Paul Frazee

If you were the original holder of it, you can go back. Nobody else can, though. And so, and I guess if you delete your account, then that gets relinquished. But yeah, yeah. So that is now fixed. Go wherever you like.

Okay. This one's pretty fun for a couple of reasons. Um, so first of all, let me start with the context of how that got built. We, um, The full context, you have to start with the fact that we are not an algorithm company. And so our initial algorithm that people are getting landed in, we're working on it all the time and we're making some great progress on it.

And I don't want to harsh the team that's working on it. They're really cruising, but it is not great yet. And so new users coming in, it's really important that they are able to get their social graph built so that the following feed could start working for them. That's point number one. Point number two is building your social graph on the app. also a bit challenging.

Getting good recommendations for follows, that is quite hard, especially when you're seeding communities. Like, here's a design challenge for you. Make a good recommender when you don't have social clusters on there yet. How do you even evaluate if this thing is doing its job correctly? You kind of can't do it. Like, we're learning a lot about algorithm design without content to work against.

Thankfully, that is less a problem now, but that was the kind of... We had a real chicken and egg problem. Okay, your obvious thinking is...

yeah so so okay so you're obviously thinking you're you've got this design problem well let's do like a contact import of some kind either from an existing social network or like from the address book well you can't do the address book because that has privacy problems that may not be fixable as far as i know last i heard you can't come up with an anonymized upload your address book thing without creating triangulation of people's contacts so we just said hard no we're just not comfortable with that we're not there's a

It's a real shame. Now that I'm on the other side of that, I get why people go ahead and do it, but we still want to cross that line. It is a shame because we're sitting there going like, we're not trying to be jerks. We're actually trying to help you, but here you are. We didn't cook up some kind of breakthrough on the privacy solution there, so we didn't bother. So, okay, that's out.

Well, then you can get into, can you try to get the social graph from another social network? And the reality is none of them want to give that up. And we're really in an era where like these APIs are getting closed down. You can't do it off of the meta products and you sure as hell can't do it off of Twitter. I guarantee I know how that would go. So we, that was a non-starter too, right?

So we're sitting around going, how the heck do we solve this problem of getting people's social graphs seeded? The original idea for starter packs was actually not just to have like a list of people to follow. It was actually to create an invite link because we have had a lot of success seeding the social network back when we were invite only.

And ironically, when we switched to the public thing, we lost one of the best organic mechanisms for people to get worked into their social graphs whenever they joined. So we were looking at that and asking, how can we make that better? And the initial impetus for this was actually just to create an invite link that you could share with friends.

They would take them through the install flow and then get you into a bi-directional follow relationship with whoever it was that invited you. And that would help seed the network. And then we were like, OK, well, let's go ahead and add in suggested follows and some suggested feeds and things like that so that you can actually hydrate in the experience.

Well, we launched this thing and we also included the ability to just like follow all of them from within the application. So it would work also if you were an existing user, but that was just kind of like, yeah, just in case kind of thing. We launched starter packs and people were like, oh yeah, that's really cool. But like, they just didn't get used.

So we ended up spending like two months going like, ah, there was so much promise with starter packs, but that really didn't land with folks. And then the big influx came in November and man, did they pop off. They ended up becoming the absolute most potent mechanism for getting people onboarded into the application. And again, rarely through the install flow.

it's very rare that people were using like clicking into them and then like kind of having the app and we would use an app clip to like do the install flow and then get you creating your account stuff like that that was very really it was almost always people just sharing them in uh in feeds or like installing the app first and like you know messaging each other with these things or however it was they were doing it and that ended up helping the social graphs and all the clusters form really rapidly and get people's following feeds into an interesting place

They ended up being really strong proxies to topic interest, which is an area that I think we're still pretty weak on, is giving new users a fast access to a topic. So you would find like a journalism starter pack or an art starter pack, and that would... Boom, now your following feed has given you some great stuff on that front. So...

Yeah, it was not a linear, like a A to B thing with starter packs. The core idea, I think maybe there was, but in terms of like how it got used and what we thought we were going to be pulling off of it, it had some twists and turns.

Oh, really happy to hear it. Yeah.

Well, thanks. I mean, I got to be honest, that level of supportiveness that you're showing here really does help at any given moment. It's been really nice to see people get that level of interest in it, too. So the feeling is very much mutual. When it gets tough, the folks that are there and like, yes, let's keep moving, that kind of buoys us up for those tough points, too.