How this startup got 100 million users with 5 core values and one simple process

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The following is an edited excerpt from Explosive Growth: A Few Things I Learned While Growing to 100 Million Users and Losing $78 Million: Ultimate Startup Playbook in Entrepreneurship, Business Strategy, Online Marketing, Leadership & PR by Cliff Lerner. The excerpt is provided by Clifford Ventures Corporation. You can buy a copy here.

(Cliff Lerner is  the co-founder and former CEO of Snap Interactive, a software and social media company which created one of the first applications on Facebook. The dating website surpassed 10 million users within a year and became the top grossing app on iTunes App Store.)

We implemented a highly effective process improvement strategy called CIO, which stood for Celebrate, Iterate, or Obliterate.

Celebrate, Iterate, or Obliterate

Celebrate, Iterate, or Obliterate (CIO) CIO was a huge process improvement strategy for us, because we were running so many tests in those days that we began to suffer from data overload. It became very difficult to keep track of all the new ideas and latest builds while analyzing the results.

Worse than that, was that the code became bloated, because the engineers had a hard time incorporating all the existing tests, which may or may not have still been around in a few months. The result of that inefficiency was that not only did our metrics suffer, but ironically, our ability to quickly build new features eroded as well.

The CIO concept put a simple process in place to follow every time we launched a new feature. Within two weeks after release, we would run tests, analyze the data, and take one of three actions:

Celebrate it!: It was a huge win and surpassed our success metric!

Iterate on it: We thought it had potential, but it didn’t quite live up to expectations yet.

Obliterate it: It was a complete disaster and wasn’t worth our time to iterate it.

That simple process forced us to remove a lot of features that weren’t adding enough to the user experience or didn’t work out for some other reason. This alone was a huge success as bombarding the site with new features not only slowed down the development time of each successive feature, but also diminished the user experience.

We learned that sometimes users didn’t know what to do with all the shiny, new objects. Much to my surprise, product managers and engineers got more excited when we obliterated a feature than when we celebrated a win, because it meant less code for them to manage, and it made it easier to build new things. Meanwhile, I developed my own reasons for becoming excited about obliterations—we saw incremental improvements in usage as we decluttered the site by removing rarely used features.

Five core values

Another one of my mandates was to come up with five core values for the organization to run by. Here’s what we came up with:

Experiment: We use a scientific, data-driven method to make decisions. We hypothesize, experiment, learn, and iterate. We find innovative solutions and question assumptions, even if they are longstanding. Experimentation and iterative steps guide even our most innovative ideas.