★What are some decisions taken by the "Growth team" at Facebook that helped Facebook reach 500 million users?
6 Answers
Andy Johns, Worked on user growth and enga... (more) Worked on user growth and engagement as an internet marketer2k upvotes by John Clover, Tudor Achim, Brien Colwell, (more)Loading...
This question suggests it wants to know the exact, tactical decisions. As much as I would like to share those tactics in great detail because it's fascinating and readers of this question would find it interesting/valuable, I'm legally bound to a certain amount of confidentiality so I'll only go as detailed as I'm legally able to. That basically means I won't share numbers and I won't comment on things that aren't directly discernable to the general public. Also, the list of optimizations is too long for anyone to remember. I also didn't work on the majority of those optimizations directly but tended to learn about them via close proximity to the people solving the problem they were assigned to solve. The team grew to 30 - 40 people so most of my day-to-day work was contained to a subset of the optimizations that were taking place at any given moment.
There are a few different types of "decisions" though. There are decisions around tactics, decisions around strategy, decisions around hiring, and decisions around priorities and culture. The growth team participated in decisions across all types and all are critical to a growth team.
Tactics
There are too many to name but most come down to internet marketing 101: test, optimize, rinse and repeat. If you want a list of methods for testing and optimizing various parts of a product or referring channel, then read my answer to What are some top strategies for conversion optimization? You can pretty much guarantee that just about every one of these strategies was applied in one way or another to various parts of Facebook's product. But again, I can't share specifics that aren't obvious, public domain nor can I share stats. Nor can I speak to the complete level of depth and complexity that the entire team went into to fine tune the parts of the product that enabled growth to happen. Some tactics I also don't want to share because they were so damn effective.
Hiring
Who was hired to work on growth was arguably the most important decision being made. The team was led by Chamath Palihapitiya:
He is by far the best person I have ever worked for/with. He is deeply analytical, rigorously focused on success (or as he would say, "crushing it!"), gifted as a natural leader and motivator, aggressive and unafraid of taking risk, and knows consumer tech at a black belt level. He was the backbone of the growth team and making him the head of growth was a brilliant decision. I remember in my first week on the job I went to lunch with him to get to know him a bit more. It was a formality that all new hires went through. Pretty standard stuff. The conversation we had was far from standard though. I remember asking him, "So what kind of users am I going after? Any particular demographics or regions? Does it matter?" and he sternly responded "It's fucking land-grab time so get all of the fucking land you can get." In other words, don't ask such a stupid question next time. Get the entire planet on Facebook. Clear enough, right!? I knew I liked him from the start.
He went on to bring others onto the team like Blake Ross, Alex Schultz, Javier Olivan and several other really talented people spanning the spectrum of skills from direct acquisition marketing (SEO, PPC, email, a/b testing, merchandising, link building) to deeply technical back end and front end engineers, designers, and data scientists.
Javier Olivan is responsible for building and scaling the international growth side of the team. He helped build the internationalization team that consisted of engineers who built the translations application that allowed our own users to translate Facebook for us. This video that explains the process always pulls at my heart strings (unfortunately it isn't embeddable so you'll have to click the link):
https://www.facebook.com/
Perhaps the greatest lever in getting to 500M or more users was making the site available in virtually every language on the planet. As Nico Vera stated in the video, language localization is the "great equalizer". It made Facebook a platform capable of supporting everyone on the planet. I believe Facebook is available in 80 languages now. That became possible because engineers on the growth team built a tool that allowed the users to crowd source translation of the site for us. Growth was not about hiring 10 people per country and putting them in the 20 most important countries and expecting it to grow. Growth was about engineer systems of scale and enabling our users to grow the product for us.
Strategy
You can think about strategy a few ways. One way is in how we generically framed growth funnels and how that tended to inform growth roadmaps. For example, you could say that growth is broken down into a few fundamental questions:
From those question you can go down the path of identifying products that impact a certain metric (e.g. what products help drive acquisition?) and then figure out how to either (1) optimize those channels to produce more value OR (2) build new acquisition channels from scratch to add more acquisition volume. For example, here is a list of things that could take part in the acquisition funnel:
Then you can try and layer your current acquisition channels with brand new channels. Think of acquisition as a stacked line chart. You want to add more stacks to that chart because each stack represents a new source of acquisition. For example:
Strategy can also exist in the form of company acquisitions or strategic partnerships. Techcrunch noted in February of 2010 that Facebook purchased a company called Octazen (http://techcrunch.com/20
Take a look at the list of mail clients that LinkedIn supports contact importing for (notice the blue link at the bottom where you can get the full list which is almost 100 clients long). I pulled this directly from LinkedIn's contact importing flow:
Enabling users to import all of their contacts gave companies like Facebook and LinkedIn the data they needed to make it easier for them to recommend friends/contacts to their users and connect you with the people you know. Plenty of social media services allow contact importing. But how many of them were rigorous enough to enable virtually every email importing service on the planet? I only know two at this point: Facebook and LinkedIn.
Partnerships were also negotiated by the growth team. Sometimes those deals were struck with international entities to enable growth outside of the US. In October of 2010 Facebook partnered with Yandex to feed the Firehose of status updates to Yandex (http://searchengineland.
Sometimes the growth team was responsible for taking big bets. Facebook Lite was one of those bets. You can read more about it here (http://techcrunch.com/20
Culture and Priorities
It has been documented quite a bit in various interviews throughout mainstream and tech media, but Facebook built a very unique culture. Within the growth team Chamath Palihapitiya was largely responsible for cultivating a culture of balanced aggression where we pushed as hard as possible to make the site grow.
The growth environment was palpable. You walked into a corner of the building and would see flags hanging that represented not only the international nature of the people we hired, but as symbolism for the global adoption Facebook intended to have.
I can't find the picture at the moment but there were two banners that hung above the growth team at the 1601 California offices. The first sign read "GO BIG OR GO HOME" and had a picture of Godzilla next to it (that made it more awesome). The other read "UP AND TO THE RIGHT". That's what we saw everyday, all day while working. It was a constant reminder of our team mission. There were several other messages scattered throughout the offices like these:
The growth team was also given tremendous air cover by the executive team. That meant that we were enabled to be aggressive and take risk in the name of giving everyone on the planet the opportunity to connect with each other on Facebook. Growth had executive support. This picture should give you an example of how close Chamath was with the core leadership in the company, and consequently what that meant for the growth team:
That's Chamath on the left with Zuck, the VP of engineering, the VP of Tech Ops, and the VP of Product. Growth wasn't mitigated to a sub-function of a higher function within the company like a Paid Search team might be a sub-function of the Marketing team within an e-commerce company. Growth was a horizontal layer across product like engineering/ops is a horizontal framework behind product. Not only would someone ask "What's the performance impact on site speed or stability if we build and ship 'X'?" it became common for people to ask "What's the impact on growth if we build and ship 'X'?". The decision to make growth a canonical part of the product, engineering and operational discussion was a really important decision that the executives made.
Summary
I've had this sort of question and conversation come up a bunch over the past two years. There is still this very nascent understanding of what user growth actually means and how it contributes to a company in the consumer technology world. The natural instinct is for it to come back to tactics, tactics, and more tactics. Executing on tactics is certainly a necessary part of making growth happen. But getting to 500M users was a function of all of these things coming together. Culture, priorities and hiring set the table for us to construct a team that was committed to a mission of tactics and strategy. A growth team that "crushes it" cannot be built in the absence of culture, priorities and hiring since tactics and strategy are made possible by the former.
There are a few different types of "decisions" though. There are decisions around tactics, decisions around strategy, decisions around hiring, and decisions around priorities and culture. The growth team participated in decisions across all types and all are critical to a growth team.
Tactics
There are too many to name but most come down to internet marketing 101: test, optimize, rinse and repeat. If you want a list of methods for testing and optimizing various parts of a product or referring channel, then read my answer to What are some top strategies for conversion optimization? You can pretty much guarantee that just about every one of these strategies was applied in one way or another to various parts of Facebook's product. But again, I can't share specifics that aren't obvious, public domain nor can I share stats. Nor can I speak to the complete level of depth and complexity that the entire team went into to fine tune the parts of the product that enabled growth to happen. Some tactics I also don't want to share because they were so damn effective.
Hiring
Who was hired to work on growth was arguably the most important decision being made. The team was led by Chamath Palihapitiya:
He is by far the best person I have ever worked for/with. He is deeply analytical, rigorously focused on success (or as he would say, "crushing it!"), gifted as a natural leader and motivator, aggressive and unafraid of taking risk, and knows consumer tech at a black belt level. He was the backbone of the growth team and making him the head of growth was a brilliant decision. I remember in my first week on the job I went to lunch with him to get to know him a bit more. It was a formality that all new hires went through. Pretty standard stuff. The conversation we had was far from standard though. I remember asking him, "So what kind of users am I going after? Any particular demographics or regions? Does it matter?" and he sternly responded "It's fucking land-grab time so get all of the fucking land you can get." In other words, don't ask such a stupid question next time. Get the entire planet on Facebook. Clear enough, right!? I knew I liked him from the start.
He went on to bring others onto the team like Blake Ross, Alex Schultz, Javier Olivan and several other really talented people spanning the spectrum of skills from direct acquisition marketing (SEO, PPC, email, a/b testing, merchandising, link building) to deeply technical back end and front end engineers, designers, and data scientists.
Javier Olivan is responsible for building and scaling the international growth side of the team. He helped build the internationalization team that consisted of engineers who built the translations application that allowed our own users to translate Facebook for us. This video that explains the process always pulls at my heart strings (unfortunately it isn't embeddable so you'll have to click the link):
https://www.facebook.com/
Perhaps the greatest lever in getting to 500M or more users was making the site available in virtually every language on the planet. As Nico Vera stated in the video, language localization is the "great equalizer". It made Facebook a platform capable of supporting everyone on the planet. I believe Facebook is available in 80 languages now. That became possible because engineers on the growth team built a tool that allowed the users to crowd source translation of the site for us. Growth was not about hiring 10 people per country and putting them in the 20 most important countries and expecting it to grow. Growth was about engineer systems of scale and enabling our users to grow the product for us.
Strategy
You can think about strategy a few ways. One way is in how we generically framed growth funnels and how that tended to inform growth roadmaps. For example, you could say that growth is broken down into a few fundamental questions:
- How do I increase the rate of acquisition i.e. get more signups?
- What can I do to activate as many users as quickly as possible in their first 'N' days?
- What are the levers for engagement and retention and how can I pull them?
- How do I bring churned users back into the system to "resurrect" them from the dead?
- Invitations
- Contact importing --> sending invites
- Open/click rates of invite emails
- Conversion rate of user post-invite
- Logged out homepage design and how that converts users to signup
- The steps of the signup form
- Account confirmation post-signup
- etc
Then you can try and layer your current acquisition channels with brand new channels. Think of acquisition as a stacked line chart. You want to add more stacks to that chart because each stack represents a new source of acquisition. For example:
- Affiliate marketing
- Paid search via Adwords and/or Facebook ads themselves
- Buying mobile installs via mobile ad platforms like Flurry and MdotM
- etc
Strategy can also exist in the form of company acquisitions or strategic partnerships. Techcrunch noted in February of 2010 that Facebook purchased a company called Octazen (http://techcrunch.com/20
Take a look at the list of mail clients that LinkedIn supports contact importing for (notice the blue link at the bottom where you can get the full list which is almost 100 clients long). I pulled this directly from LinkedIn's contact importing flow:
Enabling users to import all of their contacts gave companies like Facebook and LinkedIn the data they needed to make it easier for them to recommend friends/contacts to their users and connect you with the people you know. Plenty of social media services allow contact importing. But how many of them were rigorous enough to enable virtually every email importing service on the planet? I only know two at this point: Facebook and LinkedIn.
Partnerships were also negotiated by the growth team. Sometimes those deals were struck with international entities to enable growth outside of the US. In October of 2010 Facebook partnered with Yandex to feed the Firehose of status updates to Yandex (http://searchengineland.
Sometimes the growth team was responsible for taking big bets. Facebook Lite was one of those bets. You can read more about it here (http://techcrunch.com/20
Culture and Priorities
It has been documented quite a bit in various interviews throughout mainstream and tech media, but Facebook built a very unique culture. Within the growth team Chamath Palihapitiya was largely responsible for cultivating a culture of balanced aggression where we pushed as hard as possible to make the site grow.
The growth environment was palpable. You walked into a corner of the building and would see flags hanging that represented not only the international nature of the people we hired, but as symbolism for the global adoption Facebook intended to have.
I can't find the picture at the moment but there were two banners that hung above the growth team at the 1601 California offices. The first sign read "GO BIG OR GO HOME" and had a picture of Godzilla next to it (that made it more awesome). The other read "UP AND TO THE RIGHT". That's what we saw everyday, all day while working. It was a constant reminder of our team mission. There were several other messages scattered throughout the offices like these:
The growth team was also given tremendous air cover by the executive team. That meant that we were enabled to be aggressive and take risk in the name of giving everyone on the planet the opportunity to connect with each other on Facebook. Growth had executive support. This picture should give you an example of how close Chamath was with the core leadership in the company, and consequently what that meant for the growth team:
Summary
I've had this sort of question and conversation come up a bunch over the past two years. There is still this very nascent understanding of what user growth actually means and how it contributes to a company in the consumer technology world. The natural instinct is for it to come back to tactics, tactics, and more tactics. Executing on tactics is certainly a necessary part of making growth happen. But getting to 500M users was a function of all of these things coming together. Culture, priorities and hiring set the table for us to construct a team that was committed to a mission of tactics and strategy. A growth team that "crushes it" cannot be built in the absence of culture, priorities and hiring since tactics and strategy are made possible by the former.
I think Andy got a lot of things right in this post. As I tell most people who ask, the key to understanding growth is two things:
1) a fundamental understanding of your product - and specifically what the key reasons people use it are. its amazing to me how confused many people are about this and unable to really discern motivations and root causes from byproducts and outcomes. knowing true product value allows you to design the experiments necessary so that you can really isolate cause and effect. as an example, at facebook, one thing we were able to determine early on was a key link between the number of friends you had in a given time and likelihood to churn. knowing this allowed us to do a lot to get new users to their "a-ha" moment quickly. obviously, however, this required us to know what the "a-ha" moment was with a fair amount of certainty in the first place.
2) a simple framework for doing your work. too many people "complexify" things in an attempt to seem smart. great things are simple. we had a very simple framework for growth that andy articulated above - acquisition, activation, engagement, virality. having this framework allowed us to prioritize our work, design experiments, build products, etc. it also allowed everyone to understand it and see how decisions were made in a logical, transparent way.
As an aside: there were some other great people responsible for Growth from the outset including Naomi Gleit and James Wang. We (me, Javi, Blake, Naomi, Alex, James) were the first "GrowthCircle" or the leadership team responsible for growth. The team continues to thrive at facebook and has grown to include some other great people...
1) a fundamental understanding of your product - and specifically what the key reasons people use it are. its amazing to me how confused many people are about this and unable to really discern motivations and root causes from byproducts and outcomes. knowing true product value allows you to design the experiments necessary so that you can really isolate cause and effect. as an example, at facebook, one thing we were able to determine early on was a key link between the number of friends you had in a given time and likelihood to churn. knowing this allowed us to do a lot to get new users to their "a-ha" moment quickly. obviously, however, this required us to know what the "a-ha" moment was with a fair amount of certainty in the first place.
2) a simple framework for doing your work. too many people "complexify" things in an attempt to seem smart. great things are simple. we had a very simple framework for growth that andy articulated above - acquisition, activation, engagement, virality. having this framework allowed us to prioritize our work, design experiments, build products, etc. it also allowed everyone to understand it and see how decisions were made in a logical, transparent way.
As an aside: there were some other great people responsible for Growth from the outset including Naomi Gleit and James Wang. We (me, Javi, Blake, Naomi, Alex, James) were the first "GrowthCircle" or the leadership team responsible for growth. The team continues to thrive at facebook and has grown to include some other great people...
Jonathan Katzman, Product Guy, Cook, Dad59 upvotes by Marc Bodnick, Quora User, Brien Colwell, (more)Loading...
One note to add to the fantastic answers above. This is from an external perspective having worked on several projects with Facebook (including the Yahoo! Social Bar). In many of my interactions with Facebook teams over the last two years, I have often heard FB employees say things such as "That's a growth request." Usually that ends any discussion currently happening and the request immediately becomes a top priority. I've seen this amongst engineers, Product, BD, Legal and Partner Management teams. Its a broadly adopted cultural norm at the company that Growth is paramount. Its clearly a huge part of the company's success and something that is surprisingly hard to imitate at other companies.
Exponential email.
Not many people remember this but there was (is?) this functionality before it was mainstream that it would let you introduce your email and your password and it would send an email to all your contacts in order to find your contacts already present, almost without knowing it. It is a simple API trick that can be applied to any website.
Let me give you some numbers. Suppose you have 10 users. This functionality is quite visible/intrusive and almost confusing so 5 out 10 users will use it. An average person has 100 contact emails. So you have sent 500 emails. Let's assume you receive a mail with your contact name in it saying something curious (i.e. See what your friend Mark is sharing in Facebook). Let's assume 5% of the people will join because of that. In the end of iteration 2, you have 25 new members, which will follow the same pattern. The numbers are quite reasonable in my opinion.
iteration 1: #users
iteration 2: (#users*0,5)*100*0,05
iteration n: (#users)2,5^n
It is an exponential function, which eventually stops because of course it considers all the 100 contacts are new users. Personally I joined Facebook, after receving 3 o 4 mails from friends saying, join now to see what they are saying in facebook. And my father has recently joined for the same reason.
Eric Ries (pioneer of the Lean Startup movement), calls this the The Viral Engine of Growth, and when it is bigger than 1, grows exponentially.
I saw this applied to some kind of apps called: "Who has blocked you on messenger" and they grew exponentially with this simple trick without actually much functionality. Of course you need them to stay for order to keep growing.
Not many people remember this but there was (is?) this functionality before it was mainstream that it would let you introduce your email and your password and it would send an email to all your contacts in order to find your contacts already present, almost without knowing it. It is a simple API trick that can be applied to any website.
Let me give you some numbers. Suppose you have 10 users. This functionality is quite visible/intrusive and almost confusing so 5 out 10 users will use it. An average person has 100 contact emails. So you have sent 500 emails. Let's assume you receive a mail with your contact name in it saying something curious (i.e. See what your friend Mark is sharing in Facebook). Let's assume 5% of the people will join because of that. In the end of iteration 2, you have 25 new members, which will follow the same pattern. The numbers are quite reasonable in my opinion.
iteration 1: #users
iteration 2: (#users*0,5)*100*0,05
iteration n: (#users)2,5^n
It is an exponential function, which eventually stops because of course it considers all the 100 contacts are new users. Personally I joined Facebook, after receving 3 o 4 mails from friends saying, join now to see what they are saying in facebook. And my father has recently joined for the same reason.
Eric Ries (pioneer of the Lean Startup movement), calls this the The Viral Engine of Growth, and when it is bigger than 1, grows exponentially.
I saw this applied to some kind of apps called: "Who has blocked you on messenger" and they grew exponentially with this simple trick without actually much functionality. Of course you need them to stay for order to keep growing.
Mick Liubinskas, Mr Focus for web startups.73 upvotes by Kabir Khanna, Paul King, Douglas Crets, (more)Loading...
I think the more important moment was deliberately controlling the target customers right from the start.
Social networks are stronger when contained. Friendster was for the world and it was weak. Facebook, accidentally to begin with, was just for Harvard, then a few colleges, then colleges, then high school, then the world.
By containing a social network you make sure that it's always at critical mass. Critical mass isn't relative to the world, just to the contained addressable market. Karaoke needs critical mass, but in a room of 10 friends, 2 people singing is enough.
New startups can learn a lot from this. Have a big ambition, but contain your segments to add strength.
Social networks are stronger when contained. Friendster was for the world and it was weak. Facebook, accidentally to begin with, was just for Harvard, then a few colleges, then colleges, then high school, then the world.
By containing a social network you make sure that it's always at critical mass. Critical mass isn't relative to the world, just to the contained addressable market. Karaoke needs critical mass, but in a room of 10 friends, 2 people singing is enough.
New startups can learn a lot from this. Have a big ambition, but contain your segments to add strength.
Facebook made some really great strategic moves ever since inception. Starting from making it restricted to Harvard Login to Launching of a platform to IPO and there beyond.
Like Creating a directory for Harvard ID only and then opening for all US universities, created a sense of scarcity and want in the people those who did not have the login permission so as soon as new ids were permitted Users on boarded in no time. It made Facebook to distinguish itself from other sites like Orkut and MySpace
Similarly, accquisation of Friend feed (timeline) to make the site more interesting and engaging and Launched FB Chat were to engage users so that a user spends more and more time on the website and thus a higher value proposition for the advertisers and developers.
I have tried to capture the Strategic Lessons from Facebook in my blog. Might interest you.
Like Creating a directory for Harvard ID only and then opening for all US universities, created a sense of scarcity and want in the people those who did not have the login permission so as soon as new ids were permitted Users on boarded in no time. It made Facebook to distinguish itself from other sites like Orkut and MySpace
Similarly, accquisation of Friend feed (timeline) to make the site more interesting and engaging and Launched FB Chat were to engage users so that a user spends more and more time on the website and thus a higher value proposition for the advertisers and developers.
I have tried to capture the Strategic Lessons from Facebook in my blog. Might interest you.
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