Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:40:34 · Mark Pincus
[00:40:34] S0: Sure. I think if I'm unpacking that when you say that the products turn people off, it's funny you say that because FarmVille and CityVille were our biggest hits in terms of installs, engagement, retention, revenues. Now, Words with Friends and Poker were more enduring because they made the transition to mobile and the other games didn't. There's a whole other story, but I think the part you're getting to is that Zynga was in a lot of ways a victim of its own success, that our games were so viral and took over the feeds on Facebook so much that your friend who was playing it started to bug you as a person not playing it and that's fair. But what I would say, I think what's misunderstood about Zynga from the beginning and why we succeeded and we created eight massive hits out of 10 mass large game launches. We had a very high hit rate. It wasn't that we were good at virality. It was that we were focused on two things that I think we did better than anybody else and we had lots of competitors, lots and copying and we still managed to keep winning. And so it couldn't be that we were just spammier or better at virality. First, we had this core mission and focus around connecting the world through games and Bing Gordon and I kept coming back to this idea that I love and I want your founders, product makers watching this to join me in thinking about, which is how can we add more dimensionality? I love this idea of, it's why I call it bold beat. It's how do I take this thing that's kind of gotten boring and wrote, poker or whatever, how do I add a whole new dimension to it? And by adding social, by adding real identities, by giving you this, you're doing social networking, you're in this cocktail party and now we're giving you a way to actually meet new people or improve your relationships in a game. Well, the reason why people, so many, especially middle-aged women love FarmVille and these games was because they had this hobby, but they weren't doing it alone and they were doing it with their good friends, making new friends. And in the game, our most successful features were co-op play. There were things that let you do gifting and do things of value for your friends. And so we called the games invest, express and connect. You could do something that was, you were being seen as creative.
00:43:29 · Mark Pincus
I like to say people don't want to be creative, they want to feel creative. So we were letting you feel creative, look creative to people. It's what Midjourney does for me today. And then we were letting you... So you were expressing yourself and then you were connecting with people around it. So that was the first thing. And then if you think at a mechanical metric level, our core metric was retention, not virality. We grew, we outlasted everybody because we had the best retention. I think we were the only consumer company in the world that tracked Day 365 retention. I don't think anyone tracks it today. I talk about in the book, I think it's a gift to your founders. I believe that the most valuable companies in the world, well, statistically this is true, they have the highest Day 365 retention. Can you build against Day 365 retention? Yes. We can't wait till Day 365. We can find early indicators of a positive Day 365 and a negative Day 365 retention. If you have low D1, low D30, you will probably not have high Day 365. So those track, those are correlated, but you can have the opposite. You can have very high Day 30 and a zero Day 365, which is most products. And if you don't think about why someone would use this in a year, if you don't have that mentality, it turns out when someone tries our product, they think that way too. They kind of think, "Is this worth investing in?" Whether it's a game or a camera, it's, "Am I going to use this in a year? Should I tell my friends about this or should I bother investing? Should I bother giving it information about me or whatever?" And I think there's a mentality to that. And I like to say viral-based companies, and there's been many, be real. We've seen these, they're sinking speedboats. They're trying to drive faster than they're sinking. They're trying to get more people in. You can either go faster, bail water out faster, which is trying to get people back or plug the hole in the boat or build a better boat that doesn't have a hole. But we were tracking both in our games, in our network, what was the retention? And we were really constantly thinking about that. And I think the two things to take away from Zynga's success in my opinion that I hold is to have a strong innovation vision that translates to what your teams are doing every week. And we even built a metric that's still not used by anyone.
00:46:29 · Mark Pincus
This is an Easter egg if this doesn't get cut and anyone's still listening, we built a metric called ASN and it stood for, we measured what was your active social network. So we looked at how many round trips you had with a friend or another player, meaning you took a turn and they took a turn back, you gifted them and they gifted you back. And we found that if you went from zero ASN to one, there was an 80% chance we saw you again in the next month. And if we got you to a four, there was an 80% chance we'd see you 22 out of the next 30 days. And so we could actually build and innovate against that metric and it made sense because if you saw positive feedback loops, it's like someone likes your photos, comments, that's probably the biggest dopamine hit we get.
00:47:28 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:49:08 · Mark Pincus
[00:49:08] S0: It's probably equally surprising to you how little we're seeing in social and consumer in general. It seems like people have given up on the idea that a social app could take off or be viral and I see them every so often and they've given up for good reason because nothing's proven and nothing's working. So I like to think first, is there latent demand? So if just because a category doesn't exist today, it doesn't mean that we don't want it as consumers. In fact, the best opportunities are usually the opposite. And in 2007 when I started Zynga, video gaming was a $23 billion business, but I had stopped playing games. I didn't know anyone who played games. It was like not even a top 10 activity on the web and I... ... A top 10 activity on the web. And I thought there's a latent demand. I love games. I love playing with my family, but I can't get people to play games with me and it's too much investment. It's too hard. It was crawling across broken glass to get someone to play a game with you. I got my nephews who are intense gamers to play Rise of Nations with me and we set up two machines for them and two for me and we had FaceTime going on a machine and then the game and we were on a game server and we did that one time. I was like, "That is a lot of effort." And it was fun, but we did it once. My premise was, "Okay, I believe this could be and should be a mass market activity. I believe adults want to give themselves permission to play, but I got to make it so accessible, so cheap in terms of what it asks for them." Free, not just free event, which it wasn't. It was $60 to go buy a game. So I made it free and I said, "I'm going to make it a game you already know. Three clicks and you're in and I'm going to ask five to 15 minutes of you to do this. And you're going to trip over it. It's a breadcrumb somewhere. Say we don't go to the comic book store, but if the comics were in the newspaper, we'd read them." So I believed there was a latent demand. And in fact, today gaming is a $280 billion industry. And I actually think there's latent demand. Again, I don't play games. No one I know plays games other than my nieces and nephews. And yet it's this big a business. So I actually think there's another massive growth waiting in games because they're this big and it's this boring and adults aren't doing it or they must be some.
00:52:02 · Mark Pincus
It's very big, but none that I know. Okay, so social and consumer. I believe that we have beyond a latent demand for social, we are being social online. We are on Snapchat and Instagram and TikTok, but I believe it's lost the adrenaline. I think a lot about adrenaline. Is there a heat in it? Are you excited to go get on Instagram or do you feel a little bit like you're eating potato chips? Are these positive calories or negative calories or empty calories in the middle? And I think one interesting thing, we looked at NPS, Net Promoter Scores and we saw that when people quit Facebook and quit Instagram, they went from a plus 35 to a negative 35. People have a feeling like they just quit smoking. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram. They're not missing the party. They're like, "Whoa, I got off it." So I think all that's to say, I think it's the biggest unexplored opportunity there is on the internet. I feel very confident that someone is going to reinvent this social experience for the agentic AI age, but how are they going to do it? I would guess that they're going to give us productivity again, that they're going ... Part of what we got, people forget Facebook gave us massive social productivity. We were able to stay in the loop with 300 or 1,000 friends. LinkedIn gave us massive productivity and they still do, but they started to move away from that productivity into a realm of wasting time because they wanted to engage more and have more ads and less LinkedIn, but they might have ads now, but definitely Instagram had TikTok envy so they started doing that. And so I think there is a new step function of productivity that we could be getting in that experience that our agents are letting us stay even more in the loop with the people we care about, but not wasting our time as much. And I'll also say this, there's a side of this, I call this social thing the cocktail party. Okay. That's the big instinct vein for me. And I think about that cocktail party and I think where is that happening or where does it want to happen and how do we add things to the cocktail? We'd love to host the cocktail party and if we're not, we'd love to be at it. We know it when we see a great cocktail party, you know it.