A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:45:05 · Chris Slowe
[00:45:05] S0: I know. I mean, that's a fantastic question. Actually, we had a couple of early forays into it. I think that I can start off with saying the first answer is honestly capacity. We had a very small team at that point. Like I said, we had four or five engineers tops. Rather than spending time learning a new new kit, we initially decided to just build like a mobile experience that was actually not bad. Early on there was actually – I wonder if it still works. I'm going to really quickly just check and see if this thing is still in existence. No, it's not anymore. Okay, good. We used to have a particular view of Reddit that was optimized for mobile browsers. At this point 2008, we weren't just targeting iPhones, we were targeting Blackberry, Research in Motion and Palm OS and all those features where we didn't know what was going to be the clear winner, so we just picked that. Second, we actually did at one point bring in a contract firm to build us a first version of a Reddit app. Then subsequently after about 2008 when we open sourced, we started having more of an ecosystem of third party usage of Reddit appearing and early on there was a whole set of third party apps that developed. In fact to the point where I believe in 2013, 2014 it's after I left, but Reddit bought one of the major iOS apps called Alien Blue and then relied on that as the iOS solution for a while with no equivalent solution for Android. By about 2016, the idea was that we were looking to probably do a bit of the look of Reddit and do some cleanup, and at the same time it was worth actually investing in some first party clients that really were taken from the ground up that had a particular more modern style.
00:46:52 · Pablo Srugo
[00:46:52] S1: The other thing I wanted to touch on is the monetization piece. I mean, you mentioned it wasn't really a focus I guess until about you guys came back in 2015, 2016. I'm curious just what worked? Fundamentally, what were some of the big things that you did? I mean, you think, okay, you're going to make money on ads, but what were some of the key things that you implemented that really drove the real revenue that you have now?
00:47:13 · Chris Slowe
[00:47:13] S0: Okay, well, two things. One of them is going to sound like a cop out but I'm going to say it anyway. One of the things that actually had the most impact for revenue was just fricking grit. The reason I say grit is because trying to bootstrap an ads business – it really was bootstrapping at that point because we're talking about very low numbers even in 2015. Trying to bootstrap an ads product on top of a "social media platform" was extremely difficult given the fact that we had made a bunch of different choices from the rest of social media. We had no real user data. We have basically interest data. Everything is in the public and in the clear. You go to the front page, you're going to see the good and the bad of Reddit based on popularity. That's the value proposition of the product is that it's going to be an unvarnished view of what people are talking about. No wild gardens, no fancy look and feel. It really was educating advertisers over a very long time and really kudos to our ads team and our sales team then to now of just having to continue that path of saying like, "No, we're differentiated. We have a different value proposition than what you got off the social media. We're not really social media but we'll pretend to be, or at least we'll call ourselves that." It's the cleanest bucket. The second thing that actually came up early on we actually did do a self-serve product in 2008. The first version was my build where we wanted to actually have users be able to basically buy screen real estate on Reddit directly with the credit card. From about 2016 on, it was rebuilding that into a modern auction, actually doing it in a CPC model as opposed to a CPM model which was a lot harder to explain, building out things like tracking pixels; really building the whole kit and caboodle of what is expected on a modern ads platform but again, with a start date of 2016 as opposed to everyone else who had started in the early 18s. Lots of catch up, but also the nice thing about catch up is that you do get a chance to take advantage of the modern toolkit. We made it all the way into the 55 minute mark or so without me saying LOMs. This is a tech podcast. Somebody has to say LOM at some point. I think it's on the screen.
00:48:59 · Chris Slowe, Pablo Srugo
There's a certain advantage of being a startup now and being able to take advantage of the full kit of kitchen sink ML technology is actually ridiculously powerful for especially building the first version. You can save yourself some amount of ashla just doing it using the modern toolkit of just simple experience asking a bot to help you build it and getting moderation for free or at least getting some amount of content understanding kind of comes for free these days which is a really nice and powerful. [00:49:52] S1: Listen Chris, we'll stop it there. I'll ask the two questions that that we always end up on. The first one for Reddit, you touched on this but I'll ask it anyways. When did you feel like Reddit had true product market fit? [00:50:05] S0: In hindsight, it was pretty clear that it immediately solved the need that we didn't know was unmet. If we're going to pick a date, I would say probably when we launched subreddits, it was pretty clear that that was a thing that meant that Reddit could continue to grow and scale past a relatively small community of nerds, frankly. [00:50:25] S1: The other question I have is having gone through this journey over the last 20 years and especially since you're an angel and certainly a mentor and advisor to a lot of early stage founders, what are some of the most common pieces of advice that you find yourself giving early stage founders or if you could give yourself back then, however you want to think about it?
00:50:41 · Chris Slowe
[00:50:41] S0: Yeah, I mean, I think that some of the things – actually, at this point in my career, I have entire mental frameworks about scaling orgs, which I find terrifying to say out loud. Again, having 1,000 people on my team right now means that I don't think in terms of individuals; I think in terms of teams and org shapes. The evolution of a startup, there's a point usually that happens around the series B phase, which is almost like the startup adolescence phase where it's like nothing quite fits. You don't really know what you're doing anymore because you've had enough success to get a couple of rounds of VC. Usually that's when they you try to expand the product portfolio and you discover that things aren't sticking as well as they were on your mainline product, and you're also going through the team growth phase of – there's a switchover that happens at around 50 people where you go from effectively a small tightly knit family almost, not to abuse the term, into more of like, no, there are just people who are your coworkers who you don't necessarily know very well. That can be very tough for startups to go through because there's so much initial work that is based on implicit distributed trust across the entire company. Those two things tend to hit about the same point, which is usually around the series B and that's a fun problem where you start to think about things – you think about teams rather than individual people. That's usually the point also where you have to hire a real manager, hire somebody who's been a director before to actually start laying out processes that actually help you scale your business. I think that was actually the place where that's where I feel like I learned the most at Hipmunk was actually building a company up to 100 people and then also got a chance to start deploying that toolkit, coming back to Reddit when it was roughly the same size.
00:52:23 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:52:23] S1: Chris, it was great having you on the show. [00:52:25] S0: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. [00:52:29] S1: I just gave you content that you like so much. You actually listened to the end. Guess what? You didn't pay a single dollar. Not only that, I didn't even put any ads in your face, so you just got a bunch of content for free. Now that I've delivered that value, I'm asking for something in return. Open your app, open Apple Podcasts, open Spotify, open whatever app you use to listen to this and hit that follow button. It's actually going to help you because it's going to help you make sure you don't miss out on the next episode, which you like so much that you listen to the whole thing.