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Andrew Chen

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2021-11-30

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2021-11-30

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1. “After writing a couple of these key articles, I would find terminology and jargon that people were interested in, like Viral Loops is maybe one. There's a lot that's obviously happening in intersection of Web3 and consumer and growth. And I might write about that now. But what I would do is I would just try to write the definitive piece around that and then just kind of send it out to my mailing list. And that seems to work really well and break through the noise.”

   2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “Doing is, I end up learning that those types of titles are the things that end up becoming amazing topics for the subsequent blog that I'll end up writing. And so I kind of think of it as, cool, I already know that this particular thing, it's been, I validated from a demand side. And then I can end up writing it as a full article. And it's so valuable, I think writing is so valuable, I think, because it's just the most scalable professional activity. I mean, back before the pandemic, when we went to conferences and we had people did a bunch of networking, I used to just hate all that stuff. And so I just thought, you know, instead of going to a conference for like two hours or something, what if I just spent the two hours and just wrote down all the things that I might learn or say there? And then, isn't that a better use of time? And so I think to go back to your original question, I think my journey was actually very, very gradual. And I found that”

   2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Would happen is I would take, and I'll give an example, which is I have an essay that's called 80% of your mobile users leave, and that's normal. And that's the truth. That is what the data says, is that most apps just lose all their users. Even the very good ones still only retain maybe 20 or 30 percent of it. And what I'll do is I will often get on social media and I'll just drop little nuggets like that, little factoids that I see. I'll end up writing kind of opinions, spicy B2B opinions about, I always joke that I'm a B2B influencer and that's, or B2B content creator, that's what my life is now. And so I'll write these things and I'll say like, okay, well, you know, for example, that predominantly products are just poor at retaining users. That's just a reality. And what I'll see is that people will just engage with that tweet like crazy. They'll just retweet it or they'll, you know, they'll like it a bunch of times. What I'll end up”

   2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “I think there were two things that I started to see. One was just how much of the audience, my audience especially, they don't want to read explainers. You know, it's just boring. They want to read opinions. And so what I found was”

   2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “Would talk about how what he was doing with kind of this whole growth hacking term, I wrote a post that was called Growth Hacking is the new VP marketing, and that was sort of a way that I tried to introduce that into the world. But amazingly enough, I think in that first year, I eventually had a bunch of folks posting it online. And so the way that I met Mark Andreessen actually was he was reading my blog and he was working on Ning at the time. And he emailed me and was like, hey, Mark, and we should have lunch. And I had, you know, I Googled him. And I was like, is this who I think it is? And I was half expecting this is going to transition into like a phishing scam. I was going to have to send a wire somewhere in the Bermudas. But no, he actually was in town and just wanted to hang out. And so that's a great example of someone that I met because of writing. And I met a lot of great people and a bunch of the PayPal mafia, a bunch of the founders that I've come to be able to work with these days through my writing.”

   2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “And my sister, and like all of my friends to my blog. And I think maybe the first six months or something, like maybe 50 people read it. It was just like. One of those. I had it on Blogger originally. Ev Williams' old company, of course. And I started just writing everything that I knew. And I really treated myself almost like I was like a journalist. I was just meeting interesting people and I would just hear really cool opinions and I would have opinions and think like, wow, this is really great or this is really dumb. I'll give you an example. You'd meet these a lot of founders at the time. The concept then of even talking about monthly active users was kind of like a weird new idea. People just talk about how many signups they had, how many registered users they have. And that was it. And I was like, ah, I got 100,000 registered users. You didn't care about engagement. You didn't care about whether people were using it or not. And that was it. And so I might have an opinion there that I would say that's horrible. And we need to think about pretension and engagement. And I would start digging into that. I would, you know, throw up a post about it. Or when I met Sean Ellis, when he...”

   2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “It was 100% an accident, and it's now one of the most important decisions I ever made in my life, which is crazy how things like that happen. And I'm sure for you too, Tim, we can talk a little bit about that too, how we met, because there's a funny backstory about writing in there as well. But yeah, my blog was completely in accident. I mean, I grew up in Seattle and felt like I was one of those people where early on I would love writing journals and I would kind of write in a diary and use it to collect my thoughts. But I would never share it with anybody. And what happened was when I was 25 and it was time for me to move to the Bay Area to find the secret of Silicon Valley, like what was really there. I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I am going to write a blog and I'm just going to write down everything that I learned along the way in my journey. And so my first year was actually really funny. It was, I think I imported my list of, you know, I forcibly subscribed my mom.”

   2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “That all together. And so, because of all this, he began to describe himself as a growth hacker rather than thinking about it like, oh, he works in marketing. That term just took off like crazy. As soon as he described it, because I think it really just was the start of a new age of marketing online, which was very much about products, very much about numbers, and much less about kind of what was in traditional marketing over the years. And so these days, if you look inside of an Uber or a Dropbox or a Slack or whatever, they all have growth teams. Now, they may not describe themselves as growth hackers, but the core concept is definitely still there with interdisciplinary people thinking about growing your users not through big campaigns, but through what are the cool creative features that you're going to build.”

   2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “In order to describe what he was doing. And so what I thought was super funny was he basically just thought, well, that's the opposite of what I do. I don't do crazy brand stuff. What I want to do is really work with founders and be extremely quantitative. And so I'll give you an example. When he was working with Dropbox, Dropbox was growing really fast. Drew Hauston and those guys had announced on Hacker News and people were just downloading it because it was like a really good product.”

   2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “Sean Ellis is such an interesting guy. I met him a couple years into being in the Bay Area. And what he told me, which was so fascinating, was he was working with Dropbox and Eventbrite and a bunch of companies, a bunch of startups. And he would try to talk to these amazing entrepreneurs and they would ask him, oh, so Sean, what do you do? What can you do for us? And he would tell them, oh, well, I can lead your marketing. And his background was he had worked on a bunch of freemium companies like Log Me In, and he's very successful kind of tech marketing executive. And whenever he said marketing, what he found was these 20-something year old founders were just like immediately would like flip the bozo bit, they would be like, okay, you want to buy Super Bowl ads. You want to do all this crazy stuff. And so he eventually had to just come up with a new term.”

    2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “The mainstream market has no clue what it is that you do. And so he has all these frameworks and everything. So it was an amazing experience just to share an office with a guy. And so I feel like, Tim, I've basically been surrounded by authors for quite a while. And so it's been fun to see that journey.”

    2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “And could you explain I love it. We're going old school and everything. I love this. I moved to the Bay Area in 2007. I was 25 years old. And my first job was I was an entrepreneur in residence at a VC firm that's called More David Adventures. And they had Jeffrey Moore as one of their venture partners. And he and I would just share an office. And I was such a huge fan of his because of crossing the chasm. And so he had written this book, which, you know, before Lean Startup and before Innovator's Dilemma and all that kind of stuff, he was really the guy that built the core framework for how to think about bringing especially those days kind of in enterprise product to market. And so his whole thought was you have this technology adoption curve. You have the early adopters, you have early adopters and you have the early majority and late majority. And between the early adopters and the early majority, you have this chasm where all the nerds love you, but”

    2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “That's right. Yeah, the consumer behavior is the underlying thing. I did a presentation a little while ago where I talked about the Michelin guide, which is we know as kind of this restaurant guide and everything. And if you go back, and again, this is one of these things from 100 years ago. It turns out there was 300 cars in France and your Michelin, your tire company, you want people to drive around. Well, how do you get people to drive around? You start the Michelin guide and you list all the restaurants. Conveniently, the restaurants are spread all over the country. And so you're going to have to drive and collect them all, collect Michelin stars. And it's just great. And it's like, oh, that's content marketing. And that's from 100 years ago. It's wild how this stuff persists.”

    2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “And so here's a story about that. He has stories about stunt marketing and building kind of like a massive cake in malls to get people to come and do that. I mean, he just has all these wild stories from an era where all the stuff was just getting invented. I love this guy and it's over 100 years ago now.”

    2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “We weren't asking for them. And then you couldn't also prove to them that the customers wanted your stuff because nobody stocked it. And so he created this thing where he would go to all the local newspapers and he would tell them, I'm going to buy an ad in your newspaper. It's going to have a coupon in it. And it's going to tell you that you should watch the space because there's going to be a coupon for, you know, I think this was for a condensed milk brand that he was working on. And then he'd go to all the grocery stores in that city and just start to tell them like, hey, I'm about to buy this huge coupon and put it in all the newspapers. All your customers are going to show up and try to redeem this coupon. And they're going to be pissed because you're not carrying it. And so ahead of this campaign, like you better start stocking this stuff. And so the coupon, even though we think of it now as this weird cheapskate thing that you clip out of newspapers, was really meant to solve this really fascinating.”

    2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “He did a ton around basically what we call direct marketing today at a point where everything was very brand driven. And so he wrote both scientific advertising and then in his book, My Life in Advertising was sort of the supplemental. You can get them together. And it says autobiography of how he went and invented a bunch of the stuff, which is wild. One of my favorite stories in the book is actually when he talks about inventing coupons. And the reason at the time was back then there wasn't, obviously there was no Amazon. And so the only way to actually get your products, if you were a CPG company, if you had a new toothpaste or new kind of milk or something like that, and you wanted to get it into grocery stores, you had to actually go to each of the grocery stores and you had this chicken and egg problem. Actually, you had a cold start problem, which we'll talk about. You had a cold star problem where basically the grocery stores wouldn't actually want to carry any of your goods because the customer”

    2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “Yeah. Well, the reason why it's public domain is because it's so old that it's just gone out of copyright. And this guy is such an interesting dude because he actually invented the mainstream use of coupons.”

    2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “Thank you for having me. And yes, we have known each other for way too long, so this is great to finally be on the podcast.”

    2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT