My love for Slack..
and all things product-driven growth.
Hey !
Ashish here. Welcome to the next edition of the ProductGeeks newsletter (which you must have forgotten subscribing to!)
I am back after a long break.
The one thing I have realized is that creating a newsletter is an extremely difficult task - especially when you want to add a lot of links, curated notes..and gifs. No editor is friendly towards curation and copy/pasting the content kills the formatting.
So, for a very small percentage of the newsletter subscribers, I have started using Substack to really test out the creation process(heck! these guys went to YC, raised money - so I am assuming they must be onto something big!)
For now, let’s start with probably the most important update from the tech world.
Slack IPO.
Slack is killing it and while I won’t get into the ‘how much’ part (it keeps changing), but would love to have you read the post from the early days written by Slack founder, Stewart Butterfield.
A few excerpts from his piece (emphasis is mine)
We are unlikely to be able to sell “a group chat system” very well: there are just not enough people shopping for group chat system (and, as pointed out elsewhere, our current fax machine works fine).
That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation.
We’re selling a reduction in information overload, relief from stress, and a new ability to extract the enormous value of hitherto useless corporate archives. We’re selling better organizations, better teams. That’s a good thing for people to buy and it is a much better thing for us to sell in the long run. We will be successful to the extent that we create better teams.
A lot of clarity in there! You can read his post here.
Life is too short to do mediocre work and it is definitely too short to build shitty things.
By the way, for the love of Slack and the Product community, we have relaunched our ProductGeeks Slack channel (expect a lot more AMAs over there). Do join in if you are keen (link)!
The next story is..on Amazon.
Amazon makes nearly $800 million a month in extra sales by continuously improving their search results!
Amazon’s most significant source of traffic is Organic search from Google -- it accounts for about half of all of Amazon’s traffic. And actually, Google does a better than baseline job of putting them on the right page. But, when people come in from Google, and do a second search - they have a 13.26% conversion rate - which is almost 6x higher.
As a consequence - despite the fact that over twice as many people search on Google, land on Amazon, and don’t do the search on Amazon -- Amazon still gets 2 and a half times more sales from the people that use their search rather than Google’s.
Amazon is also using search personalization (hello Prime video - Amazon knows what you watched last night!).
And guess what - Amazon has pretty much coined a new ‘engineering job role’ called Relevance Engineering (and they have 858 such engineers just focused on improving search and personalization relevance)!
Read this fascinating piece here.
That’s it for now !
Hope you enjoyed the newsletter and the format. Please do reply with your feedback.
Cheers
Ashish.