
Thoughts on user growth and product - jonluca
https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/thoughts-on-product
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olds
Hi Jon, I was a PM on Growth at Pinterest many, many moons ago (~2013-2014?)
so it was cool to see your post and read through your observations on Growth
at Pinterest. A couple points I might add that might be of interest to your
readers would be that the biggest changes can be technically driven, and the
biggest changes are sometimes the smallest. I was at Pinterest from 2013 -
2017 and iirc the two biggest experiments in terms of percentage user signups
and retention were the conversion of unauth pages to react [1] and the change
from "Pin" to "Save". They were both roughly equal magnitude in impact (again,
iirc), and completely outsized all other growth experiments shipped in those
respective years. Two very different projects, approached from very different
angles, that ultimately lead to a faster, and more understandable, product.

[1] [https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/driving-user-
growth...](https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/driving-user-growth-with-
performance-improvements-cfc50dafadd7)

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justfortechnews
Some wise advice here. I relate to the thought on cyclical user growth.

Some execs refuse to hear that Q3 is regularly going to be a dead space no
matter how aggressive the company gets, for example. It's a challenging work
environment when there's no room for a down month or a holiday-season slump.

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thomas
For me, the real growth question with Pinterest is how come they rank so well
on Google? They dominate result for many image-related queries despite being a
content aggregator. Everything on Pinterest inherently lives someplace else on
the web, no? How come those aren’t what I’m seeing? The site seems to have
become an SEO powerhouse despite - at least for me - never being the result I
want.

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simonw
I believe Pinterest use machine learning to generate labels for images for SEO
purposes, which I imagine has an enormous impact.

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xyzzy_plugh
Honestly I'm surprised they're not penalized by Google, given that pretty much
any search result page does not contain any of the words in the search result
snippet, in my experience.

