Twitter Talk at the University of Michigan Center for Entrepreneurship

1. starting things at a fast
growing company
Twitter Talk at the University of Michigan
Center for Entrepreneurship (@UMCFE)

3. @zanes

5. Philosophy

6. Simple Framework for Starting Things

7. 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

8. 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.

9. Customers

10. The Problem

11. Maximizing Value and Creating the
Best Customer Experience

12. 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

13. Charter Partners

14. Iteration 1

15. Iteration 2

16. Iteration 3

17. Iteration 4

18. MVP / Alpha Iteration

19. 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!

20. Growth Engineering
Customer Creation Phase
@madster26

21. Simple Framework for Starting Things

22. Growth Engineering 101
When do you need it?
Pa
Credit** Paul Graham’s Startup lifecycle...

23. Characteristics of a growth
engineer?
Curiosity

24. Survey

25. Stalk...Errrm...Observe

26. Characteristics of a growth
engineer?
Creativity

27. Typical work cycle of a growth
engineer

28. A/B Testing

29. Growth product areas
Messaging & Notification:
Email campaigns
Push notifications
Sms notifications
Prompts
Activation & Virality:
Signup flow
New user experience
People recommendation

30. 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

31. Prompts on mobile

32. Prompts On Web

33. 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

34. User specific fatigue handling

35. 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

36. Some current projects
- Building an analytics pipeline for customers of
promptbird
- Building predictive models for interaction &
fatiguing

37. Questions? Join the flock!