YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Rubin

lines on the record: 36
first: 2020-08-21
most recent: 2020-08-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We're swimming. We have strong conviction about what kind of movement and what kind of way to put the energy in the water and the flow to do. And we're rethinking how we get from A to B. And we also are okay that as we're iterating on our movement, we might find ourselves in a different place. So I guess this is a long way of saying I'm looking to continue to invest in the movement every day and improve how I swim in this new kind of water that we're charting. And I have no idea where we're going to be in five years, but I know that wherever we're going to be, that's the right place for us to be.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for me, it's going to be built in this and learning to better myself in all the other works that I do with myself. For Slashdock, look, in Slash Talk, we're trying to understand what is the unit value of a conversation or a meeting in an organization. And then we actually map it as a funnel and we walk back from what is the value to what are the building blocks, the atomic building blocks that make that value. And then we try to separate them and reorganize them in a whole different way for conducting conversations. So we're focused on quick and scheduled calls. Anything that is a conversation, internal conversation that is not on the calendar. And the nice thing about it and the nice thing about what I talk to you about the swimming metaphor is that I don't know how the end result is going to be. The end result is always going to change and be better and we're constantly going to approve. But I don't know how it looks like. But what I can tell you is that right now as we”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the middle. So I think this is a misconception. I think another misconception is that from the word that we're at in our company is the idea that there's going to be pure presence, large scale product that are only based on presence. I think that's also a reaction to the culture of meeting, but I'm not sure that this is the evolution. I think that there is a synthesis that will be the evolution. So I don't know. I think these are two big ones.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a couple of things. I think people think that it's all going to be remote from now on. I actually, I'm a big hegelist, a philosopher, and one of the frameworks that I use is evolution is always happen where in the union of opposing forces. So you got the thesis and then you got the antithesis and then the synthesis of them is actually where evolution always happen. And it happened, and you can look at it in music, you can actually look at it about the differences between Gen Z to millennials, how every time as humans we are reacting to something, it's poetic, it's almost like physics, right? We're always reacting to something. But actually, the truth will be in what is the synthesis of things. And a lot of the time when I say this, people think, oh, synthesis is the average of both. But no, what are the right thing that you pick from one side and the right things that you pick from the other side and the evolution will come?”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Successful remote companies, and I was able to interview a bunch of the engineers and ICs there and inform my hypotheses before starting this company.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I had a really interesting experience with benchmark, which was you can call it an EIR, and I think that's the kind of a vehicle we used, but it wasn't really an EIR. Basically, Peter Fenton was hire who you need to hire, start hacking around, the year's benchmark credit card, and I trust you. And like, obviously, this sounds a little bit unfair because it sounds super casual. But we had a plan of this is the space we're going to go after, this is the problems that we believe we see, and we're going to use this time to explore and understand what is the kind of action we can do in the market and what are the motivations around that. And we actually had it pretty detailed out. But what was nice about it, it was almost like incubating for free. And it was great because you get to enjoy smart people in Benchmark to give you feedback and you also enjoy the fact that they have a great network and they could put you in touch with back then this was before COVID. They put me with all the mode.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do TM, I go in and out in waves of clarity. Like sometimes it's really hard for me to get into that transcendental state. I think essentially what I think it does for me, it trains me to be aware of my thoughts and my feeling almost as a bystander to them before I react. So I become a better observer and a better reactor because I don't react that fast. So that kind of the benefit of this.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a short book that explain how life can be longer if you're more presence. But the way it goes about it from, I think it was like right before counting like 50, 80 or something like that. And the same problems that you think you have with society he describes and this kind of beautiful.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of conversation and expectation setting early on, then when your company stopped growing, you're going to have different people looking at this problem from different angles and it's going to bring a lot of contention because you didn't create the environment to address that early enough.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. No, I totally don't think that the right answer is not to hire. I think that for every stage you have different hires and I think there's incredible people in big companies that know how to scale shit up. And given a product that they can market or they can grow, they will grow it. Ultimately is the job of the CEO, is the job of me for this example. It was my job to create the expectation setting and create the kind of conversations that actually lead for productive outcomes for the company. And productive outcomes are not necessarily productive by money, not necessarily productive means a lot of things. And I think that if you don't pay attention to the kind of different cultures that as your company growing size, if you don't pay attention to the different intentions and you don't create a structure”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was your ether rating and pivoting a lot? And do the people you hired after you started the immense growth, it's hard culture to bridge. And I don't think I've done a good job there, but I think I learned a lot from that. And I learned as I go into my next thing now, I take the intention of the people. I take very much into consideration and into how I communicate.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's really easy to understand what's happening. But when things are kind of like not growing, not shrinking, even something a little bit growing over time, it's really hard to understand because what you're dealing is not pure black or pure white and it doesn't matter what's good or bad. The gray, it's really hard to like how do you decouple gray into different colors? How do you take this mesh of things? And I think ultimately it's hard because half of the company, or at least the people that were from the start will say, I know we got from zero to one, but if we cannot grow one to 100, fuck it. Let's break shit up and be okay with losing some of the one that we gained in order to get to the 100. And then half of the company will say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We have this one. We have to protect this one. We can't do things that will hinder that one. And I think bridging between those two cultures of the people you hire.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one thing is the intention of the people that you hire when you're on a rocket ship and you grow really, really fast. And I've seen it twice. The intention of the people is different. These are people that usually come from some big company where they have a career and they decided that they're going to take a chance on you and come and join your team. It's really a different DNA. No matter how you try, it's really a different DNA. And where I see it breaks is where things don't continue to grow and then the people who took a bet on you are looking around say, well, Mr. Rubin, what's your plan? That was a hard thing in House Party. And this is a hard thing to answer, especially as you're working through product and growth problems that are not easy. Like it's really easy when things go up. It's really easy when things go down.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Find is what is the right movement that we need to invest energy right now in this water. And I think that really for zero to one, that's really frees up the collective thinking and diffuses a lot of the insecurity that the team has. Because as humans in this society, in Western society, we are trying to”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In your team, in coaching your team to have that, in your company, in your relationship with investors, how do you keep iterating those relationships? And how do you keep iterating the process that ultimately create a product? And the idea that product is not something that is defined. I hate, hate the word V1 or V2 or V3 because the product will never be perfect. And it's always going to be an ether of things. There's always something new to learn. There's always something to iterate. And I think from early on, it's important to tell people, this is not about getting to V1. This is not about getting to V2. This is about enjoying every single moment of the movement and making sure that we're doing the movement perfect. The process perfect. And we can trust that we will get over time to the directions that we need to go to. But it's not the find right now.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what's great about the ability of having a team. If you are thoughtful, if you're self-aware, if you're reflective, you're probably going to be able to understand with some sort of good directionality what are the things that you're good at and what are the things that you need help and what are the things that you're actually bad. And if you are honest with yourself and true with yourself, you write them down without being emotional and say, oh, I suck at this. And you actually double down on the things that you're great at and you hire for the people that you're not good at. And sometimes you even have conversations depends on the kind of hire it is, like about what is the right fit for you and what is the right fit for them. And you use that as a way of building their relationship and building the trust together. So I think that the only thing that's word perfecting is that process, is that process of self-reflection and thoughtfulness in yourself, in your product, in your product process.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a defined end result and focus on the process. Focus on having the right hypothesis. Focus on having the right process on how to come about them. Focus on having the right team. Focus on giving instructions that are more like attitude and rhythm and vibe and help through and let the kind of the flow take you there. Because you're going to get to there faster and you're going to get to their happier and you're going to be open and see different variations of success that you didn't think about from the beginning. And this is how my thought have changed over the past 10 years is the idea of letting go whatever it is that you think it's going to look like two years from now exactly.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early stage, the zero to one stage. Because honestly, there is no aim. Aim is a defined idea of what is the outcome exactly going to be does not exist in that early stage. It's not like you can say, I'm going to be B and I'm going to get to be B immediately. And that's going to be B. You're going to say I'm going to go from A to B and you're probably going to be at C. Or you're probably going to learn something on the way and you're going to be at D. It doesn't matter. But if you're going to force yourself to go to a defined outcome, you're going to be not only miserable, you're going to be slower because you're going to fight all the other flow and all the energy. You're going to put all the energy to kind of foist the reality to whatever image you have that you need to get to in your head. And I think that's very limited. I think that's very limited. I think it's hard. And I think one of the things that is really emancipating to me is to release the idea of”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably finish it first, but if you put me next to the Olympic swimmer, you will see I spend an order of magnitude more energy, but I'm moving slower. And the Olympic swimmers, they are focused on the technique to such perfection that not only you don't hear anything they are inflow with the water and they're moving two, three times faster than me. And you know, I always thought about it as funny bar joke. But when I look back at process and product development and actually any kind of relationship I have in life and where do I put my energy in, I think to myself like, am I focused on getting there faster or am I focused on the right process, on the right movement? It goes with the flow. And I know it was a little bit of a roundabout example, but this is my way to tell you almost my emotional philosophy towards”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have this pool, you know, Olympic pool, and they say, well, we're going to do benchmarks now because you start with a benchmark and then we work towards the end of the course. We're going to see if you can meet the criteria. And I go there, Harry, and I just swim with my entire body and my hands are slapping into the water and water is going over where and I give 170% of myself. Really, it's just incredible, like water going all over the place. I'm putting all of my energy into this. Then the Olympic swimmers go, and you can barely hear them. You can barely hear them. They move with the water. And it's almost looks super slow. And if you put my track, my video next to them, if you look at it separately, you think, oh, Ben was probably faster. Look, he's putting all this energy. He's moving his hand so quickly water is going everywhere. He's putting his all. When you look at my video, you'll be like, he's...”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“actually and there was me coming to this course there's 19 Olympic swimmers that instead of doing the IDF service what they're doing is basically being a lifeguard in the IDF and me and let me tell you I'm not an Olympic swimmer”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when I finished IDF, I got like a little bonus course and that was about going into a military course for being a lifeguard. But I was in this unit and I was about to just finish my service after three years. And they're like, oh, you've been great. How about you take this course that is fun course to learn how to be a lifeguard? And what they didn't know is that the army changed the guidelines for who can come there and it's no longer can be like a little treat or a bonus that you can give someone. It's only for people that are actually going to be lifeguards in the military. And the only people that are going to be lifeguards in the military are Olympic Israeli swimmer or people that swim with the Israeli national team that are eligible to actually participate in this course. But my unit didn't know that for some reason it makes sense.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During the board meeting, I think board meetings are not for a rarely or really when she hit the fan art to make decision, most of the time board should be used as discussion platform. So all of them had like one-on-one with me. I had one-on-one with Josh where I went to next to his house. We had dinner and I walked him through and explained to him and had an opportunity for him to react and digest it to Eden as well. And when I walk into the board meeting, they already were briefed. They knew they had their thought, they had the ability to digest. And that's kind of diffuse all the emotions that are associated with a founder coming in and telling you that he wants to pivot the company three months after he raised 40 million dollars out of you. And to Josh's credit, he was terrified but supportive. And I really appreciate this about Josh. This is one of the things that I really appreciate about it.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shrink in and then I show the broadcaster attention, and that's where they kind of see watcher go up, broadcaster steady, broadcaster attention goes down, and then I also broke down type of broadcasters that we had based on the amount of following followers that we can get from the Twitter API. So I was able to identify which of the attained broadcasters are considered influencers, mean have certain ratio between falling and follower, and which of the broadcasters are actually the average Joe. And I was able to show those differences, and I was able to detectly click the data and show them we have cancer in our body. And I know the body feels great, and I know that you feel healthy, but here's the cancer. And the reason I know it is because I've been in the market for two years. And I think obviously you don't want to surprise your board in stuff like this.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny at that point, we didn't know that we were going to do a house party. We just know that we're going to go after what was our liability we wanted to flip to be our strength, which is, okay, you have this inside, there's this 99% who are not slaves media news. And we say we're going to build for them. Because for the 1% periscope and Facebook Live, people are going to reach out to them. They're going to try to have them and they're going to have better chances on these platforms because those platforms have much better reach. The way I went about it with the board is showing them the amount of watchers that we have. And this was going up. It's like a beautiful graph that any CEO would love to bounce into a board's room and show this graph of users going up, the watchers going up. But then I flipped it and I showed, but here are the broadcasters, which was not going up, not going up is like a curving up, but it was like, you know, not growing.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's incredible to be first to market because Life on Air released live video products to the market since 2013. So we were able two years before the Periscope team or a Facebook Live team to understand what are the metrics that actually make a live video work. What we realized very quickly with our second failed product that nobody knows about EGM is heir is that it's all about”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was just take a step back from the process that you know and think about what is the story that is happening and all of this doctor knew I went to Baha, I put this that the one question you wanted to ask is like did this person maybe put something on his face that irritates his eye and can you believe the three doctors couldn't do that and it's not that they can't do that there's nothing wrong I'm just saying the system trains us and in fact it's really good for society that on average on eight or nine out of times we're gonna do what the validated patterns taught us and it's very good that there is some sort of stability or else where people will walk around you know with those square holes in their skull every time they had a headache but all it is to say that the traditional way of looking things is only one dimension there is always your story and your perspective in how to diagnose a problem and it's only you the founder and the team that will be able to access that”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She reads the ingredients of that SPF face thing and she's like, well, the first ingredient, the first thing on the label is an famous, notorious eye irritator. And I'm like, fuck me. You got this thought process of how people should address and how people should deal with people with eye irritation. And you got very professional people, doctors. They go and they look and they look at your eyes and they look for the different things and they open it and they take samples and they do all of the work that they are supposed to do in the process, which for the house for the example would be do everything that you can to map your hypotheses and put them into the different kind of instruments of growth accounting to understand where exactly people fall off, what exactly is the culprit of the growth. And in the I example, it was so easy.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had this problem when I went with friends to Baja California. They're all surfers I'm not, but for some reason I decided I'm going to go with them. And I came back with this irritative eye. Like I'm telling you, I couldn't. There were some weekends. I couldn't leave the house. It was really horrible. It doesn't look red, but it's just this each that I didn't know it was hard for me to sleep. I went to three different doctors, all prescribed different medicines. Some of them flipped like the eye to look inside. And you would think, you know, these are serious people. There is like, I think, I don't know, maybe 50 years of experience between all of them. And it didn't go away, Harry, for four months. It didn't go away. And then my wife sees me in all this pain and she asks me, what are you putting on your face? Because usually I don't put anything on my face, but I said like, oh, I went to Baja, I put this cream on my face. And these are other things that I use from time to time. And I'm telling you.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are very much engaged, and what are the things that you should do to convert people to engaged users? But these together there's a set of tools, thought process tools, of how we actually think about the problem. Because it's not enough to just throw metrics on a dashboard. And this is one of my biggest feedback to analyst or young analyst or even professional analyst that has experienced in a two-dimensional way of looking at metrics. Metrics unfortunately are in all our dashboards are two-dimensional and there's something poetic about it because it also reminds you that the depth in which between that depth and the data there is the story of what's actually happening with the user. I'll give you a separate example from my personal life. I don't know if we have a minute for it, but I think that will illustrate my point.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought processes are basically mental model tools in which to count and account the metrics or the data that your user has. And there's a different way. There is like what is the Hamilton? How do people get to that HAM moment? What are the steps that they are doing? Show me all these cohorts on this versions that are moving on this funnel versus these users or looking at likelihood of things. There is a set of tools in the thought process of how do I get a customer to activate more or activate better and be better engaged and there is also a set of tools that how do I get the customers that are not yet convinced that this is the right product for them to actually convert into a customer that falls in love with a product. And both of these approaches, and by the way, you should kind of try to figure out what are the things you want to do for the people that”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the graph is really key for the successful of the use case. If people are busy when you are available, you can't match with them. You can't talk to them. So we knew that we have a lot of eyescholars using the product, but we didn't know exactly how much and we didn't know exactly who was at what class. Like are you senior? Are you sophomore? Like all of these, I don't know exactly the terminology, but what year you are in your school. And it was really hard when kind of house party reached some plateau. We had a terrific engagement and a great community, but it's kind of stopped growing at some point. We had to actually Look”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High schoolers, they had two key things that are going for them that made House Party successful for them. One is the idea of code of conduct. If you're a high schooler that uses House Party, you know about 80% of the graph you know them, you see them in school. And basically when you walk into the school cafeteria, you know exactly what table you can see that. And that kind of code of conduct, that's mental model of what conversations I can be part of and who I can sit next to actually transferred very well into the product itself. So in-house whether you would open the product, you would see who talked to who, and you know exactly by reading quickly the names, what table you can sit next to or what room you can join. And then the other thing that went very well for high schoolers is that all of them start school and finish school at the same time. They go to vacation at the same time. They have summers, holidays. So in a presence product like house party, the ability to...”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I spoke to Michael at Evela, he asked specifically when you look at the process now with the benefit of hindsight, and it's a tough one to ask, but it was Michael, so I thought it was important. What were your key learnings from the House Party experience? One of the things that I think is very important for people to take from this, as a product company, you measure your success on traditional what it's called like growth accounting. So there is like pretty standardized way to understand your MEU, DAU, what are the cohorts, how different personas, different types of people behave over time, mapping user stories, understanding what are delivers in the story that makes those users successful, and etc. And it's kind of a playbook that, I don't know, 60 to 80% of that playbook is being played in different variations in most of the company and most of the tech company. With House 40, we had this really interesting problem where the”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of spaces I should build. Maybe this is the kind of spaces I should plan for and I wanted to start building spaces that are presence-based, meaning people are in these buildings, in these spaces, which is a definition of a building, but just online. So we started a company called Life on Air. The whole premise was mobile first live video experiences to bring people together in the most human way possible when they're physically apart. And in a way, I've been an architect since school. I just do different buildings. House Party is a building with hundreds of thousands of people every day. If not, sorry, millions of people every day. It's kind of crazy. I love that, especially kind of the correlation alignment between architecture and kind of building digital spaces. You mentioned Housebody there, and it was such an incredible journey, and I still love the product, by the way. So I have to say a huge thanks for keeping me company in COVID times.”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I studied architecture, and what I really find interesting architecture is the opportunity to create spaces that create new encounters and new opportunity for encounters between people. And these are the things that I got the most joy in school. Towards the end of year three of Architecture School, I realized that physical space is the physical space, but if you want to push the boundaries more, in architecture, you can either try to develop new materials or you can basically be a great marketer. So you can get really quirky or what other people say iconic buildings that are not necessarily created new statement beyond look at this cool thing that we did. And that got me into thinking the digital world or presence in the digital world is a really new space pun intended to craft as an architect. And I thought maybe that's the kind of”
2020-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Houseparty To Millions of Users, Why Today's Metrics Are Insufficient To Determine Product Success & What Breaks with Scale From Team To Product with Ben Rubin, Co-Founder @ /talk & Houseparty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source