Y Combinator Startup Podcast - Twitter vs. X: Product Lessons For Startup Founders | The Breakdown

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

Since Twitter rebranded to X, the platform has added new features and implemented a few major updates to both its UX and algo. So what can founders interested in product design learn from all this? In the first episode of our new series, The Breakdown, YC’s Tom Blomfield (co-founder of Monzo) and David Lieb (creator of Google Photos) take a closer look at X to find what lessons there are for founders building consumer products.

How do you know if your users are getting value from your product? It might be really easy just to say, well, if they're watching more content on Twitter, that must be good. But yeah, me watching a bunch of fistfight videos is not what I actually want. If you're optimizing for a single metric to the exclusion of all other factors, you're probably going to lead yourself down one of these rabbit holes. This is where I think founder CEOs do have an advantage. They have the kind of moral authority of like, I started this company and this is what I believe and this is where we're going. Welcome to a new series we're doing here at YC, looking at some of the most popular consumer products from across the internet, and giving you our unvarnished thoughts.

Tom and I both have a bunch of experience building products that a lot of consumers have used, and we thought it'd be interesting to just kind of like dive in and take apart some of the most popular products that you all probably use. So to start with, we're going to explore Twitter or what is it now called? X. X. Yeah, Twitter versus X. And what has happened over the last year or two under new ownership, let's euphemistically call it? So where should we start?

I think there's a ton of things we could talk about, obviously, here. And the timing is right. This is like a very perfect moment to talk about Twitter. I'm sure a lot of people are using Twitter these days. By far the biggest change that I have seen in Twitter over the last year or so is this shift from a, you know, chronological-ish feed of topics that you have expressed that you want to follow, to now kind of like more of a TikTok feed of stuff that you might be engaging with. Yeah.

And really explicitly, I used to see, like, Twitter used to feel like a left-leaning, I mean, you know, I'm a moderate to left-leaning person. The content was sort of left-leaning politics. And now I just seem to get like maga rally after maga rally. Same. which is sort of, you know, fine. That content, I presumed it always existed, but I just never saw it and I don't think I've engaged with it. In a sense, it's sort of imperceptible.

You know, it's not like a button has changed or the colour scheme has changed, but just somehow the content has quietly morphed in a way that is becoming more and more evident. Yeah, on that topic in particular, to be fair, I think Elon explicitly said, when you're using Twitter, you should feel equally bad if you're on the far left or on the far right. And perhaps he has achieved that, I don't know. But at least in my own usage of the product, I'm sure that my engagement is up and my happiness when I go and resume my life is lower. Totally, totally.

And I absolutely agree. Now I see way more videos of like some random fight in Mexico City or someone get smacked in the face by something or like random cat videos. It's like, you know, it gets the dopamine hit going or something. But I don't feel like I've learned anything or like engaged. with someone who's taught me something. Correct. So why does this happen?

Why are they doing this? Well, it's tricky. When a team and a product manager has a number to work towards, and in this case, like dwell time or engagement or number of minutes each user uses a service, like a well-meaning product team, in my experience, tends to optimize and optimize and optimize for that single number, almost without regard for, you know, harder to measure stuff like, taste or quality or educational content or, I don't know.

What do you think? Yeah, you bring up, I think, the critical point, which is how do you know if your users are getting value from your product? Yeah. It might be really easy just to say, well, if they're watching more content on Twitter, that must be good. Yeah. They're choosing to do it.

So, of course, it's good. But yeah, me watching a bunch of fistfight videos is not what I actually want. Even though rooted in my lizard brain somewhere, I'm going to keep watching them. Totally. And when your business model is predicated on advertisers and selling like seconds of video role, sure, the more hours your users spend on the site, theoretically you should be getting higher ad spend. Whereas there are business models like Google famously who aim to get you off the site as quickly as possible. You're getting value if you did a search and the first search was so good, you click the first link and you disappear. The counterargument though I would make to that is if I am highly engaged in content that ultimately I really don't like,

long-term retention will be poorer. Right. And so eventually, even if your business model is ads and you're getting me to spend a much time on the site, I'm going to eventually stop using it or I'll switch to something else. Over time, the quality of the service and the desirability goes and your best users churn and go somewhere else. So let's talk about if you're going to go down a path like Twitter has gone down, or I should say X has gone down, where you move to this algorithmic feed and it just figures things out, sometimes you'll get users

that are in a bad state, like I was a few weeks ago, where I just felt like every time I used Twitter it was bad, and yet I kept using it. So I tweeted about it and everybody said, oh, you're doing it wrong. You need to go and click the little dot, dot, dot button and say, not interested in this post, which I did, and it was very effective. But like, should the product designers make that more explicit? Yeah. Now is it probably a good time to actually dive into the Twitter feed and take a look at it. This is my Twitter feed. I hope there's nothing too embarrassing. The first item is this tweet from a guy called Massimo. I actually do follow him.

His tweets are generally pretty good, but this is a sandcastle maker, I guess. And if we scroll down, what do we got? Some political stuff. We've got some random soup. What is this? The thing I really notice is like a bunch of, just like political videos I'm just not really interested in. What percent of the world's population is white?

What is this? 70. 40. 7%? Like, why am I seeing this? So what you're saying is, I have to go to these three little buttons. Yes. And if you click, not interested in this post, it will, I believe, eventually have you stopped seeing stuff like this.

Okay, so I don't need to mute or block. I'm just like, no. But here's a great product design question. Like, they've now given you many tools to potentially solve your problem. Yeah. And I just don't know what I'm saying. Okay, not interesting. Fine.

In fact, we can maybe pull up the screenshot I found here. I was trying to like figure out what do I do. And I came upon this Reddit thread. How do I stop Twitter from showing me random bullshit in my feed? But yeah, this is basically like the instructions off product on how to use the product. Yeah, when people need to like record long videos telling other people how to use your product, you've probably done something wrong. The question is, again, like how did we get here?

Like, why would these changes make? I suspect a lot of it is top down trying to drive more engagement. The question is, where does it go and have they thought through that? And so, like, it's perhaps useful to look at history and see the kind of the history of social networks and how this has played out for each of them. And so if we start with, like, Facebook, let's say. When Facebook started, there was no newsfeed. It was your personal wall.

You could post content there. We're aging ourselves now. Probably the single. biggest change that Facebook the product ever made for the better was moving to this news feed where basically any time someone would modulate their wall, it would show you the content that you had chosen to see. Yeah. So instead of having to go and creep on each individual person, you just put it all there. And it was content that you had already expressed that you wanted to see.

And they just brought it to you, right? So that made a lot of sense. There was a huge uproar at the time, though, if you remember. Yes, there were protests outside the Facebook office, but every single metric was way up. Yeah, and that's probably indicative of any consumer product change. You change something that people are used to. You're going to get millions and millions of people screaming about it, whether it's good or bad. So anyway, Facebook made this change.

But then what happened? Then Facebook got really popular and my mom joined and my sister joined and all these people that I don't really want to keep in touch with joined. And so the Facebook news feed got a little deluded for me. Exactly. And then what happened? Instagram came along. And it was a new network. It was a different type of content. But I think the biggest difference is the network was different. And that was great. It was the people I wanted to follow. Yeah, it was my actual friends.

The early adopters again, rather than this broader expanded social group. Right. But then what happened? Everybody else joined. I started following brands. It was interesting for a while. But then in the drive for engagement, they just started putting more stuff in my feed that I didn't really want to watch. And now I open Instagram and it's like approximately zero photos of my friends. And just kind of random. clickbait. Yeah, totally. So it goes from sort of this tight-knit social community, people you're seeing every day, you're engaging with their photos, and then it sort of broadens out. How did we get from a small social network of my friends to this like just engagement base? Yes. And TikTok, the most recent one, I think just skipped straight to the end game. Total speed around. Which is like, let's just show all the possible content in the world and let the algorithms figure out what the human brain wants to see. Yeah, and it feels like a deeply unsatisfying experience.

You're just empty calories, perhaps. So yeah, what can people learn from this? I would say what I would try to encourage product builders to think about is like, what problem are you really trying to solve in the world? If it's boring, like being bored, then TikTok maybe is an awesome product to solve that. If the product you're trying to build is like connection between real people, then probably you need to very explicitly like fight against this urge to just drive more engagement. Totally.

And it's sort of understanding that human communities are based around. Dunbar's number. You know, you can only really know 150 people. And so a social network that kind of constrained itself to that smaller group might be really interesting. But then you have to find a different way to monetize because you're not getting as many eyeballs, as many hours of viewership, therefore your ad revenue goes down and shell. The pressure ultimately pushes you towards his algorithmic feed. All right. So you're Elon. What should you do? I don't know. I don't know if you bought it as a as a commercial concern really or

for political influence or on a whim as a joke? I don't really know. Yeah, I think if I were in charge, the number one thing I would do is, I think the idea of an algorithmic feed where it tries to sort the content, the universe of content that you might want to see, sort it per your interest. I think that makes a ton of sense. The introduction of a lot of entropy content is what I would call it, content that like maybe I want to see, but very likely I don't want to see,

like the fist fights and the car crashes. I think that needs to be done much more judiciously and much clearer ways for users to give feedback about what they want and don't want. Yeah, because as you said earlier, there are these ways to curate Twitter. And actually, it does seem to be pretty effective. You spend five or ten minutes telling it what you like and you don't like, and your feed gets better. Another way I tried was these kind of curated lists up top. So you've got your, obviously, your following tab, which is some people like it, some people don't. There are these lists, kind of pre-made lists.

So when the Ukraine war first broke out, I followed a set of people who seemed to be very well informed. And this is advertising free. There's no random Mexican fistfights. It was a pretty high-quality way to learn about what was going on. The same with the UK politics. So we've just had an election in the UK. So just zooming out, what you're basically doing is you're inheriting the credibility of work other people have done that you trust. That's exactly what I'm doing. But it's so hard to find these lists. I had to go. No one. people around. It's insane. And these are so, so powerful. And the thing that I find Twitter is still, for all of the junk on it, the garbage, the clickbait, the thing that I found the most valuable is when there truly is a breaking news event, you know, the attempted assassination of Trump, the- It's still the first place you go. It's unbelievable. Like the Ukraine war, UK politics, in those moments, it shines. But when there's nothing happening, it's just feeding you this like constant drip feed of junk.

Why is it so good at those things? I think it is that it is so easy for first party information owners to put content onto the platform. So like we saw it, like during the assassination attempt, we saw a bunch of firsthand videos that the normal media organization would not have produced for us so quickly. Right. And that's the magic. It is.

And I feel like community notes have done a relatively good job of calling out the stuff that's fake news versus real news actually. So in one sense, I think that's been a really positive change. Maybe let's touch on some of the other changes we've seen over the last 12 months or so. The blue tick, that was a big status symbol originally, wasn't it? Yes. Oh, yeah. I emailed the person I knew on Twitter to get it.

I got a blue tick. And yeah, like the blue checkmark was a signal of credibility, I think. So that other people who saw posts that had that, they knew like, okay, this is at least somehow legit. It's not just a random bot account doing something. And now you can pay what, like, seven bucks or nine bucks a month or something. And you might have Donald Trump's parody account. But a parody account always gets truncated. And then you see the blue tick.

So it's like Donald Trump, blue tick, this must be real. Yeah. So I think they overloaded this idea where they wanted to filter out bots. And the only way to do it was to get them to pay money. That makes sense. And if they connect that to the blue check, though, they now overload this term. And now I don't know if it's just a 12-year-old-old-old-old-old-old-basket paying for Twitter premium or an actual legit person that I should pay attention to.

I mean, people talked about editing tweets for like the longest time as if it was going to destroy the world or something, and it's just really just been fine, right? It's fine. It works. You should be able to edit stuff. Yeah. So that's a kind of big non-event. If we just look at the sidebar here on the screen of Twitter,

what are all those icons on the left? Oh, my God, yeah. You know, I don't think I've clicked more than two or three of those. I recently clicked on the GROC one, which might be that one. Is that one? Okay, GROC. What happens? This is a perfect example. of like a product expanding beyond what I think the users think of it as.

Totally. So this is basically chat GPT inside of Twitter, which to me doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And I'm sure to any normal person makes zero sense. So yeah, I think this is, this is a great example of probably the job of a founder or product leader, which is to clearly articulate to the entire team and to the world what this product is for and what this product is for and how you're supposed to use it. Yeah. And I feel like this is an example of it deviating from that.

And I just worry there's just not a lot of great consumer product sense coming out of that. I mean, I think I admire him in many, many ways. I mean, if you saw the recent SpaceX landings, like catching the booster in the in the chopsticks, absolutely incredible. But when it comes to mass market consumer product, this does not seem super well thought out. Yeah. Yeah, Jeff Bezos once said that, like, taste is not transferable. across domains. And to me, this is like a great example of that. I would say Elon, like if I

I drive a Tesla, I think it's the best car that I've ever sat in. But the taste and the decisions they made on that do not match what I see on Twitter and X these days. Another topic, what's with the name? Why did we change the name to X? I don't think I've, unironically called it X ever. Yeah. And I do not intend to change that. It's just astonishing because Twitter like got the verb, you know, like to tweet. When your product gets the verb, you've won. Yeah. Like I googled it or with Bump, I don't know if anyone said, I'll bump you. With Monso in the UK, people said, like, I'll Monso you money, Monso me the money. Like, we got the verb, right? Yeah, Bump has been shut down for now a decade and Apple just copied it. So 14 years later,

now you can hold your two iPhones together. And people literally call it bumping. We should bump. And I hear that and I'm like, yeah, it's a good name. So how did we come up with our product names? For me, with bump, we built the product and I showed it to some friends and I said, what did you just do? And they said, we bumped our phones together and I said, that's the name. That's it.

Well, that's one of the beauties of starting a consumer internet company, like relatively towards the start of the internet. I mean, I think these names are available. Exactly. The domains, we could get monso.com. Actually, we were first called mondo.com. It had these connotations of a world in a lot of European languages, Mond or Mundo or means world. And it's surface slang for awesome.

Someone told me, but we kind of just liked it. We could get the dot com. And then we got sued. This German company had a conflicting trademark. And so we had to change the name. And we went to our user and asked them like, hey, we like the M. We got a new M logo, watched our new name be. And like 14,000 people suggested different names.

And so Monzo was one of them, and it's stuck ever since. But I think when you get something short and catchy and you have the verb, just like total insanity to change. I agree. Especially for something as meaningless as X, right? Like the whole basis of that seems to be Elon Musk is obsessed with the letter X. Yes. And perhaps the most favorable view of it would be he has in his mind this grand plan of a future product that is not Twitter. Twitter maybe is some tiny piece of it.

But he's putting that on the world ahead of saying what that product is, and I think it makes no sense. Yeah, I mean, it started out pre-Pa-Pa-Pal. It was going to be an all-encompassing online bank, right? And it sort of merged, and there was a big fight over what name they chose. And there've been talks, mostly by Elon, it seems like, that Twitter's going to become a payments platform. So that's a view of this, like, Twitter becomes the everything app. Yeah, I would much prefer if they showed where it's going and then have the name match what people perceive when they see that product. Yeah.

versus what seems like the opposite. So if you're thinking about changing your name, how do you go about it as a founder? Yeah. Number one, if you think you need to, the best time to do it is now rather than later, because there's less awareness in the world about your product. And then I think that my advice is just try to pick something that people can easily say, and when I say it to you, you can type it into Google and spell it right. Yeah, you don't have to ask how is that spelled? Correct. Yeah, never. And ideally,

if you can pull it off, it has something to do with what your product does. And I think ultimately, the best companies bring meaning to the name often, rather than the other way around. Monzo doesn't mean anything like... Yeah, Google didn't mean anything other than some nerdy thing. Yeah. Amazon's a big river in South America. You bring meaning to it, as long as you can say it and spell it.

And I think that's all that matters. How do you think all of these changes have impacted the revenue, commercials at Twitter? Right. Well, I don't have any inside information, but from what I've read, a bunch of advertisers don't love the type of content that their ads might appear next to. And so they've pulled out. So I think ad revenue is down significantly. I don't know how the subscription revenue is doing. I'm sure it's okay, but probably not taking over. So probably the revenue metrics aren't great, but I bet the engagement metrics are off the chart. Yeah. And that's sort of the problem, right? When you give a team, especially as a product manager, this singular, number to optimize for. Everything else goes out the window. And it's like the infamous sort of AI that's tasked with making paper clips. And you just end up within the whole world enslaved with this enormous paper tape machine.

Did my job, boss. Yeah. And so I do think that a lot of top-down ownership is really important in things like this. Like when I worked on Google Photos, I was kind of the user that we were designing the product for. And of course, there will be critics of that. I was designing the product for how I wanted to use it. and there are people who wanted to use it in a different way.

But at least it had a consistent worldview of what this product is for, how you should use it. And it feels like maybe we're getting that from Elon here. And what he wants Twitter to be is just, we're not ready for it. And wrap this all up to kind of summarize what we've talked about. What advice would you give to a product founder who's starting out, maybe they're hiring their first or second product manager, kind of scaling? I think the number one thing is trying to articulate what is your product for and who is supposed to use it. And what are the good states that a user might get into?

And what are the states that maybe look good but are actually bad? Yeah. And can you wrap that up into a metric? Like, is there always a metric you're optimizing for? I'm not sure there is, to be honest. Thinking about my example on Twitter, I'm sure my time spent is up. I'm sure every engagement metric, number of likes, number of whatever's is all up. But if you asked me after I close the app, how do you feel, Dave?

I would probably say, oh, that was a waste of my time. I wish I'd been playing with my kids instead. And this is kind of heresy, right, to tell consumer product founders that they just, we're not saying they shouldn't have metrics, sure, metrics should be part of your toolkit. But if you're mindlessly optimizing for a single metric to the exclusion of all other factors, you're probably going to lead yourself down one of these rabbit holes where you end up with an engagement farm. Yeah, I think this is where the role of the product. leader is really important because you can just say we're building it this way. I might not be

picking the optimal way to grow this product, but at least it's going to be consistent and have a clear purpose. And having that kind of clear vision for what you want to your product to be over time and having the authority as a founder to kind of enforce that, right? This is where I think founders do have an advantage. They have the kind of moral authority of like, I started this company and this is what I believe and this is where we're going. When you're saying that, I'm thinking of Steve Jobs in building the iPhone and making decisions on what they were going to do in the iPhone and what things they were explicitly not going to do. Some of those decisions in hindsight, I think they changed and they were probably the wrong decisions. But he was the owner of that.

And so there was really no debate, I think, inside of Apple about what things they would do or what things they wouldn't do. It was just baked into the culture. Everyone knew. Like, we're going to do it this way. And so I want to thank you all for listening to our first in hopefully a long series of product deep dives. If you have a product that you would like us to dissect, let us know in the comments. Yeah, thanks for watching.