starting things at a fast growing company

Twitter Talk at the University of Michigan Center for Entrepreneurship (@UMCFE)

@zanes

Philosophy

Simple Framework for Starting Things

Two Examples

1. Customer Discovery & Validation Phases○ Twitter Insights - new analytics product for

developers and publishers

2. Customer Creation Phase

○ Growth Engineering across Twitter and some innovations in user prompts

Twitter Insights Story

● Twitter Ecosystem: great content, distributed and consumed widely.

● Publishers and Developers are key content creators and customers for our platform products. Create disproportionate value for Consumers.

● We want them to invest more in Twitter. They want to better understand network effects and maximize their return on investment.

● We created a new team to address this opportunity.

Customers

The Problem

Maximizing Value and Creating the Best Customer Experience

Building Insights

Customer Discovery with Few Partners● Four Iterations in Q2 - what do customers care about?● NPS Method for Feedback - is Insights actionable?

Customer Validation at Scale● MVP Limited Release in Q3● Open Beta early 2014

Customer Creation● In 2014

Charter Partners

Iteration 1

Iteration 2

Iteration 3

Iteration 4

MVP / Alpha Iteration

Some Take-Aways

● Be customer focused

● Your idea is a hypothesis, prove it ● Build, Measure, Learn / Iterate, Iterate, Iterate ● Build & hone startup skills at a fast growing company

● Twitter: Lots of opportunities for impact without distractions like hiring, fundraising, etc. Great culture and people. Come join the flock!

Growth EngineeringCustomer Creation Phase

@madster26

Simple Framework for Starting Things

Growth Engineering 101When do you need it?

Pa

Credit** Paul Graham’s Startup lifecycle...

Characteristics of a growth engineer?

Curiosity

Survey

Stalk...Errrm...Observe

Characteristics of a growth engineer?

Creativity

Typical work cycle of a growth engineer

A/B Testing

Growth product areas

Messaging & Notification:Email campaignsPush notificationsSms notificationsPrompts

Activation & Virality:Signup flowNew user experiencePeople recommendation

Promptbird

Is a platform for

- Delivering high value/actionable alerts in a highly targeted & timely manner

- Serve as a platform that teams within the organization can use to promote specific actions

Prompts on mobile

Prompts On Web

Targeting specific users

Real time targeting:- We built our own targeting language- Our current intern rewrote the entire grammar parsing tool to make it faster & easier to understand

Custom targeting:- Uses data generated by Hadoop Jobs

User specific fatigue handling

Scalability & Usability

- Ability to scale up / down prompts from 1 ~ 250+ million users

- Interactive dashboard for anyone in the organization to create prompts and launch it to the entire twitter user base across multiple platforms in under 5 minutes

Some current projects

- Building an analytics pipeline for customers of promptbird

- Building predictive models for interaction & fatiguing

Questions? Join the flock!