Jean-Denis Greze, Engineering Lead, Growth & Engagement, Dropbox

1. Growth, Engagement & Monetization
@ Dropbox
Jean-Denis Greze
@jgreze

2. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Outline
Part I: What is growth?
Part II: Metrics
Part III: Growth & engagement in practice

3. CONFIDENTIAL
Part I: What is growth?
Process or product

4. CONFIDENTIAL
At a minimum…
Getting people to your page
A great logged-out experience
Signup
On-boarding
Engagement & Retention*
Virality
* pre-condition (but LinkedIn)

5. CONFIDENTIAL
Growth = data driven
It’s just an approach to solving problems that
should permeate all of your decisions
Warning: as you growth, you need an increasingly
strong advocate for the data-driven approach.
That’s your growth team.

6. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Growth v. product: avoid holy wars
At Dropbox, extremes on both sides
Growth v1: pure bizops, number crunching,
optimized parts of the funnel but never
changed the experience as a whole
Growth v2: design something “perfect” that
resonated well during user studies but not
worried about numbers
Monetization got it right (Team Ca$h, Prowth)

7. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Don’t think small
Don’t just reduce steps / friction
Don’t forget that there are fundamental human
problems to people understanding, seeing a
need for, coming back to, and adopting your
product into their daily lives.

8. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Understanding the user journey
Acquisition
Activation*
Engagement
Virality
* Don’t forget me

9. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Virality
Virality that drives growth
Users bringing in non-users
Virality that drives engagement
Users bringing in other existing users
Think about this stuff from day 1: it’s hard to add
vitality after-the-fact

10. CONFIDENTIAL
Part II: Metrics
What to measure > how to measure

11. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Metrics
Be way of *AU (DAU, WAU, MAU, 3MAU)
You have different kinds of active users (e.g., sync users v.
backup users)
Activity is a means to an end — what is your business model?
Measure activation
Facebook’s “7 friends in 10 days”
Figure out the highest predictors of retention
Signin up != active

12. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Actually, why metrics?
Obvious: goals to aim for
Less obvious: communication (makes it easy to
explain what you are going to VCs, the rest of
your organization, etc.)

13. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Revisit your metrics often
Examples
Two sharing models at Dropbox
Email subject lines
Referral at Dropbox
If you don’t always pay attention, you will make bad
product decisions
Ask yourself: “Is the funnel I am looking at the real and
current funnel?”

14. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
$aaS (I)
Should growth look at metrics through monetization?
No (maybe?)
Dropbox example: free space as cost
Free users as happy people deriving benefit
Free users as cost-center
Free users as potential self-serve revenue
Free users as qualified leads (sales)

15. CONFIDENTIAL
$aaS (II)
Monetization like growth is data-driven, but it’s
purview is turning existing users into paying users

16. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
A/B testing (I)
One rule: statistical significance is hard (you don’t
have enough exposures)
When you are a startup, go for big wins and don’t
worry about small optimizations: they won’t be the
difference between a sustainable startup and a
failing one

17. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
A/B testing (II)
A/B tests do not understand your users
“With this variant, a user is more likely to click
on X”
You don’t know “why” or “what the user is
thinking”
If you want to understand your users (a little bit),
conduct user research

18. CONFIDENTIAL
Part III: Growth &
engagement in practice
Somewhat applicable advice

19. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Easy v. difficult (anecdotal)
Hard
Reactivating dormant users
Making your product awesome by changing a button color
Easy
Going from nothing to something
No onboarding to onboarding
No email reminders to email reminders (or notifications)
Focusing on channels that are already doing well and bringing in
high-value AUs

20. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Virality templates (I)
Big splash
Dropbox space race
NYTimes dialect quiz
Trade your product for “shares” (i.e., the Dropbox
model)
Referrals -> free space
E.g., Uber

21. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Virality templates (II)
Achievements
Broadcast something that makes your user
look good or interesting
E.g., Foursquare, fitness apps
Caveat: Signing up is not an achievement

22. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Virality templates (III)
Network building
E.g., Facebook, WhatsApp
If you have this… I’d love to invest
Pro-tip: your users’ phone contacts / address book is
the best way to kickstart this
Only takes 1 permission, cost to you is small (SMS /
user), no one controls it (yet)
Network riding (e.g., Airbnb, Instagram & Twitter)

23. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Virality templates (IV)
Word of mouth
Content
SEO
Partnerships
E.g., Chrome (really?)

24. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Progressive engagement
Activity & quality
Activity: 3MAU to MAU or MAU to WAU
Quality: MAU -> high-value MAU
E.g., reminder to get users to complete actions
People forget what they are doing
E.g., have one set of users re-engage another set
Tip: opt-in beta program

25. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Growth & freemium
$aaS: Cost of giving your product for free v.
Ads, outbound sales, paid-for leads, partnerships
It’s not just self-serve!
Freemium for growth:
Trade for vitality (shares)
Trade for better UX (address book makes it easier for your
users to share in the future)
Trade for a better product (upload all of your photos makes
albums better)

26. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Gating freemium
When do you break things and ask people to pay you?
Usage (e.g., space)
Social (# of people you are collaborating with)
Content type (Word v. Excel)
Functionality for subset of users (e.g., IT)
Make sure the subset has purchasing power
Time-bounded
Experiment early (you can have multiple gates)

27. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Parting advice
Every company/situation is different
Be wary of learning specific lessons from Dropbox,
Google, Square, Github, etc.
We may be optimizing for very different things
We may not be optimizing (things going too well)
We may be stuck at a local maxima
Get ideas, test them, talk to others, be creative, etc.

28. Jean-Denis Greze (@jgreze)
Good luck
Get some growth/prowth advisors
Ak questions / get answers
Growth is probably not a competitive advantage
(and everybody can see what you are doing)