Rules for Growth
Parent topic: Growth: Company or Product
Facebook had a very simple formula for growth. They found that they would retain a user if they could help them get 7 friends in 10 days. They used this simple rule to predict with great accuracy how they would grow.
Talk by Chamath Palihapitiya: https://youtu.be/raIUQP71SBU?t=1244
Slides: https://ma.tt/2016/03/chamath-on-growing-facebook/
The money quote:
"We knew we were gonna beat MySpace when he had like 45 million users. They had like 115 million. We just knew. Just like that was not what we celebrated. We celebrated at forty-five million. It was kind of like a high-five, we're like, alright, let's get back to work. And the reason was because we started to do enough things right where we could just see. Now we understood what we were doing.
After all the testing, all the iterating, all of this stuff you know what the single biggest thing we realized? Get any individual to seven friends in ten days. That was it. You want a Keystone? That was our Keystone. There's not much more complexity than that. There's an entire team now, hundreds of people that have helped ramp this product to a billion users based on that one simple rule."
Other valuable things from the talk: