Getting2Alpha
Casey Winters: Turning startups into rocketships
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land. It's Getting2Alpha the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Casey Winters is a growth specialist who understands how to blend qualitative and quantitative data to get massive and sustained results.
Casey learned his craft at Grubhub and Pinterest and then moved on to Greylock, the storied investment firm to help their portfolio companies scale up and accelerate their growth. Casey focuses on the space where scaling techniques meet product design, and he's collected some hard won and actionable insights about what gets in the way of growth and what you can do to set up your team to succeed.
Casey: So I think it's not about just who you listen to, but it's, it's what [00:01:00] you take away from it. For example, our operations team used to come to me with a lot of feature requests around like making it easier to log in or password reset or things like that. And I told them something counterintuitive. I said, bring me problems, not solutions.
And the same is true for users. You want to listen to their problems, but not what they ask you to build because they, they are not product thinkers and you can extract feedback from way more people and probably think of something much better than they could. In the case of user research, you might do tenure interviews and one person has a really huge problem in a certain area.
You can then go back to the data and see if a lot of other people seem to follow that pattern or not, or if it's more of a one-off and you can kind of combine the qualitative and quantitative feedback to be like, okay, is this the major thing we need to address? Or it's the thing that three other people told us about more important and, you know, kind of combining that qualitative and quantitative feedback or where time is, is really [00:02:00] helpful.
Amy: Listen in and find out how a Silicon Valley insider helps startups turn into rocket ships.
Welcome Casey.
Casey: Thanks for having me.
Amy: I'm thrilled that you're here and I'm really looking forward to getting to know you better and providing the opportunity for other folks too, as well. So let's start with your current role. What is it that you do and where do you do it?
Casey: Yeah, so basically I'm a growth advisor in residence at Greylock Partners.
We're a venture capital firm that does, you know, everything from seed to late stage deals. Basically what I do is I travel from portfolio company to portfolio company and help growth in any way I can. That can be data analysis. It can be helping them think through their onboarding or SEO strategy. It could be interviewing candidates, kind of whatever they need.
I then try to extrapolate what I'm learning from all that work and [00:03:00] expand on it to help the broader community in the form of blogging about growth, podcasts on growth challenges. Just trying to make all of the best ways to grow for startups more universally known.
Amy: Awesome. So a lot of people have different definitions of what growth is, and there's been a lot of talk about growth hacking, etc.
What's your perspective on growth?
Casey: Yeah, so the way I think about it is there are different types of things to work on in a business, especially a startup. One is innovating, which is coming up with new value for your customer. One is iterating, which is, you know, making the value that you're currently delivering a little bit stronger.
And then the third is connecting more people to the existing value of the product. And that's what I think growth does. It connects people to the value that you're currently delivering and make sure that they experience it. And a lot of that is reducing friction that prevents people from understanding the [00:04:00] value that the product delivers.
Amy: So without deep product value, it wouldn't make sense to do growth.
Casey: Absolutely. You know, what we tell founders here at Greylock is that The first thing you have to do is make a product that has value. And then after that we can think about growing it. But all the growth hacking in the world won't help a product that doesn't deliver value.
It might go up for a little bit of time, but it'll come right back down.
Amy: Short term, short term results. Yeah, I've seen that too a lot, especially with gamification. So can you tell us one story, just a short story from your daily work life that gives us a glimpse into how you work with. Uh, these portfolio companies around growth issues again, cause it's a, it's a tricky thing.
So what's something that happened recently or in the last few months that, uh, just kind of typifies this, how you engage with this issue.
Casey: Yeah. So I think what's probably the [00:05:00] most different from a normal role is that there's just a lot of context switching. So for example, last week, I had this kind of a typical day.
I started the day working with a product on how they can rank better on Amazon because it's a product and Amazon is really important. And then immediately went to a call with a Canadian company that's doing a lot of offline and online marketing to figure out how they can attribute their marketing spend better.
Then I traveled to a startup to talk about how to get their videos. More widely distributed, uh, then I met with a company about how to do scaled SEO by locations because they have a lot of different parts of the country that they cover. And then wrapped up the day with a dinner at Greylock HQ about how design founders can get more customers for their new products.
So you kind of get a spread of all the different types of things that I work on, you know, to go deep. One of the first projects that I worked on here was helping a consumer social startup figure out how their growth model actually works. They kind of rose up very quickly, but they [00:06:00] didn't really understand how that was happening so that they could control it better and could keep it going.
So we had to diagnose where people were coming from, which users were staying, which users weren't staying, and then build more of an understanding of the right things to do to keep growth happening in a sustainable fashion.
Amy: Wow. You've picked up a lot of skills along the way to be able to deal with all those different areas.
That's very exciting and impressive. So you've worked for some really amazing companies through their high growth stages, which I'm sure part of how you picked up these skills. Most recently, you were involved with Pinterest. How did that come about? How did you come to be working at Pinterest?
Casey: Yeah, well, I started my career at apartments.com as a marketing analyst, and basically I had to do there is I had to measure every channel we were using to grow for effectiveness. That really helped me understand how the channels were working. Tech companies used to grow work. And from there, I started working on some of those channels directly and startup ideas [00:07:00] inside the parent company.
And when Grubhub, uh, raised their series a, they were a couple of X people that used to work at apartments. com and they were looking for their first marketer to come in and scale it. And a friend recommended me for that. And after I was working on that for five and a half years and Grubhub was scheduled to go public, I was looking to move to the Bay area and Pinterest Happen to reach out to me at the same time because they were looking to add some of these skills to their team.
Amy: That's cool. So how big was Pinterest when you joined? And then what phase of their growth? Did you work with them? So
Casey: Pinterest had about 200 employees when I joined and 40 million monthly active users. So basically Pinterest had grown very virally in the early days, uh, via Facebook open graph. And now they were in kind of a second phase of growth where the product had moved to be more of a personal interest network instead of a social catalog where it started.
So the [00:08:00] viral growth had kind of, And they needed to think about a new growth model. And by the time I left, uh, Pinterest was at 150 million monthly active users. So, uh, some nice scale from where they are and, and hopefully it keeps going.
Amy: So when you joined Pinterest, they had gone through their vial growth phase.
And so you were really helping them double down on that, which is amazing because a lot of companies stumble at that point, how did Pinterest actually get their first few 100 customers? How did they get started with their early adopters and how did that shape their, their culture?
Casey: My understanding, obviously I wasn't there at the time, but literally what happened is the CEO went to DIY and craft conferences and met with bloggers and built relationships and showed them the product.
And they happen to like it. So he worked with, uh, those people to create a campaign that involved their readers, uh, on, on the Pinterest platform. Pinterest was invite only, so it was a way for the bloggers to invite [00:09:00] their readers to, to join Pinterest. The basic concept was called Pin It Forward. And what was interesting about the time is that Facebook open graph allowed you to post all of someone's activity on your network onto their Facebook wall, uh, which would be seen in their friends feeds.
So people started seeing all these amazing pieces of content in their feed, clicking to go over to Pinterest and requesting to get an invite. And then when they did that, they would follow their friends and they would see the amazing content that their friends were posting. So it worked really well in their early days.
Amy: So when you joined, you grew it from 40 million monthly actives to 150 million monthly actives, and you must have gone through a real expansion. And that's something that so many startups founders struggle with is that really focused early audience that gets you off the ground.
And then when you expand, you really have to think differently and more broadly about broadening that audience. How did that play out in your work?
Casey: Yeah, so [00:10:00] when you think about the early community of Pinterest, which was, you know, primarily women in the Midwest that were into DIY and crafts. A very social model where you sign up, you follow all your friends and you see everything that they're posting makes sense because it's a very homogenous community.
But as soon as Pinterest started to expand to, you know, the women's significant others or their friends on the coast, the interests of the different people became more, you know, more diverse. Heterogeneous. So the following model is breaking down quite a bit. You know, men would sign up and they would follow their significant other and they would see their significant other posting their dream wedding dresses and then think that the product wasn't for them.
So we really had to change to ask people what they were interested in instead of just following our friends, which made it less social of a product over time, but more relevant. The other thing that really changed how he had to think about growth was that Facebook open graph. Decided to limit the distribution from all these services that were using it.
So Pinterest needed a new channel [00:11:00] to introduce new users to it. So what we figured out is that we could make all the great content being posted and all the boards being curated, available to search engines and use that platform for growth instead of Facebook.
Amy: What were some of the growing pains along the way internally when you were working with folks who are used to doing it a certain way, or just, you know, that's one of the things people don't talk about that often, but someone like you has really been in the thick of it.
And clearly you push through a lot of those, right? What were some of those struggles?
Casey: Yeah. So when you're dealing with a passionate early community, uh, they have understood how the product works. They think the product is basically perfect as is, or they might have requests for additions to the product that are reflective of people that really understand the core product and want more power user features.
And what's interesting is that most of your early employees reflect that group as well. They're very connected to those groups of early users. They're very power users themselves. [00:12:00] So it can bias. The work that you do to make the engaged users stay engaged instead of to reach new audiences. And this was a challenge that Pinterest had to really overcome for a couple of things, expanding into new demographics like men, as well as expanding outside of the United States.
And what we found is that, you know, if we build products for existing users, not only did they not help us, Grow to new users. It actually made the product more complicated for new users So then they had a harder time connecting to the actual value pinterest provided So we had to really kind of refocus the company on An entirely new set of users instead of just listening to our existing users, which can be A fairly hard adjustment to make as, as a team, it's something we did.
And we had to change our goals to focus on international users. We had to change some of our product development processes. We had to do a lot of international [00:13:00] research to show how people weren't getting the very basic stuff. So building very complicated features, wasn't going to help our problems.
Amy: Your description makes me think that for a company like Pinterest, going through those changes. Your internal description of what product market fit means needs to actually change over time.
Casey: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, the first thing to understand is that there are different markets, right? And the definition of product market fit is that the product needs to be tuned to each of those markets. So we had a core user base that loved the product as is, and the employees love the product as is.
But if we wanted to reach international people, if we wanted to reach men, we did not have that strong a product market fit there. And we needed to make changes if we wanted to be successful with those people. But then you want to make those changes and not alienate your core user base, which we eventually we figured out how to do, which is make the product simpler for new users, but don't change it for the old users was kind of the high level [00:14:00] strategy of what we did there.
But it took a long time to get comfortable with saying, Hey, then you use your experience has to be totally different from what it's been because. We're reaching totally different people. We're reaching people that aren't early adopters. We're reaching people that don't speak English and wouldn't like all the English content we normally would recommend.
And it took a long time to get over that hump as a company.
Amy: How do you actually manage that in practice on the front lines? How do you create a new experience for new users? That's really simple. But not change it for all users.
Casey: Right. Uh, so essentially you have to be able to first off as a growth team, define the parts of the product you own and the parts of the product that you don't.
So we created these really clear swim lanes for the growth team and said, okay, the, the logged out experience, that's something growth completely owns and they have the freedom to experiment the way they need to experiment the onboarding experience. Is something growth completely owns, uh, emails and [00:15:00] notifications or something.
The growth team completely does things like that. And then as we did more of this research, we realized that that real estate had to expand a little bit. So not only does one part of the growth team on the onboarding experience, they need to really own the experience for the first 30 days. And as part of owning that, they will strip away a lot of the complexity of the core product and reintroduce it.
Once we see that. Users are understanding the real core concepts they need to understand first, and that ended up being not a hard thing to work on technically. So you basically say I'm going to run an experiment just on new users. I'm a run experiment just on existing users. That part was pretty easy to do.
I think the harder part of that evolution was making sure that we had access to all the right components of the product. So I felt like a holistic experience to new users that would solve the problem.
Amy: How do you think about the difference between what you do with qualitative and quantitative feedback [00:16:00] and how you manage it?
It, I mean, it sounds like most of what you get when you're working on growth is the quantitative feedback from user behavior. Is that right?
Casey: I think in the early days for Pinterest, that was certainly true. And then in the long run, we ended up having a nice balance of quantitative and qualitative feedback.
I think. Quantitative feedback can help you understand what is happening and what people are doing, but doesn't necessarily tell you why. And that's something that you need the qualitative feedback to really help you hone in on. So, you know, when, when I started on the growth team, it was basically a lot of AB tests and analyzing data.
And by the time I left, we're still doing a lot of that work, but we're coupling it with A lot of qualitative user feedback, bringing users in, watching them use the products, asking them questions, and then also traveling to different parts of the world since international was so important to our growth strategy to see how someone in Germany would do it, how someone in Brazil would do it, and those yielded tremendous insights [00:17:00] that unlocked new opportunities for us that data alone wouldn't have helped us understand.
Amy: So when you're in the midst of that and you're gathering, say the qualitative feedback, doing those user tests, watching them, et cetera, something that often happens is you'll get conflicting feedback, right? And filtering feedback is really tricky, whether it's qualitative or quantitative, knowing what to pay attention to and whatnot, when you're faced with either a lot of data or conflicting data, how do you think about that for yourself as a growth expert?
How do you hone in on what to focus on and what to tune out.
Casey: So I think it's not about just who you listen to, but it's, it's what you take away from it. For example, our operations team used to come to me with a lot of feature requests around like making it easier to log in or password reset or things like that.
And I told them something counterintuitive. I said, bring me problems, not solutions. And the same is true for users. You want to listen to [00:18:00] their problems, but not what they ask you to build, because they, they are not product thinkers and you can extract feedback from way more people and probably think of something much better than they could.
In the case of user research, you might do 10 interviews and one person has a really huge problem in a certain area. You can then go back to the data and see if a lot of other people seem to follow that pattern or not, or if it's more of a one off and you can kind of combine the qualitative and quantitative feedback to be like, okay, is this the major thing we need to address?
Or is the thing that three other people told us about more important and, you know, kind of combining that qualitative and quantitative feedback over time is, is really helpful. We had similar situation at Grubhub when we were thinking about building a loyalty program. We didn't know what we didn't know about how people use delivery.
So we sent a survey to our users asking how often they order delivery and how often they use Grubhub. And we found [00:19:00] that 40 percent of people. Ordered delivery more often than they used Grubhub and we had no idea why so then we you know talked to a bunch of users on the phone to understand what the reasons were and then we basically collected those reasons and then sent another survey to that group that ordered delivery more often they were Grubhub and then the question was why When you order delivery and don't over order Grubhub, what's the most common reason why?
And then we're able to kind of quantify what we were seeing in the qualitative feedback. So kind of going back and forth between those two methods eventually can help you hone in on the right problems to work on.
Amy: That's fantastic. So as you're working with these teams now in your job and you give them advice and, you know, help them basically build their products faster and smarter and achieve success.
What is the most common mistake that you see product teams making when they're in the early stages of bringing an idea to life?
Casey: Yeah. So I think one that I see a lot is taking way too long to validate what they're doing. So Reid [00:20:00] Hoffman, who's a partner here at Greylock and founder of LinkedIn said, if you aren't embarrassed by the product you release, You waited too long to launch and on the growth team at Pinterest, we really tried to do the minimal amount of work to get an idea out there to real users so we could validate if it was worth building fully.
And this saves a lot of time. You waste a lot less work and you find the things that you work on, you do much more efficiently. And I see, still see a lot of teams creating something pixel perfect. before they've had users try it. And then once users try it, they find that it's in just the totally wrong direction and they need to retool and then they feel like they've wasted three months of work.
So that's a big problem I see happening. The other problem I see happening is people investing in building new features way too early. If you have a product that hits product market fit, if that market is big enough, You should be mostly invested in connecting as much of that market [00:21:00] to What you've built as possible instead of I need to build something totally new to create new value.
And I think a lot of Founders, they're very good at thinking of new ideas and new value. So their default when they need to drive growth is to build something totally new and the kind of weird, uh process of Like launching a company is that you connect with one thing that people really like your incentive is to just keep working on that thing People really like and make it slightly better and prove it over time I always use the google search engine example where every day they looked at the top queries and they said How do we make that top query a little bit more relevant, a little bit better for users?
And they basically did that for 10 years and the results are incredible. And a lot of other startups could, could use with that type of mentality that they go back to building something entirely different all the time. And that actually can hurt growth instead of help it.
Amy: You know, to me, that speaks to features, not systems to, you [00:22:00] know, as a game designer, we're always thinking about core systems and what's the system and systems need tuning.
Casey: Exactly.
Amy: Right. And so if you invest in finding the core system that really is going to drive user value and then tune the hell out of it, that's one approach versus feature, feature, feature, feature, feature, feature.
Casey: Yeah. It, I feel like the feature approach is kind of like shooting in the dark all the time.
And the more system based approach is just kind of You know, squeaking the wheels more so that things can turn faster. And what a lot of founders don't understand is like, what is the system actually look like? Right? They've never invested to understand, okay, here are all the components that work together to drive a valuable product for my users and to drive continued growth of that product.
But if you go through that exercise. You'll typically find there are so many areas of that model that you can work on, uh, to make it work even better for everyone, [00:23:00] better for the company, because it'll grow faster, better for users because they'll get more value instead of feeling like you need to totally reinvent new system to deliver on something else.
But it can be different skill sets. And if you're a founder, that's really good at coming up with new value, you know, chances are, you'll go back to that instead of saying, okay, now I need to figure out a system of iteration to drive growth at this one thing. It's, it's kind of a different part of your brain.
Amy: Yeah, people like to do what they're really good at. And that's, I mean, that's part of the magic of teams too, is that you surround yourself with a balance that you know will You know, yield better results, even though it might not be the easy path for you.
Casey: Right.
Amy: So speaking of yourself in that way, what do you feel like is your superpower?
What do you feel like is your sweet spot the kind of work and projects that really light you up?
Casey: Yeah, so the types of projects that I feel I'm the best fit for our marketplaces where the demand side needs help in scaling up. So, [00:24:00] you know, take the example of Grubhub. You have restaurants on one side of the marketplace.
You have people that order from restaurants on the other side of the marketplace. And the real thing we had to figure out was how do we introduce more people to the value of online ordering and kind of replace people, you know, calling on the phone or, you know, Not even ordering delivery because they don't know that a hundred different places will actually deliver to them.
Those are the kind of projects that I feel like I'm, I'm best at. And I think I'm pretty good at figuring out how to find the right tools to get that side of a marketplace try a product. And then also to make the product work well so that they retain and I'm kind of not a tools based approach to things.
Like I try to figure out the right tool for the job and then work with those tools instead of trying to always use the viral tool or always use the SEO tool. So that's the kind of. The perfect storm for me. And what's interesting about my role at Greylock is I get to try to apply that to a lot of other different models and see, [00:25:00] see how well it works.
And I, I'm seeing a lot of differences, but also a lot of similarities, which is fun.
Amy: That's, that's great. So what's inspiring you these days on the frontier? What Trends and market forces changes. Are you paying attention to you?
Casey: Yeah. So I think there was kind of short term market forces and then there's long term market forces.
So I'll, I'll start with the long term first. Uh, I'm just really fascinated by what's happening and the potential with, uh, automated vehicles, uh, autonomous vehicles. When I think about the types of major platform shifts that have occurred over, you know, my time, uh, in business, uh, you think about like internet and mobile essentially, and how they reshaped a lot of things and made a lot of new things possible and autonomous vehicles, uh, seems to be on that path as well.
But it's, it's a longer term evolution because there is how you actually make the technology work. How do you make. The [00:26:00] cities respond to that. How do you make the governments respond to that? There's all sorts of implications on jobs changing as well in the short term. That's something that I've been doing more research in at Greylock because what we've seen is, you know, kind of this mobile platform shift was very major.
And you potentially have these major platform shifts happening in the next 10 years, like autonomous vehicles. But what are the major interesting things in between those platform shifts? Are the things that I'm looking for now? I don't think I have a great answer right now as to, as to what those are.
That's kind of the fun of getting to work at Greylock is seeing a lot of these different things and trying to understand. What are the major trends and what are more faddish in nature? There's really interesting stuff around video communication that is probably going to be a major shift. When you think about how humans communicate today through the internet, it's still mostly through text, but in [00:27:00] person, what you say is a very small part of how you communicate, like what your body language is and what your tone makes a much bigger impact.
Then what you actually say and what we've seen with the rise of emojis and video applications is basically people are able to communicate in a lot richer way with saying a lot less, uh, which is kind of fascinating the way I think about it. And it's no coincidence that a lot of these apps gain traction with teens.
First is you know, I remember when I was a teen and a lot of my friends, especially female friends, they would just be on the phone all day and they wouldn't really have anything to say to each other, but they just were craving that human connection. And the phone was the best way to do it. And now they can do it with emojis and text messages.
They can do it with video chat or group video chat, like house party, which the companies I'm working with. And it's just, it's so much more richer and fulfilling than what I had, you know, as a teenager, uh, and what my friends had. And I, I do believe [00:28:00] there's, there's something big there. Uh, I haven't fully wrapped my head around it, and I think we'll, we'll certainly see that.
Rapidly change how we communicate faster than autonomous vehicles change how cities work.
Amy: Wow. That's fascinating. I think a lot of interesting things will come out of Asia because they've been ahead of us with emotional social communication with avatar chat and emojis. You know, we're, it's interesting.
We're kind of playing catch up to Asia. Are you digging into some of those trends as you're doing this research?
Casey: A little bit. Greylock doesn't do a lot of investing in Asia. We have an investment in musically, which is an example of a...
Amy: Bad app.
Casey: Yeah, as you guys are familiar with it for the for those who aren't.
It's basically a social app where you lip sync to songs that you love and you share them and people do crazy dances while they're lip syncing and all sorts of crazy stuff. And it's been interesting to watch their evolution. One of the things that's been very interesting about Asia is, you know, when you think about how [00:29:00] these apps eventually monetize in the U. S.
They basically do it through advertising, right? And in Asia, advertising isn't as large a market. It's not something that people are as used to, especially in China. So the default business model for the social apps is not advertising, it is live streaming. And the reason for that is a lot of the entertainment that the U. S. has grown up with, you know, in terms of physical locations, things to do.
A lot of these major booming Chinese cities, they just don't have a lot of that infrastructure, right? So they don't have nightclubs, they don't have places to like hear people sing, they don't have places to dance. So they're using these virtual communities to listen to people sing and pay the money of which the app, you know, will take a commission rate and things like that. And that's just really fascinating.
Uh, is there an equivalent for the U. S. where there are physical places I can go to hear a rock band tonight? Um, [00:30:00] I, I don't know, um, but You've certainly seen the adoption of mobile in Asia pretty aggressively create a lot of new business models that are not available in the U. S.
Some of which are easily translating over in terms of the trends, like how people communicate with emojis, some of which are maybe a little bit different around, like, How WeChat monetizes everything through the mobile web, probably something that's less likely to occur in the U. S. or live streaming, I think is kind of an open question.
We've seen some successes with like Facebook Live, Meerkat, Periscope, but how, how big of a market that is for the U. S. where there's a lot of entertainment options versus, you know, a city in China where there aren't, I think it will play a role.
Amy: Fascinating. Uh, thank you so much, Casey, for joining us today and sharing your stories and your insights and your wisdom really appreciate it.
Casey: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Outro: Thanks for listening to [00:31:00] Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Get smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com, for more great resources and podcast episodes.