YouSaid · the spoken record

Sarah Tavel

lines on the record: 118
first: 2023-12-27
most recent: 2023-12-27
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

“Out ways to accelerate them. So classic seller to seller referrals, right? Uber drivers would get, would tell their friend, oh, you should start driving for Uber. It's great. But then Uber incentivized it with a referral kind of bonus. And you start to see Uber drivers literally writing blog posts about how much they loved driving for Uber because some of them were making more money getting the referral bonus than actually driving. And so you're trying to find these growth loops and you maximize them.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scale. The first are the growth loops. And so we just talked about an example with Recki. There are many examples of this hip camp in other marketplace. I'm lucky to work with. If you and I went camping on hip camp and I booked a treehouse on hip camp and you're going to join me on it, I could then, as part of my checkout flow essentially, invite you to my reservation so that you could see the maps, the more information about the treehouse at any of the kind of sites around it. And so I'm the person that hip camp acquired, but then I pull you into my experience. And that's a great buyer-to-buyer growth loop. There's kind of classic seller-to-seller loops or buyer-to-seller. All these directions. And then the great marketplaces see those loops and they figure.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think Ronan predicted that that was what was going to happen, right? And your constant, that kind of customer obsession, having the relationships with the suppliers, having the relationship with the buyers so that you have your ear to the ground. And when they start to lean in a little bit, you're there to receive them, right? And so I think this is very much like part of the what great marketplace founders are able to do is they're able to start to feel that there's something tipping in their direction and then create momentum behind it. And that's a lot of what this level two is all about, which is that I think every marketplace has to figure out what I call tipping loops. And there's two types of tipping loops that work together symbiotically to help a marketplace.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them to wreck it because I'd much rather have my orders come via Reki than the way I'm getting them. And so you go from this moment of like the hard, high cost of sales, like pounding the pavement to getting a list on a silver platter of restaurants to onboard. And that's that feeling of tipping, right? Where all of a sudden something goes from being really freaking hard to so much easier.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Restaurant normally ordered from. And so instead of getting the voicemail, the supplier would start to see a nice kind of order form that was from the restaurant and kind of provided by Reki, powered by Reki. And what would happen is that as Reki grew more and more in London, these suppliers started to get more and more of their restaurants ordering Via Recky. And then some of the earliest suppliers started to be like, well, this is so much easier for me. Like I would much rather get this order form from Reki than have to listen to an hour of voicemails from chefs with different accents and different ways of ordering their food in the morning when I come in. And so then the sellers would reach out to Reki and be like, hey, here's the CSV of all of our customers. Can you reach out to them on board?”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Midnight when they're leaving the restaurant or texting, typing something into WhatsApp and texting it to their supplier, an email, whatever it is, they could use this Reki app. And it would make it a lot easier for them to do that. And then, of course, the marketplace elements is that then they'll be able to discover other suppliers on Reki if they need them. Now, in the beginning, Reki had to have their own sales force. And they were going to London, knocking on the doors of these restaurants, finding and cornering probably the chef in the kitchen to show them the app, to get them to change to this new app called Reki. And it's like a very high cost of sales effort to have, as you might imagine. But then what started to happen is that every time they got a new chef onto Reki, that order would then go to the supplier that that”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as you're doing all these things again that don't scale, then you reach this moment where things start to get a lot easier. You've kind of pushed the boulder up the hill and it starts to slide down. And what you notice first, I think, is you start to see it on a micro level where you might have suppliers that start to tip to you or buyers that tip. You might see your cohorts get a little bit better. You start to see some organic growth. And let me kind of give a story or an example of a company that I got to see where the marketplace started to tip. So we're investors in a company called Recki. And Recki is a marketplace for restaurants and their suppliers. And it's imagine the beginning this kind of app that you could use and almost looked like WhatsApp that a chef could use instead of doing a voicemail at like”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increasing happiness. And this is a really important thing. Like the growth that you're doing should be a lot of clarity on your flywheel at this point and know that you're growing in service of accelerating your flywheel. And I think of the people talk about the flywheel as liquidity. You could think of it as happiness, which is that the more the flywheel spins, the more you're able to make both sides of your marketplace happy, right? What you're doing is you're growing into a greater percentage of your market.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So layer two, I think, will actually illuminate again the importance of that constrained focus for layer one. You're doing all these things that don't scale, that you've written so much about, Lenny, about kickstarting the marketplace, all those things that you can't just keep on doing forever. Now layer two, level two, is about figuring out how to do things that do scale. And really, you're doing it in service of this kind of mythical moment of a tipping point. And the tipping point is this idea that you often reach some kind of saturation point in a market. You've reached an experience. You've kept on working on the product experience. You've taken a lot of friction out and you keep on growing, growing, growing, and you're doing that in service of.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll link to a few posts. Anything you want to add there? I mean, I love, you know, the only thing I'll add those two things related I'll add. I don't like NPS for this. And I have a whole blog post on this. I like Sean Ellis's question of how disappointed would you be if this product disappeared? And I think it's if you have at least 40% of people respond that they'd be very disappointed, then you're on the right track. That's kind of the feeling that should tell you you're on the right track.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's very much that you just start, you see people retaining. You see people, you just feel that where people are texting you or emailing or whatever it is that they've had a great experience and you see them coming back. And that's, and you see a greater, you know, you're not going to make everybody happy. That's like, let's all accept that. There's a core of users, a persona that you are able to make really happy. That's when you know that you're on the right track.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the trickiness with thumbtack? And by the way, when we talk through level two, that also is the trickiness that thumbtack, you know, level two will articulate some more of that trickiness.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was just going to say that is the trickiness with thumbtax model and it persists as the trickiness with their model, which is that you don't have a high repeat use case there. And so you have to, you know, one of the really important things with building a marketplace is cornering the buy side, like having a relationship with the buy side where they don't even think about where they're going to go. They come to you. And if it's a plumber, you use that so infrequently that every time you are going to look for a plumber, you're going to start at Google, right? You're not going to assume I'm going to go to Thumbtack to find that because you've already forgotten by that point. And so you need to have enough touch points with the consumer so that they'll have a relationship with you and start to think of you as a place to go to. And that's probably that.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And sometimes as we see, as we saw with postmates, sometimes it's both, which is, you know, geography and category. Again, you only have, you have to assume scarcity of your capital, of your attention, of your customers' attention. And so getting complete clarity of what is the experience that you want to really nail, what's that happy path you're optimizing for constraining that in the beginning gives you the option, the optionality to grow beyond that. But if you don't constrain, you just won't be able to get there fast enough.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Yes. And kind of the way to think of it is like obviously when you're a marketplace founder, you know that in order to build something that indoors, you're going to have to grow, right? In the beginning, you're doing all these things that don't scale. You're working on your product experience. You're taking friction out of the transaction. And you want to get to a point where there's a certain percentage of people that retain after having done a transaction. And so you're kind of doing the work, doing the work, doing the work to get to that minimum threshold. And that's when you know you get to kind of go to the next step of starting to figure out the levers to really scale what you're doing.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still, we're disrupted by a startup. And it's because actually customers don't care how big you are, right? They don't care how many transactions you've accumulated. What they care about is when they have a transaction with you, how happy do you make them? How much better is the experience that you provide than any other substitute that they could use? And if you do a good job, then they're going to keep coming back to you. And so I call it happy GMV. And that's actually the thing that I think you as a founder or a product leader have to focus on, which is what do I think is going to be the experience of a buyer or seller that leads them to retaining and tracking that as the happy path and therefore the happy GMV?”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lost a lot of money in the beginning fulfilling delivery in the suburbs just because the delivery times, the driving was so long. But by going after a market that other people weren't focused on, it let them get to a place where they were able to really make the customers on both sides of their marketplace happy enough that they retained. And this word happy I use, I should expand on it a little bit. Because the, you know, when you, the realization I had as I reflected on this kind of feeling that GMV is really actually a vanity metric, it doesn't get at the core of whether you're building enduring value. It's like very clear and there's plenty of examples I could give where there are companies that had incredible scale and”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the big cities. They went after not just restaurants but restaurants and apple and retail, bicycle. I remember there were so many things that they went after all at the same time versus, and when you're playing that game, you're always being compared to whatever other substitutes there are in the market, right? And that just, when you have constraint of capital and attention, you're spreading yourself thin across a lot of different vectors of kind of preference for the customer and the seller. DoorDash, on the other hand, famously and very controversially went after the suburbs, right, in the beginning. And the beautiful thing about the suburbs is that there's very little competition because no one thought that you could do it economically. And they probably weren't wrong in the beginning. Like DoorDash.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, where you had companies like DoorDash and Postmates and Uber Eats and then the incumbents of Grubhub take very different strategies. And what Postmates, you know, I make comparisons to Postmates and DoorDash, both successful companies. But Postmates from the very beginning had very big ambition and went after”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And part of this is that we have to accept a couple things, a couple points of scarcity. One is that you can't raise hundreds and millions of dollars from the start, right? We, especially today, live in a world where there is a constraint around capital. And so you have to be able to take that capital in the beginning and make the most out of it. And the only way to do that is to be very, very focused. And the second thing is that the constraint is the founder's attention. And again, these things are really, really difficult to get off the ground. And the only way that you can do it is by having myopic focus on a segment. And the example that I always think about, and it's just was a very cool thing that we all got to see, which was when the food delivery wars happened.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you know, part of what's so hard about this idea focus is like, you know, I'm lucky to meet with just incredibly ambitious founders. And the hardest thing I think about building these marketplaces is that the ambition can often feel like this sun, you know, like the heat of the sun that's trying to warm everything up and you're going after this big market, you know, warming the ocean. And I think that really what the best ambitious founders do is they focus that ambition like a laser beam on a small market, the thimble. And what you do is like you're getting that thimble, you're getting the product market fit really, really right with this like small constrained market. And if you heat that up really, really hot, then it expands from there.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the only scalable way to do that. And that's what level two is. And so how do you get, how do you maximize your chance? You have to focus on a really constrained opportunity. And that is level one. So that's kind of the broad framing, which is a really important thing of how when you're building a marketplace, you actually are building towards that point of dominance. And so it's part of the reason why being really, really, really focused in level one is so important.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it is, it kind of shows that the more dominant a marketplace is relative to the number two in its base, the more profitable that business is. And so it's just like a very clear, like you don't want to be, you don't obviously when you're building a marketplace, you don't want to be in the middle of the pack. But even being number one, but just barely number one doesn't give you any of the benefits of a marketplace model. You're fighting for each incremental point of market share. It's not clear to the supply side or the demand side that you're like the main place to be. And so it only becomes really clear once you have that dominant market position where you're just so much bigger than the number two. And the only way to get to that place, to get to that moment of real dominance where you have this winner take most dynamic is that you have to tip your market.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You think about the full expression of these models and you think about companies like Airbnb or Amazon or eBay or Google, where once you have scale, and have like very dominant market share, you have a product that just is the best place without question of fulfilling this need. And they end up being very profitable cash flowing businesses. And you see that. And that's the business that you want to build, right? That's why you're going through all the hardship of building a marketplace, getting the marketplace off the ground to get to that place. And there's kind of very clear analysis. I published it in the hierarchy. I have this incredible graph that I remember seeing when I was at a board observer for this online classified company called OLX, led by Fabrice Grinda.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, there's probably a couple core insights, but the first one that I think about with this hierarchy is that when you're building a marketplace, you actually have to start from the goal and work backwards from there. Now, what's the goal? Like marketplaces, I mean, you have so much incredible content on this. They're just incredibly difficult to build. You're basically building two companies at the same time, right? You have the product and go to market org for the demand side, the product and go to market org for the supply side. And somehow you have to make these two line up so that they serve each other's needs. It's an incredibly difficult dance and it really, it's one of the hardest types of companies in this software world that I think you can build. And you do it because”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Longer, for it is actually the path to building something they endorse. And so I was having the same conversation again, and I just felt like I needed to crystallize it or synthesize it in a way that would be easier to communicate. And that's what led to this hierarchy.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or you could have a million dollars of GMV by having $500,000 here, $200,000 here, like spreading it out. And so the founders, and I would meet so many founders who'd say, oh, well, I thought we had to prove out that the value proposition resonated in these other cities. And so that's why we're diffusing our focus. But what I would always feel is like they were just making their job so much harder by doing that. The other way you could think of it is like, if you're trying to get to a million dollars of GMV as quickly as possible, you're actually motivated to go after a really big market, right? It's a lot easier to get to a million dollars of GMV when you're skimming the cream on this big ocean of a market than to be very, very focused on a smaller market and getting to a million dollars of GMV in a constrained market is a lot harder takes longer.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you're running is to grow MAUs or to grow GMV, you're not actually going to run the right race. It can take you, and actually with marketplace is very interestingly, it can take you in the wrong direction. So what would happen is I would meet all these founders and everybody got fixated on this milestone of a million dollars of GMV, right? And I think a lot of people started to feel like you hit a million dollars of annualized GMV. It means you're ready for your Series A. But it's kind of self-evident that not all GMV is created equal, right? Like, so imagine a food delivery company 10 years ago. You could have a million dollars of GMV by focusing on LA or a million dollars of GMV by focusing on”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a framework or hierarchy that is for marketplace founders. It could actually be B2B or B2C. Marketplace product leaders that are just continuing, like either getting started or scaling their marketplace and helping kind of prioritize and focus on the things that most matter. And it came out of a similar reaction, a very similar parallel to what I was experiencing, meaning all these consumer social founders. They would talk about MAUs and I just felt like it didn't get to the heart of whether they were building enduring value. And I actually started to realize that GMV was very similar. You know, GMV, it's a metric that it seems like, of course, you can't build a marketplace without growing GMV in the same way that you can't build a social product without growing MAUs. But if you focus, if they...”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just think about consumer founders, product founders, product leaders in these companies that are thinking through the roadmap. What are the most important things that they need to prioritize, the big rocks for the immediate short term? And the framework then provides a lens on what to prioritize.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, one of the funniest things that will bridge to our next conversation is that all social products are really marketplaces, right? YouTube is a marketplace. You have the creators uploading content and the viewers who are watching it, supply and demand. And so then the subscribe button is also very interesting because then from the demand side, the viewer, why would I come back to YouTube consistently versus, again, all the other places I could spend time on if it weren't for me having found creators for whom their content really resonates with me so much so that I subscribe to their content. And so I loved that example because it also showed a little bit the evolution that can happen with these companies, but then also just the beauty of like, you know, you've got something really right with the core action when it's helping both sides of your”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you one other one that I thought was super interesting, which is that when I initially published this post, I had assumed, wrongly, that YouTube's core action was watching a video. And then Shashir Mehta, who is the kind of CPO of YouTube, he reached out to me and he said, you know, that's what it was in the early days. But we started to realize that it wasn't actually our core action. And we did a lot of analysis on YouTube. And what we realized was that subscribing was the core action on YouTube. And it makes so much sense when he said it, right? You're a creator. You're uploading content onto YouTube. There are a lot of other places at that time that you could have uploaded that content to. But you care about YouTube because that's where you're growing your audience, right? And so the more people that subscribe to your content on YouTube, the more you have the accruing benefits and mounting loss of using YouTube. And so that was super important on the creator side, which”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That pins something doesn't go up, or the number of pins for that cohort doesn't go up, that experiment is not a successful experiment.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If someone's pinning something, they're coming back to Pinterest the next week with a super high, more than 90% probability at the time. And then there's the top-down way of thinking about it, which is, well, what is Pinterest for? And if a user does come to Pinterest and they never add something to a board, do they really understand what Pinterest is? And yes, clicking through makes you want to save the click-through is valuable, you want to save it. So clicking through is obviously really important. But at the end of the day, if they don't like that pin enough that they want to save it themselves to their board, then we haven't done our job. And so we did this kind of top-down, bottoms-up analysis to make it very clear that when we launch an experiment or launch a new feature, if the probability, if the percentage of people”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was going to be our North Star. We called it weekly active pinners. And the two things were, you know, there's always this bottoms up analysis that you do, which is we looked at every action that you could do on Pinterest. So we had liking, following, clicking through, time on site, pinning, repinning. And we looked at, first of all, what percentage of users complete those actions. And if you do that action in a week, what's your propensity to come back the following week? We basically ranked that. And what we saw was that if you pin something, repin something, which is finding something on Pinterest, I'm using those synonymously, or click through, you had an incredibly high probability that you would come back.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'll tell you the exercise that we did at Pinterest because, you know, as I mentioned before, it wasn't obvious to us in the beginning of Pinterest, were we as social network, you know, like, should we optimize for the follow graph? You have to remember Pinterest, this was 2011. You had Twitter growing like crazy, Instagram was growing. Those were both asymmetrical follow graphs that they were creating, right? And so it wasn't clear at the time whether Pinterest was actually just creating a new follow graph, but that was about things instead of what Twitter was or what Instagram was. And so it wasn't obvious. And what happened actually is that there was two efforts that I think of as like kind of bottoms up and top down that helped really clarify that actually pinning something was the core action.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That when a user comes to your product, signs up for the first time, doesn't have necessarily a lot of context on what the product is itself, that they see the thing that they're supposed to do and you get them to do it. And a lot of times in the beginning, there are just so many other things that a product might have that you're diffusing that attention that they would otherwise have had on the thing that's most important. And so I feel that that's kind of where I always, that's the first mistake, and it's kind of natural that it would be the first mistake, but maybe the largest mistake that I see people make.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I often feel is that a lot of times product founders, consumer founders see where they want to get to. They see, they compare themselves to the full expression of a product that you see with other products, you know, roadblocks, Instagram, TikTok, whatever it may be. And they want to get there. What that ends up meaning when a new user signs up is that there's almost, there's too much in the beginning to take in and understand. And you don't then have a very focused product that gets the user to the thing that you most want them to do. And that's actually the importance, part of the importance of understanding level one, what your core action is, is that you want to make sure”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And users start to use a product more and more, you start to see that over time they actually become more retained in the product as opposed to kind of the classic leaky bucket where the cohort just keeps on dwindling down. And until you reach a point with your cohorts where there is a plateau, you have more work to do on figuring out the retention of your users. The second thing is just focus. So I can't tell you how many times also you'll meet a founder and they will, you know, there was one example I saw. It was kind of a dating app friend making app. And he was growing it via TikTok, which is not geographically constrained at all. And so you're growing, you know, he's growing the user numbers, but without focusing on a specific geography, it's going to be really difficult to make that type of product a high retention product”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, you know, a cohort, what I always like to look at is weekly cohorts for these products. And you look at them in two ways, which is one, for each vintage of cohorts. You're looking at like a group of people who signed up in a given week, and that's one cohort. You look at it both on an active user basis. Like, are those people continuing to come back to the product? And I particularly love to look at that on a weekly active user completing the core action basis of like, are users completing the core action? How is that changing over time for each of the cohorts and then also looking at activity level within those cohorts? And so what you love to see is the kind of classic smile graph where as the network grows,”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one is actually measuring it. Like, I can't tell you how many times I suggest to a founder to track cohorts. And that's a new thing. And so, you know, just being really, really clear and intellectually honest on looking at cohorts, I think, is number one.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over time, the self-prepared, like the network effect doesn't work because the anonymity creates the conditions for bad behavior. And so that starts to pull down the community. And then it is also the experience where you use a product and you can delete it and then come back three months later. And because of the anonymity aspect of it, your experience isn't any different. And so I find anonymity people keep trying it and super talented founders keep hitting their head against that wall because it has the very early fun growth, but it just continues to be a product that isn't able to persist without some persistent identity.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not funny enough to make something like that. But for the people who do have it, They get accruing benefits because they get people to follow them. And that's the mounting loss too where they've grown their identity on a platform, even though it's a pseudo-anonymous identity. The challenge when you have pure anonymity is that you don't have that accruing benefit or mounting loss that happens. I don't know if you ever played with Secret, but it's similar to TikTok or something like that These are the types of experiences where”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anonymity is something where if without pseudo-anonymity and anonymity are very different concepts, right? With pseudo-anonymity, we have it on Twitter, you have it on Reddit, you have a persistent identity that you're creating. And that identity then can have accruing benefits mounting loss. My pseudo-anonymous account on Twitter that just flames other VCs. I'm just kidding.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe one other thing that I've seen that runs into a challenge I find it runs into a challenge particularly with level two is anonymity.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is hard, and at the same time, though, we do see exceptions to it where I still feel like consumers are hungry for new experiences. And so we've seen a couple over the last few years that have gone into tens of millions of users. Nothing that has really created the experience that's sticky enough to kind of pull minutes away from really TikTok and Instagram, which just are these dominant forces right now.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These loops. And even TikTok got to millions of users before they spent all the capital to acquire those remaining users.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, what are you trying to build with a consumer product? You're not trying to build something niche, right? You want to build something that can be a mass market hundreds of millions of users, billions of users. And it's considerable capital to do that with marketing. There's one example that we have so far, which is TikTok of spending more than a billion dollars once they've figured out actually the first two levels in order to grow. So they didn't actually put money, like user acquisition spend behind TikTok until they had a product that was retentive and then they knew that they really wanted to maximize that. But every other social product has grown organically. And they've been able to do so because they figured out how to maximize.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. And the importance of it is like, I can't emphasize enough how important focus is when you're building these companies. It's so hard and there really isn't a playbook, right? Like every company, the ones that succeed have to be fundamentally different from anything that was before it. But there are these kind of first principles of the ingredients that they all share. And you can use those ingredients to really focus you when you're going through this inevitable growth curve and wanting to know, well, how do we maximize this moment? How do we really focus on the things that will set us most up for success? And that's where I think a framework like this can be really clarifying.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies like House Party and Clubhouse. You know, what was interesting about both of those products is that you would think that the more users that came into Clubhouse or House Party, the faster the flywheel should spin. But the challenge was that they relied on push notifications, right? And so I don't know if you had this experience, but with let's take House Party as an example, you started to follow a lot of people on House Party and then all of a sudden it was like your push notifications just got overwhelming, right? Because it was a real-time product that you had to use push notifications to know the moment to join the product. But when you had so many push notifications because the more people you followed, the more notifications you had, you just get to this point where you start ignoring them. And so it becomes this thing where even though the fly.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source