How to Get Users and Grow - Alex Schultz, VP of Growth at Facebook - Stanford CS183F: Startup School

Alex Schultz, VP of Growth at Facebook, shares with us how to get users, how to grow, and how to measure growth.

[aemericenglish]

1. Growth key is retention
2. Network effect - people use what others use
3. Build more category

[jdavidson]

Very insightful - should be mandatory to go through this series before starting a startup

[Zeangjpn]

Great presentation. Very thought provoking statement @ 24:53
"The purpose of a Startup is to grow."

[GraehamF]

One of my favs from this year's series.

[Eren-zluw]

It fascinates me how knowledge like this is free on the internet, learning from entrepreneurs like Alex is so extremely valuable and people rather be watching Netflix all the time to entertain themselves

[lenso]

I watch people on youtube for long years. This is in my Top10 list. This guy has a unique shaped brain with filled so much useful information. Loved.

[richaprasad]

This was great! Please do more slides/presentation type talks like this instead of panels. Panels seem to have orders of magnitude fewer deep introspective takeaways to communicate.

[justcx]

1.Retention is very important
2.Understand what's going on，identify the opportunities in that data you've understood, and then execute against it.
3.Best of talks about making decisions with 70% of the data not 90% of the data.
4.Move fast, focus on retention and have one key metric that you care about for your company growth.

[simonseverinoold]

Brilliant. I am sharing this with all founders in our accelerator.

[littlebrit]

There were sending out a lot of spam emails. I remember I got 5-6 everyday asking to sign up. That time public email service users were asked to share they contacts list with the app, so that is how they got hold of my emails addresses.

[RoscaLion]

I did the math at 11:14. It was 800, 000.
1 (New User) - 1.3 (Churn) + 1.1 (Resurrecting Users) = 0.8 - Add the units and its 800, 000.

[ultronsam]

Looking forward to the day I will also be in Stanford to give a lecture as a Founder.

[akshaykamathb]

1:29 I loved what D'Angelo ( Adam D'Angelo ) had to say, so that lecture, if you weren't here, I'd strongly recommend you go back & see what Adam D'Angelo said coz I could not emphasize his points on metrics more than enough

[ultronsam]

As an early-stage founder currently reading 'Hacking Growth' by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, I can relate to what Mr. Alex said about using different retention metrics based on the category you're in. A Saas business retention metric may be different from an E-commerce's.

[ultronsam]

Personalized communication is very crucial.

[tjc]

Tons of take home messages. Worth taking some time to digest.

[NaftaliBudamba]

Network Effect- User Values
Platforms/market- OS
Product Features- Categories

[mironic]

Great but anyone could help to clarify what he talks about at 15:29 and further. Is it about the curve that will become flat at some point so you may assume that it will be at the same level +100 days from that point OR it is that you may take curve representing the retention and use it to predict other metrics?

[mashah]

This is my analytical observation, not a criticism. I don't agree that "Email is dead for people under 25 in my opinion. Young people don’t use email." Youth use emails (but don't like it) as a communication channel at schools with teachers and at colleges with professors & lecturers and to send all homework and projects via email (it's still a good tool for teachers to distribute information to the mass), as well as with all official communications with school/colleges administrations. So, knowing this fact, it's still a good metric to have these users in mind, and it's a really good number of Facebook users.

[cindyshen]

Reminds me of the Disruptive Innovation theory by Clay Christensen.