Track how many new users get 5 friends on day one, then build for it

Joseph ChoiSo then how how did this go? You got 500,000 users, daily active users on Lobby, and then what happened?

Roger Chen… like power users, but overall, like retention was not that good. And uh and what and as a result, we did not really grow for like a year. I think our big break came uh in 2022. [sighs] Like, of all places, like Lobby just suddenly went viral in Israel, [laughter] uh of all places. Uh so yeah, nobody's going to marketing Israel, obviously. It's like 7 million people, [laughter] and uh but it suddenly like went viral, and became number one in the App Store, and just stayed there, and all the data is just like super, super good. Uh like I think like the day 90 uh for uh Lobby in Israel back then was like 25 to 30%, uh so like super solid, and like the retention in other places like half that. And when we looked at it, like there's only really one key difference, uh which is the network density. Because like, in Lobby, we do have public rooms, but it's majority like people talking with their friends. Uh and which is very intuitive, because like nobody's like outgoing enough to talk to random people [laughter] every day, right? But you always have some time to talk to your friends every day. Um In Israel, um like the key difference between Israel and and the other markets in late at the start of 2022 is that I think on the first day uh So we we tracked this like one number, which is like the percentage of people who got five friends on day one. Uh in other places it's like like 20%, but in Israel it's like 60%. So, that's the difference, and that led to like super high retention, which leads to even more growth. So, that was a huge inspiration, right? And um so we know that the answer is really really to double down whatever it takes um to get our density up. What that means is like this is not something that's solvable through content marketing, [laughter] you know, because if you do content marketing you're just going to be a whole lot more of, you know, like like random people without friends. Starting from that, we start to really work on growth features. So it really has to be people inviting their friends through using the product. So we did like a whole lot of things to boost like inviting and sharing. Like we did the common things they can think of, and we'd also do some pretty wacky things. Um yeah, like one thing I I still love to this day is a feature called like Group Picture. The idea is when you hang out in real life, let's say you're hang out like in Dolores Park or something, you're just like sitting on the on on the grass, right? And uh you have nothing to talk about with your friends, and what would people start doing? They're going to start taking group pictures. [laughter] So like when you have nothing to do, people are going to start taking pictures, [laughter] and uh and when you start whip out a camera, and people get excited, again they're like, "Yay," and then and then …

Joseph ChoiThat's one of the most insane growth hacks, like product-led viral growth um strategies I've heard of about. That's really interesting. It's like you're combining the IRL experience with the invite flow. So a lot of people do the classic stuff where it's like invite, you know, five friends and you unlock some sort of social benefit or um invite a friend and you get a discount or whatever it is, but this was literally just like it tells you to …