A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:15:26 · Chris Slowe
[00:15:26] S0: Yeah, a hundred percent. Then to get to the other secret sauce that we have since that beginning moderators, to start with the first version of moderation was we just basically allowed the creator of those communities to have a similar toolkit that we had for keeping track of content. That wasn't much more than just being able to remove content or see reports. Subsequently we discovered as communities got larger, they needed to be able to add more people to the moderation team and so we basically added that permission. The feature that no one really notices that I think had the biggest impact was we gave mods the ability to edit the content on the side of the page where you could actually explain the community and just say what it's about, because you had to be able to say – you come to ran a community, what am I supposed to be doing here? What we found happened very quickly is that they started using that space to start to create rules of how to use the community. You can think of it in the same way that we originally created a politics community because we wanted to get politics off the front page because people were complaining. You wanted to have the opposite of happen where it was actually – because we've been through multiple elections at that point. 2008 was the election that actually kicked it over where people were tired of politics and they're like, "Okay, no more politics here, put it over there." We had the opposite happen where it's like, yeah, only post content to peer reviewed scientific articles in our slash science. Starting to have those be a list of actual rules started creating more structure for communities to create their own culture effectively.
00:16:55 · Pablo Srugo
[00:16:55] S1: Is that the key thing that hooks people and keeps them coming back where they just find themselves so identified I guess in these and there's just something for everyone?
00:17:06 · Chris Slowe
[00:17:06] S0: Yeah, I think that with hindsight, one story we've heard over and over again for users that end up sticking around and becoming Redditors is there's this particular arc that usually goes something like, "Yeah, I noticed Reddit." It kept coming up in search results or I started seeing it in here or I'd ask a question and it would come up. I casually used it for some period of time, usually months to years. Then I found this thing, and then I discovered I was coming back every day. That thing is always very specific to the person. It's like you're a botanist or you're a hobby gardener, and you find a community that's dedicated to your particular variety of gardening and it's like, "Oh my God! I'm going to just going to stick with this forever." Another one that comes up that's also not talked about as much is we actually have really good support communities; so for people who have wanted to stop drinking, for people who have substance abuse, for people going through divorces, those can be very sticky because there's not really a place anywhere else where you can go in and be honest and talk about your actual problems and not worry about it coming back to you as a person. I mean, that's the magical model that we picked early on was we decided that we didn't want to have real names, we didn't want to have association with you. We just relied on the fact that if you're going to waste a bunch of time creating a fake user and a fake persona, if it's entertaining, great, otherwise there's no motivation to go and create a fake persona because it doesn't come back to you. It actually cuts both ways. Even though we are pseudo anonymous, the incentives are such that authenticity is what comes out of that because there's no reason to try to be an influencer.
00:18:46 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:18:46] S1: That's right. I mean, unless you're trying to troll like that, that's always the only reason I can think of to, to create like a fake, fake persona. Yeah. [00:18:53] S0: Yeah, that seems a big waste of time for very little return. The other standard approaches, of course like an opera, we deal with, and again this is a tales of time on Reddit, spam. Trying to spam, trying to sell, pushing pills, that's the cornerstone of the internet. You can either be identified as spam or you can go through the front door and pay for advertising, but there's that in between. It was just like, yeah, you're just wasting everyone's time and efforts. We'll just get rid of that content. [00:19:19] S1: In those early days, like 2005, 2006, how much was it just straight organic word of mouth, and how much did Google and Google results play a role in growth?
00:19:19 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:19:19] S1: In those early days, like 2005, 2006, how much was it just straight organic word of mouth, and how much did Google and Google results play a role in growth? [00:19:30] S0: Very early on it was almost entirely word of mouth. In fact, in the early days, we have a lot less insight into how things spread at that point because keep in mind, we're older than Google Analytics. We used to run our own analytics toolkit. Actually that was my first jobs was doing our traffic was we used to see a bump in traffic in those days in September and what we figured was probably happening was when people would go back, like people would go to college or go back to school, there was an opportunity for word of mouth on campus because the 18 through 20 was always – 20s range was always very large on Reddit. We had a suspicion that it was just like, yeah, you come back from the summer and now you tell all your friends about this place you found and then it just spreads that way, but it was definitely very organic. It wasn't until much later where, probably the last five or 10 years where Google's played such a large role. [00:20:24] S1: I'm trying to get a sense of magnitude. I know it's a long time ago, but do you remember that first year, that second year, we're talking about 10,000 users a month, 100,000, a million, what scale were you operating at
00:20:24 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:20:24] S1: I'm trying to get a sense of magnitude. I know it's a long time ago, but do you remember that first year, that second year, we're talking about 10,000 users a month, 100,000, a million, what scale were you operating at [00:20:37] S0: I looked this up because I figured you were going to ask this question. Let me actually find it. I just was complaining about it somewhere. Okay, so we didn't hit 10 million uniques per month until 2010. We hit about a million a month in mid to late '06, but at that point we also were on a pretty good three to six month doubling curve. If anything, the rate that we were growing was about the same pace where we could actually keep the site perky. When the load's going to be twice as much in three months, it really focuses the mind to like, okay, what's the current bottleneck that we're going to hit and what's the next bottleneck we're going to hit and how do we make sure we're at least a couple bottlenecks away from the actual major outage? [00:21:25] S1: How often were there big outages in those first days, like just didn't work?