the people that are doing something like this on this graph, if it's expected that you pay for the product, they should be paying for the product. Alright. Next section. Let's talk about growth channels and tactics. This section really applies if you have product market fit.

If you if most of the people that come to your product go down the drain right away and they never come back, this section doesn't matter. Like, why would you work on trying to get more people to a product that if no no one is using your product anyway? If most people are just churning and, like, they try it once and then they can come back, like, don't work at this stuff.

Wait with this stuff until you have some people that care about your product. You can try to use some of these channels to reach those people specifically. There's really two ways that you can grow at scale. So when I looked at that team, that's sort of photo of the Airbnb team, they worked on two things. They either worked on what I call product growth or conversion rate optimization.

What this means is you have typically engineers, designers, data scientists, product managers working on improving specific parts of your product to get more people through that funnel. It's a good example. I'm gonna give you some example in in a second, but that's basically what defined as the first section. Most of those people in that photo were in the this category.

They were engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists. The second group is what I call growth channels. Growth channels is basically platforms in the world that people tend to discover products on. Let me give you some specific examples. Google. It's a huge platform for new products to be discovered. Anything that you wanna use that is a rare behavior in your life, Google.

That's what you do. Insurance. I wanna figure out the insurance. Google. I wanna find a doctor. Google. Everything you do rarely is gonna be Google, which means lots of products are being discovered on Google. And growth channels like Google is an extremely important one for many companies.

Another one might be Facebook, Instagram. Advertising on Facebook and Instagram is critical to company's growth these days. What I mean by growth channels, I mean, basically, other platforms about your website or your your app. So let's talk about conversion rate optimization. What does it mean?

Every single step of your product experience is a funnel that, like the retention curve, can be measured. You can have a metric, and I think I Ilya talked about this in his earlier job school school talk when he built funnels. If you put a metric on every single page in your product, you will know what percent of people that make it from the first page, let's say, the homepage to the booking page.

In the case of Airbnb, we call the homepage p one, the search results page p two, and then the booking page and the listing page p three, and then the booking page was p four. Four pages. That was the entire website. Now what's the funnel? What percent of people make it from p one to p four? What percent? Not that many. 1%, two %.

Most people don't make it that far. Your job is to figure out how many people make it that far, why are they dropping off, what can I do to increase that number? That's basically multiple teams or multiple people at start ups that do work on those things. Every single step in that funnel is gonna have some kind of drop off for some reason.

They might be that the content on the page is not suited for them. At Landon Airbnb, all the content speaks to millennials. I have a family. It's not not good content. I land on some other website, and the content doesn't speak to me because I'm not the the the right customer. That's one example of a drop off that you can fix with content content changing the content.

Another one might be, I land on the website. It doesn't work because Internet Explorer is not optimized for that. It's not optimized for that. You're gonna drop off, so you gotta fix that too. There's lots of different reasons people wanna drop off. Here are some specific things that people tend to work on when they work on conversion rate optimization. Internationalization.

If your website or your product is international, translating it, the product is really a good idea. We saw that Airbnb. I've seen that at Facebook. I've seen that many other companies where translation is is is really, really important. Authentication. Most products have some flow where you're signing up. Now that flow, probably your products too, have some kind of authentication flow.

That flow is very critical and and the users are kind of vulnerable in that case because they don't really have time for too much friction. So if it's not working perfect, they might just go to the next website. So make sure the authentication flow works really well. Look at the best websites in the world. Look at Pinterest. Look at Airbnb. Look at some of those sites.

They have teams optimizing these these these flows, the authentication flow. Copy what they do. They probably figure it out. They spend a lot of time optimizing. Onboarding. This is a huge effort specifically for products that need a lot of involvement from the users to be able to become active users. So there are lot of questions you might wanna ask early on in a new product.

The more you can onboard users by asking them questions that make the experience better, the more active and the more retained they will be. So onboarding, then lots of things that you can do. And finally, purchase conversion.

When you're about to purchase, there's a lot of things around urgency and scarcity and just user flow and UI, all of these things matters, and that's another great example of conversion optimization. So let's talk about growth channels. So, again, don't get here until you have some good sense of that that this is something people want.

First one, like I said earlier, if this is a rare behavior most new ideas are rare behaviors, either because they don't exist yet or because they're not something you do every day. We tend to go to Google to learn about rare things that we don't do very often. So that's why if that is the kind of product that you have, being on Google is gonna be really important.

It can be either on Google through paid marketing, through SEM, or through SEO. Talk about it in a second. Second, does your product already the people already share your product through word-of-mouth? So some products are viral in its nature because they sound really exciting to talk about. Lyft and Uber and Airbnb are examples of those.

If that's the case, you wanna make sure you focus on virality and referrals. What does that mean? Is you're building into your product a flow that friends can tell other friends about the product. Referrals is a way that you can do that by giving some kind of financial incentive. Does the product get better if you have more users?

Well, this is true for marketplaces, but it's specifically true for anything that's social. So if you think of an a LinkedIn or an Airbnb sorry, LinkedIn or a Facebook, then having more people on the on the product is gonna make it better. So it's gonna be really important for you to get more people, and those people on your site is gonna be the ones doing it.

So you wanna feel like good viral loop. So when you sign up to LinkedIn, the first thing they ask you is to invite more people. That's because your experience get better, and there are more people on LinkedIn. Now many products do work this way, and this can be perfected.

And the ones that really succeed in the world of of of of a social products are the ones that really nail this down, that figure how to do this really well. Many people that make social apps underestimate how important it's going to be to get to get your friends on that product.

If you can make a list of all your customers, even if that list is a hundred thousand or 500,000, if as long as it's not mainstream enough, they'll be in the tens of millions. You're probably gonna do sales. You'll make that list, and you start contacting those people. Why make it any more complicated? Why go out and reach the world for people if there are only a few people they really wanna reach?

So most companies in YC these days, I ask them this question. Can you make a list of your customers? Yeah. Right. Make that list. Start listing them out. Who are the people? Decision makers in those companies you're trying to sell to.

These people. Make the list. Email addresses, phone numbers. Try to figure out how to reach them. But start by making the list. Don't make it complicated by going out in a in a world where most people aren't gonna be relevant for for your product.

And finally, this is a channel that nowadays is bigger than it ever has been and more important than it ever has been, which is if you look at how the entire world of startups has changed in the last ten years, more and more of them are turning more money and and and therefore getting what's called a higher high LTV, high lifetime value.

By getting high lifetime value, you are enabling the ability to buy paid advertising. If you don't have people paying for your product or you're making money from your product, you should not be spending time on on on online marketing. Now the truth is that most companies these days are charging for the products.

They are making money from the product, and therefore, they spend money on online marketing. If that's true for you, this can be an extremely powerful channel. The biggest mistakes founders make is to start working on online marketing when they don't have people paying for the product. Here's an insight that you probably didn't think of. Most really big companies didn't use all of those channels.

They use one or two channels. Think of a TripAdvisor. How is TripAdvisor big? SEO. You guys type in something on Google, you learn on TripAdvisor, and that's how you found this website. Most companies have have a setup where there's gonna be one or two channels that really matters. If you think of Pinterest, SEO is the the real way how Pinterest is going.

You type something in Google, they already access the Pinterest board for that, and you land on that Pinterest board. That's how they acquire new users. Alright. I'm gonna be give some specific tactical advice on some of these channels. The first one I talk about is referrals and virality. So referrals is word-of-mouth.

If word-of-mouth is a strong driver of your product, then referrals is gonna be one way that you can amplify that word-of-mouth. How do I define referrals? Financial incentive to tell your friends about the product. That's my definition. This is the Airbnb referral product. You give someone $40 to sign up to Airbnb, and when they do, I get $20. Pretty simple concept.

We have that on the on the website and on the mobile app. Now that's actually more complicated than you might think. This entire product funnel where there's multiple steps in that funnel, I'm not gonna go into detail here, but if you think of a referrals product, it's not just as simple as throwing that offer out. That's probably what you want in the very beginning.

But once you have a referral product, you wanna start measuring each of these steps. Like, what is that referral offer? How many people go to that page? How many people send invites? How many of those invites are being clicked on? How many of those people sign up from those invites? How many of those people that sign up end up booking? Each one of those steps is a step in this funnel.

Let's talk about one specific step, the referrals email invite. So we would spend a lot of time optimizing this this this step because there were lots of people getting the referrals email invite at Airbnb. So what are the things you can optimize on a referral invite email? First, who's the sender of the email?

If it's just Airbnb, I probably have never never heard of Airbnb with the first time I get this email. If it's Gustav that send the email and I send it to my friends, they haven't heard of me. That's the reason to open the email. So people open the email. Clear value. What is this email about? Many emails just start with text. Don't start with text.

Just have the clear value prop at the top. Why should I care about this email? In this case, it's extremely simple. Gustav sent you $40 for your first trip. That sounds good. What is that about? I'm gonna read about it. When do I have to care about this?

By this date in the next month. So I can't just leave this email and never open it again. I have to do it right now. What do I have to do here? Well, I could sign up, which is a undefined thing that you can do sometime in the future, or I can do what what we did here was accept my invitation. This sounds more exclusive. It sounds like something that is just for me.

It doesn't sound like something I can do anytime in the future. And finally, here's some social proof from this email. This is me. I live in San Francisco. We can reveal that. I actually been a member of Airbnb since 02/2009, and we can reveal that as well. Let's talk about pay growth. Each of these sections, referrals, pay growth, SEO, could be a presentation on its own.

So it's impossible for me to go into deep details on this, but if you're determined that you have product market fit, you wanna grow one of these channels and this is the channel you wanna you wanna go deep on, you're gonna have to go really deep on it because being really good at one of these channels require a lot of work.

So there's lots and lots of stuff online about how to get really good at one of these channels. It doesn't really make sense to get good at all of them because most of you won't really need all of them. The number one lesson in paid growth, I e online marketing, is to not do it if you unless you have revenue.

This is the most common mistake that founders make is to somehow start buying ads for products and they'll never be able to pay them back. Don't do that. The next thing you wanna figure out is what's what's called CAC, customer acquisition cost. How much does it cost to acquire a new paying or new valuable customer? Someone's giving you value value back.

Many of the advertising tools like Google and Facebook have a very clear system for how they calculate this. And once you start running ads, they'll start telling you what the cost is gonna be. Next is gonna be that your revenue or projected revenue from this user is gonna have to be higher than the CAC, higher than the cost. Very simple. Otherwise, you can't do this.

So how do you know this is the common question you get early on in paid marketing. Well, it seems like in eight months, it will be higher, but not in the first month. Well, you can't take all your money and spend on something that you have no clear certainty of is gonna happen in in the future.

So you're gonna have to either wait eight months or you're gonna look for early indicators that your hypothesis about the value is gonna be stronger. The best thing startup can do is don't wait eight months. Just have a much lower l like, much lower target on what your CAC is going to be. Maybe one month, two months, three months, first first transaction, something like that.

That's a much better way to do it. The main channels for online marketing these days is going to be Google, Facebook, Instagram. That's pretty much it. Let's talk about search engine optimization. This has changed a lot in the last couple of years. It's very competitive, and what changed is there used to be millions of websites that each would rank for tens of millions of keywords.

Now what have changed is that the really big companies started getting really good at ranking for all those keywords. So a Pinterest or a TripAdvisor might rank for every single travel keyword that you can imagine. That's hard for small companies.

What that means that if you are gonna rely on search engine optimization to grow, you're going to have to be as good as a Pinterest or or a TripAdvisor eventually. Not right away, but eventually because it's so competitive to win in this grant, like, large role of SEO. When you get started, you can think of this way. SEO is a is a zero sum game. Basically, you're competing against others.

So what you do in SEO is gonna be a matter what do you compare to others? The second thing is that the the keywords that people search for are changing constantly. So if you're building something new, let's say, ASMR, I think was in a thing that came up recently, lots of companies are able to rank for that because it's a new keyword.

There weren't websites built ten years ago that ranked for that because the thing didn't really exist. Alright. Let's talk about SEO, how it works on the technology side. This is the Airbnb search results page. This is what you and me see when we go to the Airbnb. This is what Google see. Google just see text.

So to be good at SEO, you need to understand what text am I showing to Google so Google can understand what the website is about. Google can't understand what your site is about. It's not gonna rank it. What are the two main levers for SEO? The first one is gonna be things I do on my page. So for example, what's the title of the page? Can Google read the the the page? Does the page throw errors?

What specific page am I keyword am I trying to rank my page for? Well, start with the keywords, do some research, and see what are people searching for. How many people are searching for ASMR in in in United States per month? Maybe I wanna try to rank for that keyword. We'll build a website that's trying to rank for that keyword. Start in that that start with Google.

Don't start with your own content. You don't know exactly what people are searching for. You're gonna start doing some research. The second thing is the thing you can't do that much about, which is called off page optimization or domain authority or or something like that, which basically means how valuable does Google perceive your website to be in the grand scheme of all websites.

And the more inbound links you get from press, the more links you get from all kinds of people that are also author like, have high authority, the more valuable your website will be in the in the eyes of Google, which means it will rank you higher on some of the keywords you're trying to rank for because it will compare you to other websites and see if they seem more or less authoritative.

I'm going to details here, but it's basically how Google work. If you're curious about this, you can Google PageRank and go to the Wikipedia article on PageRank. Basically, it will explain sort of, like, high level how Google works. Final section. I'm gonna go through this one a little faster. Most of you guys don't have to focus on AB testing at all. It won't matter for a long time.

It is a great decision making tool later on. Here's the the the situation the startups tend to get into. I wanna launch a new homepage. I wanna launch a new design. I did, and the numbers went down. What happened? It's a really hard problem to launch something new and then sort of, like, just look at the the metric over time. Don't do that.

There's a better way. First, before you get into that stage, you wanna figure out, is AB testing something I wanna do? The best way to do that is to go to Google and type in AB testing calculator. Think of the metrics that you're trying to change here.

So, like, visitors to some conversion metric, put them into the first link you see on Google, and that'll tell you whether it's gonna be worth doing. Mostly, it won't be worth doing for quite a while. So here's the example I try to give you on the website. So I wanna ship a new experiment, our new design on the homepage. So let's ship it. The metric went up or the metric went down.

Either way, like, I don't know if the website actually cost it or not. The only way for me to know if this new design actually changed the metric is if I had an alternative alternative side of history. We get two side two different parallel universes at the same time. One with the new design and one with the old design. If I have that, I can tell exactly what happened.

That's the definition of a testing. You basically have two different parallel universes of the thing you shipped at the same time, and you measure the metrics that matter to you. The reason this is so powerful, it helps you make decisions at scale.

What ends up happening if founders, when they get five or 10 people in the company and they launch a new design and they're arguing about what cost the thing to go up or go down, the only way to really know is to run an AB test to figure out what does the metric say about whether it went up or down.

This is hard to internalize because most people think of themselves as as good product good product thinkers. So I'm gonna talk about one thing called experiment review. I did it at Airbnb. How many here think that you guys have good product instincts? Raise your hand. You guys are founders. You have you should have good product instincts. Alright.

Let's see. Let's see how good they are. Alright. So I'm gonna give you two examples. So at Airbnb, we launched a new sharing sheet for the mobile app, And this was the old version, which was the the native share sheet that you've seen on iOS. You click on share, and then you see a bunch of sharing options. And then we just tried this new share sheet that showed more options.

We call this experiment, but it didn't really look native. So the question was, which one was better? Well, we didn't really know. So we launched an a b test. We launched both of them at the same time for different users. The goal here was to measure number of shares. So alright. How many here think that the control was better?

How many people think that they this experiment was better? How many people thought there was no difference? This is quite common. This is about 40% better for us. So thank god we ran experiments because if this was the decision making group, then we wouldn't have made the right decision. Next one, should we have a sign up wall or not in the app?

Now these are not necessarily learnings that you can apply to your companies right away, but it was an important decision for us to determine. So should we have people just open Airbnb app and go straight into the app, or should we have an experiment where you can click out and x out the sign up wall, or should we have a sign up wall that is a wall that you can't climb over? You have to sign up.

Otherwise, you can't use the Airbnb app. Which one is better? How many here think that the control no sign up wall is better? Raise your hand. How many people thought that the experiment where you can x out and then sign up was better? How many people thought that just like this wall you can't climb over is better? That's the fewest amount of people. Alright.

So this is a lot better. We got 2. 6% more bookings from iOS by making people sign up through a sign up wall in the app. Why is that? Well, we knew something about them so we can send we can show them more personalized stuff. And when they were about to book, we already had them signed up so they didn't have to, at the time of booking, go through the motions of signing up.

You wanna learn why why it cost us. The whole point is basically when you get big enough, when you're starting to grow and you have these decisions about, should I launch this thing or not, this is a really good way to do it. Product decisions are really hard, so using data to to to make them is a good way. Most of you won't have to worry about this for a while, so don't worry about it.

Here's the summary of my talk today. Most of you need to do things that don't scale. You are not at the place where you can think about, real growth things that growth teams do. So you have to unlearn the things you've learned at your big companies or in MBA programs and just do things that don't scale. Secondly, you wanna measure your attention to understand if you have product market fit.

There are other ways too, but that's the best way in my opinion. And third, you wanna build a culture experimentation. You wanna use data and not have the loudest voice in your room deciding what the best decision is, but you wanna use data and experimentation to decide what is the best decision. Probably doesn't matter right now, but it will matter at some point. Thank you.