Pod Insights Y Combinator Podcast Twitter vs. X: Product Lessons For Startup Founders | The Breakdown About this episode 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.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 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.
0:13 Speaker 01 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.
0:32 Speaker 01 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.
0:43 Speaker 00 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.
0:55 Speaker 01 So to start with, we're going to explore Twitter or what is it now called?
1:01 Speaker 00 X.
1:02 Speaker 01 X.
1:05 Speaker 01 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?
1:13 Speaker 00 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.
1:41 Speaker 01 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.
1:57 Speaker 00 Same, yeah.
1:58 Speaker 01 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 color scheme has changed, but just somehow the content has quietly morphed in a way that is becoming more and more evident.
2:15 Speaker 00 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.
2:36 Speaker 01 Totally, totally.
2:37 Speaker 00 Do you feel the same way?
2:38 Speaker 01 I absolutely agree. Now I see way more videos of like some random fight in Mexico City or someone gets 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 learnt anything or like engaged with someone who's taught me something.
2:58 Speaker 00 Correct. So why does this happen? Why are they doing this?
3:01 Speaker 01 Uh, 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, like tends to optimize and optimize and optimize for that single number, almost without regard for, you know, harder to measure stuff like taste or like quality or educational content or, I don't know. What do you think?
3:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, you bring up, I think, the critical point, which is how do you know if your users are getting value from your product?
3:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:39 Speaker 00 It might be really easy just to say, well, if they're watching more content on Twitter, that must be good. 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 gonna keep watching them.
3:55 Speaker 01 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, right?
4:19 Speaker 00 The counterargument that 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 bunch of time on the site, I'm going to eventually stop using it or I'll switch to something else.
4:36 Speaker 01 Over time, the quality of the service and the desirability goes and your best users churn and go somewhere else.
4:43 Speaker 00 Yes. 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?
5:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, now is 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, 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. If we scroll down, what have we got? Some political stuff. We've got some random soup. What is this?
5:45 Speaker 01 The thing I really noticed is like a bunch of, just like political videos I'm just not really interested in.
5:51 Speaker 02 What percent of the world's population is white? Sixty-three.
5:55 Speaker 01 What is this?
5:56 Speaker 02 Seventy. Forty. Seventy percent?
5:59 Speaker 01 Who cares? Like, why am I seeing this? So what you're saying is I have to go to these three little buttons?
6:04 Speaker 00 Yes. And if you click not interested in this post, it will, I believe, eventually have you stop seeing stuff like this.
6:10 Speaker 01 Okay, so I don't need to mute or block. I'm just like, no.
6:13 Speaker 00 But here's a great product design question. Like they've now given you many tools to potentially solve your problem.
6:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I don't know what I'm, okay, not interested, fine.
6:22 Speaker 00 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.
6:39 Speaker 01 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 were these changes made?
6:50 Speaker 00 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.
7:14 Speaker 01 We're aging ourselves now.
7:18 Speaker 00 Probably the single biggest change that Facebook, the product, ever made, for the better, was moving to this newsfeed where, basically, anytime someone would modulate their wall, it would show you the content that you had chosen to see.
7:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, so instead of having to go and creep on each individual person.
7:32 Speaker 00 Correct, just put it all there. And it was content that you had already expressed that you wanted to see.
7:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, people you followed.
7:37 Speaker 00 And they just brought it to you, right? So that made a lot of sense.
7:40 Speaker 01 There was a huge uproar at the time, though, if you remember.
7:42 Speaker 00 Yes, there were protests outside the Facebook office, but every single metric was way up.
7:48 Speaker 01 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.
8:00 Speaker 00 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 newsfeed got a little diluted for me.
8:14 Speaker 01 Totally.
8:15 Speaker 00 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.
8:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was the early adopters, again, rather than this broader, expanded social group.
8:30 Speaker 00 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.
8:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, totally. So it goes from this tight knit social community, people you're seeing every day, you're engaging with, their photos. And then it broadens out. How did we get from a small social network of my friends to this engagement thing?
9:01 Speaker 00 Yes. And TikTok, the most recent one, I think, just skipped straight to the endgame.
9:05 Speaker 01 Total speedrun.
9:06 Speaker 00 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.
9:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it feels like a deeply unsatisfying experience.
9:16 Speaker 00 Correct. 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.
9:43 Speaker 01 Totally. And it's sort of understanding that human communities are based around Dunbar's number. You can only really know 150 people. And so a social network that kind of constrained itself to that smaller group might be really, 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 shareholder pressure ultimately pushes you towards this algorithmic feed.
10:06 Speaker 00 All right. So you're Elon. What should you do?
10:12 Speaker 01 I don't know. I don't know if you bought it as a commercial concern, really, or for political influence, or on a whim as a joke. I don't really know.
10:21 Speaker 00 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 fistfights 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.
10:51 Speaker 01 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 10 minutes telling it what you like and you don't like, and your feed gets better. Another way I tried was these curated lists up top. So you've got your, obviously, your following tab, which is... People, 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 UK politics. So we've just had an election in the UK.
11:31 Speaker 00 So just zooming out, what you're basically doing is you're inheriting the credibility of work other people have done that you trust.
11:38 Speaker 01 That's exactly what I'm doing, but it's so hard to find these lists. I had to Google 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.
11:59 Speaker 00 It's still the first place you go.
12:01 Speaker 01 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.
12:12 Speaker 00 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.
12:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:20 Speaker 00 So like we saw, 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.
12:30 Speaker 01 Right.
12:31 Speaker 00 So that's the magic.
12:32 Speaker 01 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, 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, a big status symbol originally, wasn't it?
12:53 Speaker 00 Yes.
12:53 Speaker 01 Did you have your blue tick?
12:54 Speaker 00 I emailed the person I knew on Twitter to get it.
12:57 Speaker 01 I got a blue tick.
12:58 Speaker 00 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.
13:10 Speaker 01 And now you can pay what, like seven bucks or nine bucks a month or something? And you, you might have Donald Trump's parody account, but parody account always gets truncated and then you see the blue tick. So it's like Donald Trump blue tick, this must be real.
13:21 Speaker 00 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 in his basement paying for Twitter Premium or an actual legit person that I should pay attention to.
13:41 Speaker 01 I mean, people talked about editing tweets for like the longest time as if it was gonna destroy the world or something, and it's just really, it's been fine, right?
13:48 Speaker 00 It's fine. It works.
13:49 Speaker 01 You should be able to edit stuff.
13:50 Speaker 00 No deal.
13:51 Speaker 01 So that's a kind of big non-event.
13:53 Speaker 00 If we just look at the sidebar here on the screen of Twitter, what are all those icons on the left?
13:59 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, yeah.
14:00 Speaker 00 You know?
14:00 Speaker 01 I don't think I've clicked more than two or three of those.
14:02 Speaker 00 I recently clicked on the Grok one, which might be that one.
14:06 Speaker 01 Is that one? Okay, Grok. What happens?
14:07 Speaker 00 This is a perfect example of like a product expanding beyond what I think the users think of it as.
14:14 Speaker 01 Totally.
14:14 Speaker 00 So this is basically ChatGPT inside of Twitter.
14:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:19 Speaker 00 Which, to me, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And I'm sure to any normal person makes zero sense.
14:25 Speaker 01 Okay.
14:26 Speaker 00 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 how you're supposed to use it.
14:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:40 Speaker 00 And I feel like this is an example of it deviating from that.
14:42 Speaker 01 And I just worry there's just not a lot of great consumer product sense coming out of that guy. 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.
15:03 Speaker 00 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 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?
15:29 Speaker 01 I don't think I've unironically called it X ever.
15:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:33 Speaker 01 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.
15:46 Speaker 00 You've won.
15:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, like I Googled it or with Bump, I don't know if anyone said, I'll bump you. With Monzo in the UK, people said, like, I'll Monzo you money, Monzo me the money. Like, we got the verb, right?
15:55 Speaker 00 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. They're like, we should bump. And I hear that and I'm like, yeah.
16:10 Speaker 01 No.
16:10 Speaker 00 That'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.
16:26 Speaker 01 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.
16:32 Speaker 00 These names are available.
16:33 Speaker 01 Exactly. The domains, we could get monzo.com. Actually, we were first called mondo.com. It had these connotations of a world in a lot of European languages, mond or mondo or means world. And it's surface language 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 users and asked them like, hey, what we want, we like the M, we've got a new M logo. What should 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.
17:14 Speaker 00 I agree.
17:15 Speaker 01 Especially for something as meaningless as X, right? Like that, the whole basis of that seems to be Elon Musk is obsessed with the letter X.
17:23 Speaker 00 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, right? 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.
17:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, it started out pre PayPal. It was 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 the view of this, like Twitter becomes the everything app.
17:55 Speaker 00 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.
18:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:03 Speaker 00 Versus what seems like the opposite.
18:05 Speaker 01 So if you're thinking about changing your name, how do you go about it as a founder?
18:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, number one, if you think you need to, the best time to do it is now rather than later. Because there's less, you know, awareness in the world about your product.
18:19 Speaker 01 Yep.
18:20 Speaker 00 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?
18:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, you don't have to ask, how is that spelt?
18:30 Speaker 00 Correct, yeah, never. And ideally, if you can pull it off, it has something to do with what your product does.
18:37 Speaker 01 And I think ultimately, the best companies bring meaning to the name often, rather than the other way around. And Monzo doesn't mean anything.
18:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, Google didn't mean anything other than some nerdy thing.
18:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, Amazon's a big river in South America. Like, 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?
19:03 Speaker 00 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.
19:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that's sort of the problem, right? When you give a team, especially a product manager, this singular number to optimize for, just everything else goes out the window and you just, it's like the infamous sort of AI that's tasked with making paper clips. And you just end up with the whole world enslaved for this enormous paper clip machine.
19:44 Speaker 00 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. You know, 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.
20:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:04 Speaker 00 But at least it had a consistent worldview of like, 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.
20:20 Speaker 01 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.
20:31 Speaker 00 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?
20:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, and can you wrap that up into a metric? Like, is there always a metric you're optimizing for?
20:50 Speaker 00 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 whatevers is all up. But if you asked me after I closed the app, how do you feel, Dave? I would probably say, ugh, that was a waste of my time.
21:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:07 Speaker 00 I wish I'd been playing with my kids instead.
21:09 Speaker 01 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.
21:27 Speaker 00 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.
21:41 Speaker 01 And having that kind of clear vision for what you want your product to be over time and having the authority as a founder to kind of enforce that, right? 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.
21:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, 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.
22:22 Speaker 01 And so I want to thank you all for listening to our first in hopefully a long series of product deep dives.
22:30 Speaker 00 If you have a product that you would like us to dissect, let us know in the comments.
22:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, thanks for watching.
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