Facebook VP of Growth on how to prioritize power users vs marginal users

“The thing that everyone in the Valley gets wrong is that we think about ourselves when we optimize for growth… But what you need to focus on is the marginal user.”

As Alex Schultz explains, this doesn’t mean power users aren’t important:

“Building an incredible product is all about optimizing for the people who use your product the most. But if your goal is driving growth, the people who are using your product the most are not the users you have to worry about.”

He cites the growth accounting framework Facebook used to think about growth:

“We looked at new users, resurrected users (people who weren’t on Facebook for 30 days and came back), and churned users. The resurrected and churned numbers for pretty much every product I’ve ever seen dominate the new user count once you reach a sensible point of growth a couple years in… And [at Facebook] all those users who were churning and resurrecting had low friend counts… So the number one thing we needed to focus on was getting them to 10 friends.”

In sum, focus on power users to build an incredible product, and focus on the marginal user to accelerate growth.

Full video: Y Combinator: Live “Lecture 6 - Growth (Alex Schultz)“ (Oct 2014)