EPISODE 225: Marketer of the Month Podcast with Rose Wang

Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Rose Wang for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Rose and here’s what we discussed about-

1. Builds a new social web where no single entity controls content decisions.

2. Ensures seamless user experience despite rapid expansion through robust infrastructure.

3. Implements proactive moderation tools to enhance online security.

4. Uses content filtering and unique post-quoting mechanisms to reduce toxicity.

5. Encourages organic social interactions instead of algorithm-driven echo chambers.

6. Focuses on user experience over advertiser demands, reshaping the digital landscape.

About our host:

Randy Rayess is the co-founder of Outgrow.co, a platform designed to help marketers create highly interactive web and social experiences to drive referral traffic and lead generation. With a background in venture capital, private equity, and startups focusing on financial services, transaction processing, and machine learning, He is passionate about leveraging technology to transform marketing strategies. He believes in shifting from traditional advertising to creating valuable tools and experiences for customers. 

About our guest:

Rose Wang is the COO of Bluesky Social, bringing a wealth of experience in tech, entrepreneurship, and sustainability. Previously, she was Head of Customer Experience at AI platform Forethought and the CEO/co-founder of Chirps, a sustainable cricket protein food company. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, TEDx speaker, and Echoing Green fellow, Rose is passionate about innovation, social impact, and education.

Chronologically Yours: Reinventing Social Media with Bluesky’s COO Rose Wang

The Intro!

Randy Rayess: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Randy Rayess, and I’m the co-founder at Outgrow.co. And for this month we are going to interview Rose Wang who is the COO of Bluesky Social.

Rose Wang: Great to be here. Thank you.

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Challenge yourself with this trivia about the exciting topics Rose Wang covered in the podcast.

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The Big Questions!

Randy Rayess: All right, everyone. Welcome to Marketer of the Month. Today, we have a really interesting guest. So we have Rose Wang from Blue Sky, and she’s the Chief Operating Officer of Blue Sky, which is a very rapidly growing social network. So Rose, can you give us a little bit of information about Blue Sky and how you guys have rapidly grown in the last 10 Months?

Rose Wang: Thank you for having me, Randy. I am excited to be here, this is our first year, kind of our coming out year. And people ask, well, what is Blue Sky? And what we’re trying to do is build the new open social web. This is our first year here because Blue Sky is only 1-year-old. And we opened to the public in February of last year. And we’ve grown to 32 million users in one year. And to give you a comparison, Twitter I think grew to about a million users in two years. That’s crazy. So here’s a comparison. So why are all these people flocking to Blue Sky? And, you know, at the end of the day, I think it comes down to they’re having a good time, they feel it safe and then they are making friends again versus just talking into the void. And why is that happening? It’s because, on Blue Sky, you’re not tied to one algorithm that you have no control over. Here there are about a hundred thousand different feeds that users have created. Some are algorithmic, some aren’t. And what we’ve learned is that people want choice, right? You don’t have one mode of being, maybe in the morning you just wanna wake up and talk to your cat-feed friends, right? And then you maybe wanna go check the news later that day. And so what we’re giving people is a choice. And when you find people with similar interests in these cozier corners, much more like a subreddit interaction, you make friends. And so I think that’s why people are having such a good time. That’s why they’re coming and flocking to Blue Sky simply from the fact that they’re just feeling like their lives are improved.

Randy Rayess: Very interesting. Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the most rapidly growing kinds of user growth stories, that you can hear of these days. So that’s, that’s very impressive. And I know you kind of focus on the operation side of things and one of the challenges when you have this rapid growth is how do you keep, you know, uptime? How do you make sure services are running? How do you think about employee acquisition and hiring and how do you kind of sustain and manage the business while you have this rapid user growth?

Rose Wang: Yeah. So what’s funny is that people think we’re this huge company, but there were 20 people. That’s crazy. So even though, you know, operations is in my name or my title I think we all kind of do everything. Maybe the only thing I don’t do is write code specifically. I think that that’s what you want in an early company. You don’t want, me to just focus on operations. And you know, the product engineers just focus on the app. I think when you have a small team where we can kind of coordinate across, well, you know, what are we gonna be doing at South By and how does that factor into what publishers want and how does that go into the product that we’re the same team that Correct. Puts all of this together. And so, you know, as we experienced this crazy growth I believe since November we went from maybe like 15 million to now 32 million. So a lot of this growth happened in the last three months. And the US-specific focus has been let’s keep, the app online.

Randy Rayess: Exactly. Let’s keep it running,

Rose Wang: Let’s keep it running. And I think this time though it was a test for our protocol, which is new and decentralized, which all it means is that not one group of people is making decisions that essentially parts of the infrastructure, parts of the app that many people can go and make a competing service. And that’s how we have a more democratic system online And so what we wanted to see is, can a technology like this stand up? With 32 million people, right? And the answer is yes. And not only is it standing up, it’s doing very well. And so it’s proof that the way that we want the social web to work can work. Not only that, but we don’t have to build it ourselves anyone else can build the TikTok or Instagram of the atmosphere, and we can share this world. And, we’ve proven to developers that, we can build for hundreds of millions of people, and so they should be building on top of our technology.

Randy Rayess: Interesting. So we’re basically trying to manage the uptime, manage all these algorithms, and then you as an individual kind of running, obviously not just operations, but kind of a little bit of everything, how do you decide, okay, this is something I’m gonna own and this is something I’m gonna delegate down to the few people you have on your team. How do you kind of decide, I want to own this, or I’m gonna delegate this down to other people?

Rose Wang: Yeah. The name of the game is prioritization always. I think that oftentimes you can feel like there are a million things to do. Definitely. And you can always do those things, but I think in a startup, you have to honestly get one to two things, right? And everything else you can kind of just let go. And so for how we make decisions, so much of it is what is the end goal that we care about. And for us, it’s always been the end user. I see we care so deeply that the everyday person has a great time on Blue Sky. And so everything is about that experience. And so when we think about, okay, well what is gonna make sure that end users have the best experience, it’s making sure that they can feel safe online. So we put moderation as a priority when most social apps probably think of moderation as, a cost center. Or something they have to do. And so you experience it as such because it’s not the priority of the company. And so then your concerns come later. And so for Blue Sky, we’ve already put forward lots of safety features like detaching the quote post from the original post. And that’s a really interesting way where you don’t have to propagate negative news or like express descent through continuously taking an original post and sharing it over and over again. Or things like when you’re in the comment section, we’re putting toxic comments or rude comments below the folds so you don’t see them. And so like these little product features just at the end of the day, it’s about what makes users have a good time. And so when we think about, well, what are the first things we’re gonna do? First, it always comes down to, well, what makes sure that people have a good time

Randy Rayess: Fair. And one of the ideas around moderation, so, obviously it’s been a challenge for companies. I know Facebook, said they were gonna downsize their moderation, move to what, you know, access Community Notes model. Do you think that the reason so many companies have struggled with moderation, is it, is just hard to, figure out what’s where to draw a line? Or do you feel that people are moving to community notes just to save money? Or what’s the kind of thought process?

Rose Wang: Yeah, So first of all, we love community notes. And so in general, I think when we think about moderation, it’s basically like, what do you need to do to provide a safe experience? And it’s kind of crazy to me to think that we say that there’s only one solution for that. It’d be like offline or in the real world saying like, oh, we’re only gonna have firefighters but not police department. No court system and, you know, and so ultimately the question is what are the different ways systems, people great product features that enable that safety or like incentivize people to behave more positively? And so community notes aren’t a very important part of that, where people can share their different viewpoints on a certain piece of information. And so you have the public as one forcing function for understanding information, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t also have content moderators who are reviewing posts and accounts that are also problematic. And so we, we believe it is, here’s a toolbox of safety features and services that we should all tap into because it takes more than one to keep society safe. 

Randy Rayess: Correct Very interesting. And then as a, as a company, so a lot of the standard model, I know Zuckerberg would always say that for him it was like monthly active users in the early days, and then he moved to daily active users and kind of, they go between in terms of how they look at their user flow. For you guys, is it the same thing? Is it like monthly active users, or do you look at minutes on this platform? Or how do you guys think through what’s the right metric to assess if you’re doing a good job with content moderation, with the algorithms, with the making easy for build, do, how do you kind of say, okay, we’re doing a good job?

Rose Wang: Yeah, great question. I do think how you measure is basically what your app turns into Because that’s essentially how you drive all the product features toward this metric. And so I think it’s important not to just look at one metric. So, you know, is MAU important? Absolutely. Is DAU important? Absolutely. It’s some sort of signal on the health of your product, but something else that we look at in Blue Sky is how many people are following more than 10 people.That’s a really interesting metric for us to see where it’s actually who is, who’s engaged, who’s making friends. And what’s interesting about people who follow more than 10 people is they tend to be two times more engaged. Interesting. And so at the end of the day, what we’re learning is people want to stay on a platform because of the other people. Correct. And because of the other connections that they’ve made. And so, so much of what we think about is what it takes for people to build connections and make friends again.

Randy Rayess: That makes sense. You get more diversity of opinions if you have two people you’re following and they don’t post that day, you have nothing on the platform to kind of see.

Rose Wang: Totally. And also I think that we think that somehow like people posting or that they or that somehow like shouting into the void, your opinion is gonna change people’s minds. And we’ve learned that that’s not actually how people change their minds, right? It’s some combination of meeting people that they’re familiar with or people that they know deeply who have a different viewpoint and they start moving them in a more adjacent way, rather than like two directly opposing people trying to change their minds. Correct. And so I think we’ve seen why social networks have created more polarization, because I don’t think we were ever meant to, as people be in one entire like town square, not having any context on each other, shouting at each other. That’s just not how humans work.

Randy Rayess: Right So do you think that, the polarization that you see that’s happening on platforms where they focus a lot on engagement and retention is because people just wanna see things that they like and they’re gonna like people with similar viewpoints, with similar posts? Do you think that’s kind of what’s causing the bubble effect right now that people see in a society where they are not exposed to ideas outside of their core kind of beliefs?

Rose Wang: Yeah. I do think that for most people, you wanna take people on a journey It’s just like, we think a lot about games and how games bring people from, you know, a beginning to a new part of the journey. And it’s from sort of like a side quest that they discover something new. Interesting. But I think it’s really hard to take people from a belief that they’ve had and ask them to change it immediately. So on social media, I think that what we’ve seen is a lack of choice. And so at the end of the day you know, here’s a story. So for so long, users wanted Facebook to change their feed to chronological. And Facebook said, no, we don’t wanna do this because when we look at the data people tend to engage better on the algorithmic feeds. Yeah. And so Blue Sky has a chronological feed, and what we found is that people love the chronological feed because they’re discovering content that’s not suppressed by the algorithm That’s just like based on people that they follow. What happened is that threads after all these years Have changed to a chronological feed. After Blue Sky showed that this is something that users want and they get enjoyment out of. And so I think this type of competition and this type of pressure shows that the way that we’ve cont like done social media up till now is not necessarily what people want. It’s just that it’s been really hard to start a new social network. And to compete. And so these social networks can kinda do whatever they want, and they oftentimes care about what the advertisers care about. Not necessarily what the end users care about. ‘Because Those are the people who are paying them the dollars. Right. And so because we get to start over at Blue Sky, we get to reimagine this world and end users at the Centerfold and where all our incentives are directed at, how do we make sure that the end-user has a good experience?

Randy Rayess: Fair. And one of the things that’s happening that’s interesting is I think LinkedIn even recently added the video feed where you can do like the video vertical scroll kind of experience. X has it Facebook has it Instagram has it. So, and TikTok is the, do you guys feel that that’s gonna be a larger percentage cause, you know, the Twitter, the social, the Blue Sky, the threads are supposed traditionally more text-based and it was like Sure. Short text, you know, posts and now you’re starting to see more videos. Do you feel that that’s, that’s like a new transition? Or do you think it’s gonna stay like you’re still gonna be, text is always gonna be there as a source of like, people are gonna want both.

Rose Wang: It’s hard to say what’s gonna happen because I do think that Gen Alpha and Gen Z are different, are very different from millennials and, older generations. I think when we think about a global platform, I think we have to think about people in different countries. People across different generations have different preferences. So for example, I do voice notes, with my international friends, and when I try to send an American friend voice note, they’re like What are you doing? This is so awkward. So similarly on Blue Sky, I think this is the whole point about choice where we do have a scrolling video feed, and we’re actually about to come out with longer videos. Right now we have 60-second videos, and now we’re increasing that up to three minutes. So we also recognize that more and more people want video. That’s a form of content that people tend to consume information, but still, the journalists, the bloggers, and the publishers are word cells. Right. And they love the art of the word. And so we still also want to support them and make sure that there’s a platform that they can go and reach their people. And different formats of content tend to tell different stories. Correct. And so I think, the question again goes back to why we have to only have one thing. It’s all about choice.

Randy Rayess: Interesting. And then I know there’s been kind of a question around the, the putting links in in posts and I think pretty much across the board you’re starting to see people post and then they put links in comments to not destroy the algorithmic boost on links. Obviously from a platform, if you’re doing, you’re looking at your metrics, the more links there are in the post, the more people are going away from the site. So it reduces your minutes. What do you guys think about it on Blue Sky since you guys have that optionality? Can people just say like  I’m gonna do a link-focused feed and see links, or how does it work?

Rose Wang: Yeah so on Blue Sky because we don’t do advertising the way that other social platforms do advertising, we’re not incentivized to lock people into Blue Sky. I see. We want people to use Blue Sky as a lobby to discover the rest of the web. I see. And so we don’t depromote links. We don’t punish links. We are very encouraging of links and want Blue Sky to be one of the best link experiences on the web, which is going grab it whole. And then come back around. And so I was just talking to The Onion last night and they said that they had more subscribers from Blue Sky than anybody else last month. So in general, what we’re seeing is that publishers, anybody who wants to go and create their presence that wants to build their audience, rather than being tied to the algorithm or the platform interesting. They should be building their presence on Blue Sky because they own it. And so they can go take if you’re a standup comedian and you’re posting a bunch of funny jokes, as soon as you try to send people to your standup comedy show people that post gets completely down ranked and you can’t send people there. And you’re like, I’ve done all this work for the platform where I’m posting funny content and as soon as I want them to come to my thing, I get punished. That’s crazy. Right. And so on Blue Sky, we’re saying, no, you go build your audience. And then as soon as you want to have that comedy show or you wanna go support somebody else, all your followers subscribe to you and they’ll get that notification and we’re not messing with the algorithm that where then we’re hiding your content.

Randy Rayess: So my next question is around the kind of things that you learned or things you do differently today. So as you know, you’ve gone through this crazy growth as you said. What have you learned along the way that maybe at the beginning you’re, you kind of underappreciated and now you’re like, oh, we should have done like that, we should have done it like that, or I should have known this kind of piece of advice was relevant at that time?

Rose Wang: Yeah, I think that a lot is Running a startup. I there you’re you’re flying the plane. As you’re building it. And so there’s a, there’s a lot of, mistakes that we’ve made, but I think one of the most, like obvious ones that we’re correcting for now, is for the last year, I think that most people don’t understand the blue sky. They just know it as this like, like very fancy tech type of thing. And there’s like these words like protocol and decentralization. And they’re like, what? And so I wish that from the beginning we had talked about the Blue sky in terms and analogies that people understand. And so for marketers, I think you guys can all understand it’s about translating and speaking to people in a language, in a story form that they understand. And so, uis is kind of a call out, but if there are any marketers out there who are like, I have a really good way to tell the story. Like, please get in touch with us. We very much believe that the blue sky is built for the people by the people. And so, you know, come build with us, come tell the story with us.

Randy Rayess: That’s cool. Yeah, I think the challenge with branding is, that it evolves but totally people, you know, the way you want to message the way you want to phrase things as you kind of find your perfect value proposition is gonna, is gonna change as well. Yeah. But that’s a, that’s cool. That’s a cool piece of advice there and then I was gonna say, we’re kind of Closing out on the last thing around growth. Like how do you think through, I mean you have natural growth that’s coming in organically and so the last question is around like, what are the things you kind of think through okay how do we sustain this insane growth?

Rose Wang: I love this question about growth ’cause I think it goes back to product market fit. And what I’ve experienced in Blue Sky is that product market fit is some combination of a little bit of science and a lot of timing. A lot of luck.And a lot of good execution to capture moments opportunistically. And so much of Blue Sky has been events happening around us and us capturing the traffic and the tension that has come our way. But the other thing that’s happened with Blue Sky is we are very much a community-run, community-based type of social media platform. I think a lot of people think of us as just Twitter, but we’re a sub-Reddit and Twitter interaction model where there are a hundred thousand different feeds. And in fact, many of these are communities interesting. Like so many of our sports folks, like we have now NBA and MLB and football, NFL, but they all started from a few wrestlers that we gave in invite codes to about a year and a half ago. There are more science papers shared on Blue Sky than before Twitter hit. I think when Twitter hit a million users, they still had fewer scientific papers shared on Twitter than on Blue Sky today. And why is that? It’s because we’ve won over the science community. Interesting. And so it’s a scientist who runs the science feed. Interesting. And she’s brought on a bunch of scientists and they’ve done that community work. And so I still very much believe you gotta empower the people Like every day some people are trying to build community, who are trying to reach their audience, who have something to say, and you have to talk to them and to understand what do you need. And how do we build a platform, a toolbox for you? It’s not about us, it’s about you.

Randy Rayess: Interesting. I never heard of that subreddit meets Twitter idea. Maybe that’s part of the new branding that you guys should do. That’s a perfect, simple, clear analogy and you figured it out on your own I love that. Well, thanks a lot for coming on the show. Appreciate it. And it’s very impressive. It’s rare to see a company growing that quickly. So thanks a lot Rose for joining.

Rose Wang: Thank you for having me, Randy.

Let’s Conclude!

Randy Rayess: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Rose Wang who is the COO of Bluesky Social.

Rose Wang: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Randy Rayess: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.