Polish the paywall like a core feature, e.g. add a gold shimmer

David Barnard… a quality product and caring about the users and the mission and things like that, but then also monetizing. And so it sounds like that $50 million paywall was a tension in the company of the designers not wanting the top nav pitch. But how do you balance those things to keep the product quality up while still monetizing as effectively as you can? And then in your case, doing it while having a quarterly pressure every 12 weeks to deliver.

Jeff MorrisI think there was a great culture within our design team. We had a VP of design who understood that we were trying to design and build a beautiful product, but we also were trying to build a large business in the process. And so how we thought about it a lot was just taking all the interactions and paywalls and putting as much love into those designs as we would any other product feature. And so I remember in 2017, we added an animation to one of our paywalls. It was like this gold shimmer. It probably took a couple days of engineering time, but people saw them and it was a well-designed paywall, which I know is not something that design teams want to focus on, but we were like, if we're going to show a paywall, we want that to live up to the product, the core experience.

Jeff MorrisAnd so we tended to over-design the features that other people would spend less time on. And I think that at least showed the users that we cared about the experience. I see a lot of paywalls that look like they were designed by a PM, and I just don't think that's how you maintain product quality. The other thing, and I'll say I've seen it more from a lot of products is you do start to get into the over-optimization mode and you start to grind users and the product itself starts to feel almost like spammy where you have too many paywalls. And I think that just comes with a mature product that doesn't have enough room to kind of grow. And when you're a public company, I think you can start to over-monetize too. There's a trade-off. I was lucky in that role. I think I departed the company at the perfect time because we were still growing a lot and it wasn't kind of a more mature product. I don't think I would've been as good in the current years at doing that job.

David BarnardYeah, it does. It gets harder and harder as you mature, as the user base matures, as competition matures, as the industry matures around you, it does get harder. I did want to get to some of your more recent contrarian takes. And one of them then is mobile isn't dead. And we've been hearing this since, I don't know, 2010, mobile is dead, mobile is dead, but you seem to think it's a great place to build today in 2025. Why do you think that?