- David Lieb, product director at Google Photos, discusses his experience co-founding the app Bump, which became popular in the early days of the iPhone.
- Bump allowed users to easily share contact information by bumping their phones together.
- The app gained traction through media coverage and was even featured in an Apple TV commercial.
- However, the focus on user numbers and frequency of use rather than retention and value extraction ultimately led to the downfall of Bump as a business.
- Lieb and his team explored various ideas, such as charging for the app or implementing a freemium model, but ultimately decided to pivot to working on Google Photos.

- The company tested in-app purchases and ads as revenue sources but found they could only make about $1 per user per year on average.
- They realized they needed a better plan than just focusing on growth.
- The success of their product, Bump, was largely due to word-of-mouth distribution and minimal marketing spend.
- The founders conducted phone calls with top users and discovered that the app was being used primarily for photo sharing instead of its intended purpose.
- They created a new product called Flock to address the photo sharing problem, but it failed to gain traction because users had to convince their friends to download the app.
- They realized they needed to go upstream and become the camera roll to solve the problem of automated photo sharing.
- The founders were power users of photo sharing and had a personal interest in the space, which helped them understand the potential of the market.

- The founders of the company were using iPhones and experiencing problems with storage and photo management.
- They decided to create a better photo gallery app called Photo Roll, which included the functionality of their previous product, Flock.
- They realized they needed to raise more funding to continue developing Photo Roll, but felt it would be difficult to secure a Series C round.
- The founders discuss their fundraising experience and the ease of raising money due to the popularity of their app.
- They reflect on the importance of discipline when managing raised funds and advise entrepreneurs to only raise money if they have a clear plan for its use.
- The founders believe they could have made their previous product, Bump, profitable but not at the scale required by their investors.
- They explain their decision to join Google and how their product aligned with Google's mission and existing photo-related teams.
- The founders discuss the insights and features that led to the creation of Google Photos, including animations and smart photo organization.
- They explain their approach to designing Google Photos by imagining a human photo assistant with unlimited resources.

- The co-founder of Google Photos discusses the concept of having a virtual photo assistant and how it led to the design of Google Photos.
- He explains his day-to-day responsibilities at Google and the different aspects of his job.
- He talks about the transition from a startup to a big company and how it feels like their startup acquired a large team at a big company.
- He advises AI startups to focus on solving real problems that people can resonate with and to consider whether they are trying to scale a solvable human problem or solve an unsolvable human problem.
- He emphasizes the importance of focusing on the user and how Google has transformed to prioritize user needs.
- He discusses the challenges of talking to users at scale and the methods Google uses to gather feedback and understand user needs.

- The speaker emphasizes the importance of intuition and talking to users in product development.
- They mention that focusing too much on system performance can lead to overlooking the bigger picture.
- The speaker discusses the process of gaining confidence in a product before launching it to a large audience.
- They reflect on their mistakes in a large company and the need to convince multiple bosses.
- The speaker highlights the value of startups and the ability to have a direct impact on users.
- They discuss the alignment of vision and the importance of conversations about product outcomes in acquisitions.
- The speaker acknowledges the significance of photos in people's lives and the need for alignment in building products.

- The power of nostalgia is a significant truth about humanity, and Google Photos aims to give everyone a photographic memory.
- The challenge is determining which photos are important and which ones should be forgotten.
- The speaker is interested in apps that improve mundane systems and apply technology to everyday activities like eating and healthcare.
- In the consumer space, it is difficult to predict which products will succeed, but durable human needs are essential for long-term success.
- Instagram succeeded because it fulfilled the human need to interact with others.

- David Lieb, co-founder of the app Bump, discusses its downfall due to a focus on user numbers rather than retention and value extraction.
- Lieb and his team explored different revenue sources but ultimately pivoted to working on Google Photos.
- They realized the success of Bump was due to word-of-mouth distribution and minimal marketing spend.
- They created a new product called Flock to address photo sharing but failed to gain traction.
- They decided to become the camera roll and created Photo Roll, which later evolved into Google Photos.
- The founders reflect on their fundraising experience and the importance of discipline in managing funds.
- They joined Google because their product aligned with Google's mission and existing photo-related teams.
- The co-founder discusses the insights and features that led to the creation of Google Photos.
- He emphasizes the importance of focusing on the user and talks about gathering feedback and understanding user needs at scale.
- The speaker highlights the value of startups and the ability to have a direct impact on users.
- They discuss the significance of photos in people's lives and the challenge of determining which ones are important.
- The speaker is interested in apps that improve mundane systems and fulfill durable human needs.

David Lieb is the Product Lead for Google Photos. Prior to working on Google Photos, David was the cofounder and CEO of Bump, which was in the Summer 2009 batch of YC.

https://twitter.com/dflieb
https://photos.google.com/

Gustaf Alströmer is a Partner at YC.

https://twitter.com/gustaf

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

https://twitter.com/craigcannon

***

Topics

00:10 - How Bump became one of the biggest apps on the App Store

3:24 - Bump was the billionth app downloaded on iOS

5:42 - David's YC interview

7:45 - Bump's goal during YC

9:40 - Experiments at Bump before working on photos

10:45 - How Bump grew

12:00 - How David thinks about product market fit

13:00 - Flock and talking with the top users of Bump

17:30 - Going upstream in photo sharing, becoming the camera roll

19:00 - Being a photo sharing power user and how that helped when building a product

21:40 - Fundraising

25:40 - Deciding that Photo Roll would work better within a big company and building it at Google

29:10 - When building a product, pretend there's a person doing that task for you in the best possible way then try to build that

31:20 - How David spends his time running Google Photos

33:15 - How David feels about his work at Google after being a startup founder

34:45 - When to apply AI

36:50 - Attention to the user vs the technology

37:30 - Talking to users at scale

40:30 - Lamide Akomolafe asks - What did David focus on too much as a rookie product lead that he thinks was a mistake now?

42:15 - Getting confidence to ship features to a billion users

44:45 - Generating support for a project within a big company

46:30 - In 5-10 years will David be working for a large or small company?

47:55 - When thinking about an acquisition, can you execute your vision in a larger way within the company?

49:40 - Larger truths about people learned by paying so much attention to photos and memories

51:15 - Giving everyone a photographic memory and deciding which photos are important

52:25 - Products David likes and the importance of solving a durable human need

He is a product director at Google specifically for Google photos.

What some people might not know is you are also the co-founder of bump and bump was 1 of the biggest apps on the app store for the first years of the iPhone.

I had been an engineer and I kind of went to the dark side and went to business school in the fall of 2008.

This was right when the iPhone had come out a year earlier.

They had just opened up the App Store to third-party developers that summer.

So I showed up to business school and I met a couple people in the computer science department who had built apps over the summer.

And this 1 guy I met, he had built an app that looked for open Wi-Fi networks.

And it just like told you which ones were open and which ones had like a pay or whatever it's called, a password.

And he made $200,000 that summer selling that app.

And I was like, okay, we should build an app here.

And at the same time, I was in business school and I was meeting all my new business school classmates and we were doing that thing that like we still honestly do today, which was, hey, tell me your phone number.

I'll type it in, then I'll call your phone.

You dismiss the call and then you ask me how to spell my name.

Like 1 day I did that 10 times and I was like, okay, somebody should solve this.

So I emailed a guy I met, I didn't really even work with him directly, but I had met at my previous job at Texas Instruments.

And I said, Hey, Andy, like any interest in building an iPhone app?

And at the time, he was like, I think Android is going to be bigger.

And so we just started hacking away and trying to build this app to make it easier to share your phone number with people that you met.

I was like a full time business school student.

We just kind of worked on it for a while.

We met, I met my third co-founder, Jake Mintz at business school.

He was also just a random classmate of mine.

We met, we both had worked at Texas Instruments.

And we brought him on board and the 3 of us just kind of did the whole thing ourselves in our spare time.

And we put it onto the App Store and people started using it.

We launched March 27th, 2009 was when it got out to the world.

And at that time, it was very non-obvious that apps are gonna be big.

I remember watching the apps for the first

And I think a lot of people viewed Bump as a silly trivial thing too, right?

It was like this kind of novelty of the iPhone.

Like, oh yeah, it's got an accelerometer.

You can bump your phones together and it does something.

But that actually was like the engine that made it grow.

We got a few, you know, people started using it.

But then because of that like novelty and the fact that the iPhone was a thing in the news around that time.

Every reporter wanted to talk about the coolest apps on the iPhone.

And so, I remember I met 1 reporter from the Chicago Tribune at like a random business school conference once.

And I emailed him and I'm like, hey, I've got this cool app, you might want to write about it.

And then I did this little hack where I took his article and I forwarded it to like the next highest person on the like journalism rank.

think I mailed it to David Pogue at the New York times.

I was like, Hey, the Chicago tribunes got this already, but you could still write about it.

And then I took that and I like went up the notch.

And eventually, it just got pretty popular.

And I think we were, we were like the maybe on the like 200 on the top app chart at the time that the billionth app was going to be downloaded from the app store.

And because we were the top 200 app, we were getting a lot of downloads that day.

So the probability of us being the billionth download was like 2% I think on the day that it happened, and it was us.

And so I got a call in Chicago, I was in Chicago, I got a call from the woman who runs all of developer relations from Apple.

You were the billionth app downloaded yesterday.

We'd like to tell the world about it, but I wanted to call you to make sure that your servers are going to be able to handle it.

And I was like, Oh, yeah, let me let me call you back.

So I call Andy, I'm like, Andy, are we gonna be able to do this?

And I said, Okay, that sounds like a yes.

Like that was the thing that got us globally, like everybody heard about us.

Yeah, I mean, Apple like did a marketing little effort, little marketing effort around it.

But then later, like after we joined YC that summer, they actually put us into an international TV commercial.

This was the like, there's an app for it campaign, people might remember.

And we didn't really know we were gonna be a part of it.

The way Apple works is they're very secretive.

They say like, would you please sign this waiver that says we can use your brand in various things.

And yeah, 1 day during YC, we were looking at our graphs and our servers just went, like it was a factor of a thousand in 10 minutes.

And then our friends started pinging us saying, hey, wait, I just saw you during Dancing with the Stars.

And that's the point where our servers like totally melted down, everything broke.

And this is the first moment where I realized the value of the YC network.

I sent an email out to YC founders and I said, Hey, does anybody know how to, I think we were using Apache, there's like an Apache web server in our stack at the time.

And I said, does anybody, like, is anybody an expert at this?

They came over to our office and just sat in our desks, and they said, like, step away from the keyboards.

And so that was the first moment where I was like, ooh, YC's really valuable.

I didn't, like, I remember when I was talking to Paul Graham about how we should do this, and he said, I won't be able to explain it a priori why it's really valuable, but I guarantee you'll see that it's very valuable.

And that was the first moment where I was like, yep, he was right.

Yeah, no, we didn't know anything about it, honestly.

Jake and I were in business school, we were trying to learn about tech, because everybody in business school, you're supposed to go get an internship for the summer.

So we were like, oh, where should we get our internships?

So we were reading TechCrunch a bunch, and we kept seeing this thing called Y Combinator.

And then it turns out we knew a couple people who had gone through it already.

And so we went and talked to those people.

I knew Sivraj, who had done Watt Vision, I think was his first 1.

And I went and talked to him, and he's like, yeah, you should totally do it.

The interview process was fascinating to me as an outsider in this world.

Our interview was PG, Jessica, Robert Morris, and

I can only imagine, what were their responses when you're like, okay, so this is an app that you share your contact information.

We walked in and we sat down and Literally before I could open my mouth, Paul said, give us your phones, we wanna try it.

So we hand our phones over to him, and they just start playing around.

RTM was like, oh, I'm gonna try to hack it and break it.

Let's all bump at the same time and see if we can break it.

And then, and I do distinctly remember Jessica being like, so how do you guys know each other?

And like, that was the moment where I was like, oh, okay, she's interested in understanding like how the founders know each other, what our backgrounds are, like what type of people are we?

Whereas like Trevor and Robert were just like hacking away at the tech, right?

And the most surprising sentence that was spoken in our interview was, at some point, PG just kind of detached and put his head down and was kind of just thinking, and he said, how does this become bigger than Google?

But that just showed how he thinks that you can take something that seems so frivolous at the beginning and turn it into something potentially that would be really big.

And so did you establish a metric early on during YC?

Like, what was your goal before demo day?

We were really anchored on how many people used it and how many times they used it.

That's like the main thing that we were focused on.

In hindsight, that probably was not the right thing to be focused on.

But I think, especially for us as total newbies to this space, we didn't know anything better.

And so this was actually 1 of the big learnings that we had at Bump, that we grew like crazy.

We got up to 150 million downloads of our app, And I think at the peak we were at like 10 million monthly active users, so it was like a very big property, especially 10 years ago on the internet.

But the thing we were looking at was like, how many people use it and how many bumps were happening per day and per month.

And what we weren't tracking as precisely as we should have was, do the people who use it today, when do they keep using it?

How frequently do they use it and what is the retention curve?

So I remember we were raising money and all the VCs would ask, what's your cohort retention curve look like?

And then I'd go and Google cohort retention curve.

And I was trying to learn, like, what is this metric that people keep talking about?

And in hindsight now, I realize it's like the single most important thing.

And with Bump, the actual dynamic was that our long term cohort retention was really good, actually, if you measured it on a wide enough time period.

Basically, people kept it on their phone and they would definitely use it at some point in the future.

The problem was the frequency of use was very long.

And so we thought that we were going to be able to build a business off of a large user base using this product.

But if your large user base uses your product infrequently, you have to figure out a way to extract a lot of value each time they use it.

It was like, yeah, it's nice, it's convenient.

I could solve my problem in another way and it's not that hard.

So ultimately that was the thing that kind of killed it as a business for us.

Like what'd you try to push into before you ultimately decided to do something with photos?

Yeah, we thought about a bunch of ideas, like, should we just charge for the app, or should we have a freemium model where there's a certain feature set that you would get if you would pay?

We tried in-app purchases for different stickers and things like that.

We tested all these things as like tiny 1% tests.

We tried ads in the product also as a little test.

And we basically concluded we could basically get like maybe 1000000 sorry, 1 dollar for every user of the product per year on average.

And then we realized like, oh we've got 10 million monthly active users.

Like, that's a nice business, but it's not a business that you go raise huge amounts of VC funding to go build.

I think this was in like beginning of 2012, maybe where we realized, oh, we need a better plan.

Because our plan all to that point was just grow.

We'll just do it too, and it'll be great.

And I think we didn't understand the fundamental differences between our business and those businesses.

So we spent no money on customer acquisition, no money on marketing.

I used to tell this story that the amount of money we ever spent on marketing, I think was like $42.

And it was for me to buy a videotape to put into a borrowed camcorder and a black piece of felt to put behind so I could make the demo video for Bump in my apartment.

People who got the app thought it was cool enough that they wanted to be like, hey, Gustav, try it.

Like, I want to show you this cool app I just downloaded.

And what we thought was going to be an inhibitor to growth, which is this chicken and egg problem, like you can't use it unless I have it, actually turned out to be the driving force behind our distribution.

Because it was like novel and cool enough that people were willing to like take that investment to say, oh, just download it.

And you thought about product market fit quite a bit.

You mentioned that in 1 of the talks you did at YC.

So we'll come to Flux in a second, but there's 3 different products you worked on in the last couple years.

And what's your, when you think about the word product market fit in terms of bump, like how do you analyze that today, after the fact?

Yeah, product market fit, I still, it's a very subjective concept.

I don't think you can really measure it because you can have very great product market fit with some customer base.

But as you try to expand your customer base, you might find like, Oh yeah, there's not product market fit for these other people over here.

And so saying that you've reached product market fit, I think is really like, it's a staged question.

And ultimately, if you want to be huge in a consumer space, you've got to get to a large group of people.

And the question is, do you have product market fit for that large group of people?

Even with Google Photos today, my answer would be, we certainly have product market fit for a large group of people in the world, but there's another group of people who use our product that I wouldn't say is product market fit necessarily.

There's a whole lot more things that we need to understand and build for that.

When you get to a billion or more users, there's the next person who joins your product, like they're very different than the first person who joined your product.

And so you've got to really understand that.

So after Bump, you guys tried another product.

So Flock came around, tell us about that.

built Bump to share the contact sharing problem and people started using it for that.

Apple eventually added an API to access photos on the phone and we thought, OK, let's just add that, let's see what happens, it's pretty cheap to do.

So we added that feature and people started using that and it turned out that turned into the biggest single use case of bump sharing photos.

And so 1 day in I guess beginning of 2012 when you know I was looking at our dashboards and I'm like I think it's not gonna keep growing.

I thought back to the advice that I heard PG give us back in YC, which was, when you're stuck, go talk to your users.

They will always tell you what they want.

So I said, okay, guys, give me a list of the top 100 users of Bump in the world.

I'm gonna try to go have phone calls with them.

So Jake and I that day went into a conference room and just tried to call as many of those people on the phone as we could.

And we said, hey, we're the founders of Bump.

We just wanted to hear like what you think of it, why do you use it, that sort of thing.

And what we heard was basically most of those people said, oh, I don't use it for contact sharing.

I use it to share photos with my husband.

You can just email the photos to your husband.

And these people would tell us, well, it's just easier.

And they get the full resolution file and I don't have to worry about attachments and emails bouncing.

Like, it's just easy." And we thought, oh.

And that then led us to, okay, so there's clearly a problem in the photo sharing space amongst your like friends or family.

But the product we built is like kind of the most hard product to use to solve that problem.

Because both people have to download this app, you have to stop what you're doing, and both decide, okay, we're gonna do this bump thing now.

It's like, when you're building product, you try to minimize friction of using your product.

And with bump, it was almost like we maximize the friction.

So we were like, okay, let's try to build a product that minimizes the friction rather than maximizes it.

And so that led us to this product called flock that we built and launched.

It was really a very convenient turn of events where at the same time that Jake and I were sitting in that conference room, roughly, having that learning or that insight, our engineering team was developing the bump algorithm, which was really like a pattern matching early type of AI system that would use a bunch of signals to predict whether you bumped with another phone because it was all server-based.

So it was all kind of like a magic trick.

But our engineers said, hey Dave, I can tell you who's going to bump with whom tomorrow.

And the answer was, they would go look at where and when people took photos on their phone.

So they look at the metadata of their camera roll and they could say like, I'm pretty sure Gustav's gonna bump with Craig tomorrow.

And what they did is they figured out that like today you 2 were at the YC office and you took a photo and you took a photo at the same time.

And they're like, probably they are going to bump those photos to each other.

And so that was the key insight on the tech side that allowed us to kind of marry those 2 insights and create this product, Flock.

So Flock looked at your Facebook friends and figured out when you took a photo at the same time as when your other friend was there.

And then it basically did a suggested sharing prompt to you to say, hey, it looks like you might want to share this photo.

And just press this 1 button and we'll share the photo to the other person.

And we built that app, we used it ourselves, we used it with our friends and family before we launched.

And we realized like, wow, this is really great.

Like it just makes my life so much easier.

I'm getting all these photos from my friends that I was never gonna get otherwise.

And then we launched it and nobody downloaded it.

And we were like, oh shucks, this is terrible.

And what we didn't really understand, which we learned through this experience, was this, it's a Chris Dixon blog post, which is the like, come for the tool, stay for the network idea, which is that the first users of your product have to have some core utility that makes it useful for them, even when no 1 else in the world has the product.

And with Flock, it was like, I download Flock, and it says, great, go convince your friends to download this app so that you can get some value out of it and 99% of people were like cool home screen

so that was the key insight there and what we learned was that if we wanted to solve this like automated photo sharing problem we had to upstream ourselves and get 1 step higher in the stack and actually be the camera roll.

And if we were the camera roll, then everybody's going to be using the product anyway.

And then all this sharing stuff would actually work.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Google Photos Product Lead and Bump Cofounder David Lieb with Gustaf Alströmer