One of the biggest mistakes founders make is relying on aggregate user metrics instead of understanding how any individuals use their product. In this episode of Startup School, YC General Partner David Lieb walks through one of his favorite tools for better understanding your users, the dot plot. It’s a simple two-dimensional grid that maps individual user activity over time and it can help separate signal from the noise in the early days of a startup. He’ll cover why it gives founders a better sense of product health compared to aggregate metrics, what patterns to look for and real-world examples of how dot plots helped teams at Google Photos and PayPal. 00:00 — Stop Looking at Aggregate Metrics 00:52 — Why DAUs Lie to You 01:39 — What is a Dot Plot and How Does it Work? 02:50 — Picking the Right Event to Track 03:34 — Reading Patterns in the Dots 05:17 — Tracking User State & Attributes 06:16 — The PayPal Fraud Insight 07:59 — Dot Plot vs. DAU Graph 08:56 — Finding Features That Drive Retention 10:30 — Scaling Dot Plots to Billions of Users 11:13 — The $80K Contract That Churned 11:57 — Common Dot Plot Mistakes 12:41 — Dot Plots + Cohort Curves Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
David Lieb is the Product Lead for Google Photos. Prior to working on Google Photos, David was the cofounder and CEO of Bump, which was in the Summer 2009 batch of YC. https://twitter.com/dflieb https://photos.google.com/ Gustaf Alströmer is a Partner at YC. https://twitter.com/gustaf The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon. https://twitter.com/craigcannon *** Topics 00:10 - How Bump became one of the biggest apps on the App Store 3:24 - Bump was the billionth app downloaded on iOS 5:42 - David's YC interview 7:45 - Bump's goal during YC 9:40 - Experiments at Bump before working on photos 10:45 - How Bump grew 12:00 - How David thinks about product market fit 13:00 - Flock and talking with the top users of Bump 17:30 - Going upstream in photo sharing, becoming the camera roll 19:00 - Being a photo sharing power user and how that helped when building a product 21:40 - Fundraising 25:40 - Deciding that Photo Roll would work better within a big company and building it at Google 29:10 - When building a product, pretend there's a person doing that task for you in the best possible way then try to build that 31:20 - How David spends his time running Google Photos 33:15 - How David feels about his work at Google after being a startup founder 34:45 - When to apply AI 36:50 - Attention to the user vs the technology 37:30 - Talking to users at scale 40:30 - Lamide Akomolafe asks - What did David focus on too much as a rookie product lead that he thinks was a mistake now? 42:15 - Getting confidence to ship features to a billion users 44:45 - Generating support for a project within a big company 46:30 - In 5-10 years will David be working for a large or small company? 47:55 - When thinking about an acquisition, can you execute your vision in a larger way within the company? 49:40 - Larger truths about people learned by paying so much attention to photos and memories 51:15 - Giving everyone a photographic memory and deciding which photos are important 52:25 - Products David likes and the importance of solving a durable human need
YC General Partner David Lieb’s story is all about perseverance. In 2008, he co-founded Bump, an app used by 150M people to share photos and contact info by bumping their phones together. Though he couldn’t find a way to turn it into a sustainable business, he didn’t quit. Instead Lieb and his team pivoted several times, got acquired and eventually went on to build Google Photos. In this episode of Backstory, Lieb shares his advice for finding the right idea, what mistakes to avoid and how to maintain a positive mindset no matter what gets thrown at you. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/Backstory-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/Backstory-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 01:15 - Dropping out of UChicago 02:55 - Word of mouth 04:50 - Bump Turns into a verb 05:50 - Costly mistakes 07:40 - Reason for success 10:40 - Selling to Google 12:50 - Risky move paid off 13:50 - Google Photos launch in 2015 17:45 - Joining YC
At YC our motto is make something people want. But how do you actually know if you’ve accomplished that in the early days? One of the best ways to measure successful growth is a concept called cohort retention, which tracks the fraction of new users that come back time and time again to use your product. In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner David Lieb explains how to define cohorts, track active users and determine the appropriate time frame for measuring successful retention rates. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:43 - Cohort Retention 02:31 - Key Insight 05:21 - Best action to pick. 10:29 - What is good? 14:49 - Ways to fool yourself 21:27 - Ways to improve the curve 26:43 - Conclusion 29:05 - Outro