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Zuckerberg's 4-Step Playbook for Building Products That Reach Billions

By Mark Zuckerberg · Product & Building · 1 min read

Phase one: build a thing that sparks some joy. Phase two: make it retentive — people come back. Phase three: grow it. Phase four: monetize. These are not the same thing — and the order matters.

Key Points

Phase 1: build a thing that sparks joy and that people appreciate
Phase 2: make it retentive — a lot of things people think are awesome may not bring them back
Phase 3: grow it — but only after retention is proven. Phase 4: monetize last.

If people aren't going to be retained by it, why would you ask people to go sign up for something?

Phase One: Spark Joy

Zuckerberg: We have this playbook. Phase one is build a thing that kind of sparks some joy and that people appreciate.

Phase one: build a thing that sparks some joy and that people appreciate.

Phase Two: Retention

Zuckerberg: From there you want to get to something that is retentive — people who have a good experience come back and want to keep using it. These two things are not always the same. A lot of things that people think are awesome may not always bring them back.

If people aren't going to be retained by it, why would you ask people to go sign up for something?

A lot of things people think are awesome may not bring them back. Retention and delight aren't the same.

Phase Three and Four: Growth, Then Monetize

Zuckerberg: Once you have retention, then you can start encouraging more people to join. But if people aren't going to be retained by it, why would you ask them to sign up? Step one: spark. Step two: retention. Step three: growth and scaling the community.

And only at that point is step four — monetization. We take a while to go through all those. WhatsApp has two billion people using it every day and we're really only getting started on monetization now with things like business messaging.

If people aren't going to be retained, why ask them to sign up? WhatsApp has 2 billion daily users — only now starting monetization.