Roblox bought its first users, then creators drove growth

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 15:39

   so we had in-house creation the three of us are coding um and then we we had some users starting to play on classic crossroads how are you getting them really interesting i don't know what entrepreneur i heard this from they said look just go buy 50 users a day from google like that's it You can buy them for a buck a buck a user. And so we said, oh, that's a really good idea. Let's go buy 50 users a day. That was the germination of all of Roblox.

2. 16:12

   If we were able to like reverse engineer the whole social graph tree all the way back to the starting of Roblox, we'd probably see a one month period, you know, times 50 users, times 30, probably see 1,500 users that were saw some ad, like online building game, come try it out, that are the initial social graph of everyone on Roblox. Now in the afternoon, the four of us go online, there's maybe 20 or 30 people just hanging out in these games and we're kind of watching them.

3. 16:46

   We had been making those games with Roblox Studio, which was our creation environment. And we were in a rush. When can we publish the full closed loop system? The closed loop system is anyone can download Roblox Studio. You can make an experience. You can push it live. There's a page where you can see all of the experiences. You can jump in and start playing that. And that's a, you know, that's a kind of a closed loop perpetual motion machine.

4. 17:15

   So we're just like, hey, we got to get this studio thing out. Like, what's going to happen? We don't know. I hope someone likes it. Blah, blah, blah. We got about 1,500 users. So you go from, you're trying to get them from being users to creators. That's right. And then a few years later, which I want to talk to you about, because people, I don't think many people know that the size of businesses people are building on top of your platform they're big yeah they're they're massive now at this point where we're in the story you're turning your users into creators and it happened very virally so there's a day we were in a little office on chestnut street in menlo park the four of us it's like okay it's one in the afternoon let's push roblox studio live see what happens and then probably around three or four o'clock we started

5. 17:57

   seeing our, whoa, someone has published something. Look at that. Look at that. Oh, someone published something that other people are playing. Oh, look at that. Oh my gosh. Now there's 20 things published and that has a bunch of people in it. Oh my gosh. And so we went home that night just going, okay, closed loop viral system. Like these are users now that have way more word of mouth than anything we're buying, this system is growing on its own.

6. 18:26

   Why do they have way more word of mouth than anything you're buying? Because they're telling their friends to play the game that they made? They made a game, the variety of the games. All of a sudden there's a hundred different things. It's not the boring stuff we made for the existing users. I'm seeing something new every minute rather than this boring stuff we made three weeks ago.