Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:41:31 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
And also, it can be what we call a random access so people can get back to it anytime they want, like if they're feeling help. And so if you divide onboarding into those two things and then figure out what to put in one and what to put in the other, I think you can be quite successful. And this is just the tip of the iceberg that I get into in the book. [00:41:56] S1: Are there any examples of really big onboarding wins, things that really helped with conversion or activation that come to mind?
00:42:01 · Oji Udezue
[00:42:01] S0: Well, I think keep it short is one big win. The fewer things, the better that are central that everyone has to go through. It's unclear if all those click throughs go here, go here, and all those things work. The wizards. Yeah. Yeah. The wizards have had, in my experience, limited benefit so much as just directing people to the one thing that they need to do post mandatory onboarding. Having examples, not 10, one or two of what good looks like is particularly powerful because it's mimetic. People see, oh, okay. This is exactly what I'm shooting for, is very powerful. In terms of trial and conversion, letting people understand and being very clear about where they are in the trial cycle, whether that you want them to pay for it now or they need to pay for it later after seven days. Have... Having them understand that really clearly so they know where they are versus they feel like they're completely at sea, I think is very important for conversion. I think there are a few things like that, but I also wanna mention that it's different for every product. Right? Depending on where you are in the quadrant and the amount of augmentation and problem solving and how sharp the problem is, you might wanna adjust your your approach. And this is the kind of thing that there is no... There are some fundamentals, but it's not necessarily this one size fits all. In fact, at Typeform, we're trying to maybe invent a new twist on freemium just because of some of the things we're seeing for our particular customers. And so, you know, these are, for me, some new learning as well as I go through each different product.
00:43:49 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:43:49] S1: Along these lines of onboarding activation and getting a user activated is really important. And I'm curious, do you have an example of what an activation milestone was at Calendly or Twitter or Typeform just to give people a sense of like, here's a good example of an activated user milestone?
00:44:03 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:44:03] S0: I think this goes back to, you know, people with Pendo's and the Amplitude of this world. You have to sort of think through your journey, right? Like, at Calendly and also at Typeform, we have three thresholds of increasing activation, right? And we just try to make sure that people go through each one, as many people as possible. And frankly, we try to forget a drop off between the increasing definitions of activation. So at Calendly, we wanna make sure you've you've you've created your first meeting. Right? But then if you've created five within a week, that's really much more powerful. At Typeform, it's it's really about have you published the form and have you gotten responses and have you gone to look at what the responses mean in the insights page, for example. At Twitter, is are you following anyone or are you being followed? Right? Because that that verb, follow, is the way you start to construct your informal community. Remember what I said is Twitter is for people who want informal community around a topic. That is not... You know, Facebook is about who do you know. Twitter is about who do you wanna know, who's passionate about what you're passionate about. And so if you haven't set up your follow graph at all, you're not gonna really activate. It's not gonna be compelling for you. [00:45:23] S1: Awesome. Those are great examples. It's funny hearing that Twitter activation milestone out of context sounds so creepy. Have you followed anyone, or is anyone following you?
00:45:23 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[00:45:23] S1: Awesome. Those are great examples. It's funny hearing that Twitter activation milestone out of context sounds so creepy. Have you followed anyone, or is anyone following you? [00:45:31] S0: Yeah. Because a lot of people go in and then they don't... They tweet into the void or they don't feel like they have a voice. Right. But that's not the most important thing. Most important thing is are you getting content that you're interested in? That makes you wanna come back and see more and follow is a huge part of doing that. [00:45:47] S1: Yeah. Just on the point of Twitter, I don't know if this goes anywhere, but it's crazy how it keeps going no matter how much destruction is happening all around. [00:45:58] S0: You want you want me to talk about that? Because I wanna talk about [00:46:00] S1: it. Please. Let's do it.
00:46:01 · Oji Udezue
[00:46:01] S0: So, you know, one of the things they they they they... I wanna say they. One of the things I learned early on is network effects. Yeah. Network effects... Let me define it. Network effects is when you create value for passive members by other people joining the network. So I am by myself. I have done nothing. I'm at home chilling, but one person joins the network and immediately I gain benefit. Okay. So think about Facebook. If there are 8,000,000,000 people on Facebook, it means that all of a sudden I can reach everyone on the planet. And so the more people on Facebook, the more it's valuable to me regardless of my effort. That's network effect. If I'm into Word, Word, you know, Word processor, you know, Microsoft Word, and the more people who use that file format, it means that the more Word documents I can read. And so I did nothing, so by increasing the people adoption of Word, I gain benefit. Network effect. That's what it is. So Twitter, know, and then this is the mental model of critical mass. Network effect is about critical mass. You hit a critical mass, and sometimes that's not mathematically defined. And then you've hit network effect because people wanna come because people are already there. Right? So Twitter has hit critical mass in lots of your favorite social networks. Network effects is a feature by itself, and it's the most powerful feature. A good way to illustrate the power of network effects is Twitter did not die because threads came up... Came about. Right? That's the power of network effect. In fact, the last telegram was sent in 2016, over a hundred years after it was invented because of network effects. It had to be manually closed down. I believe Friendster is still alive. So we have to be really clear that it's really hard to kill a network effects business. Now how do you how do you actually accomplish it if you were to accomplish it? Well, the revenue side of any social network is vulnerable to attack. So for example, if advertisers stop being on Twitter, for example, they're not gone because, again, network effects affects them. They wanna go where their eyeballs are. But if for some reason they disappeared, then while the people will continue to come, the ability to have money to improve the network will disappear, and that is sort of a negative spiral. But it's very, very hard to kill business...