Discord's 200M User Growth Strategies

0:00how long were you at Discord eight years and what was your role technically uh I was the head of product early on and um built Nitro and built the business model can we talk about marketing strategies of Discord early on when we built Discord this was before my time this is me paraphrasing right but like before my time like the team really honed in on specific uh use cases for like hey we want to power an MMO guilds raids we want to uh make sure that like hey we like people can use Discord for say OverWatch for say League of Legends for DOTA for Wow Etc and so the team

0:37actually went game type by game type went into the reddits and the forums of these guilds that people are using and basically con asked people very manually hey come check out this app what do you think what do you like most notably Final Fantasy was one of the first games that that Discord was built for in part because the founders were playing it um and so uh a lot of kind of like early marketing was actually just like building a very tailored solution to a problem going into these reddits and forums and convincing Guild leaders to actually go adopt it and and join it did they so did they make it game specific

1:15or that was just the marketing itself that was the marketing itself so our philosophy was to always build Primitives MH that solved specific needs for specific games but could be used for other things so we never made it so specific that um we would shoehorn ourselves and like okay it works here but not not there so whatever we built whenever we build it in code works for all sorts of games that's General functionality but then when we went and marketed it it was very tailored I remember uh when we built um there there's some like functionality where you need to you need to be able to set priority speakers in

1:55chat in voice chat it's very very helpful if you're playing a game like Eve online where you have a couple of commanders and everybody else is kind of needs to be talking to each other but not as important as hearing the shout outs from commanders like that is a product feature very very detailed so that some one person can talk over others the generic functionality exists you can use it for anything but we went in and very targeted being like hey this is for you guys um the point I was trying to make is like when you're building these things you can build with a general purpose functionality in mind

2:27and still Market it in a very targeted way to your to your point about marketing um and then the the other thing to think about especially for Discord especially early Discord like the way that um discord's ultimately flywheel worked is that when you think about a group of humans there's usually one person who's the ring leader we call him the super node MH that's the person that in your friends group will be the one sending messages setting up events inviting people to trips like organizing [ __ ] like in the the gaming world it's like that's the person organizes the raids that's the person who's like we're

3:03hanging out here we're going to do this we're going to do that um for when you're building a community product like Discord and a group chat product like Discord that's the person you to convince and that's the person you to Market to and so the tool their needs and the tools that they need to do the thing that they're already doing elsewhere they need to know that they can do on this new tool most of those features are never used by any of their members they are like this is [ __ ] complicated but that person that's going to bring all the groups the entire group over needs

3:36to feel like it's very much tailored for them in many ways you guys at [ __ ] actually have understood this intuitively because for you that's the Creator MH right and you're building the tools for the Creator they bring their audience they bring their customers their customers aren't going to use any of the tools you build for the Creator not any but like most right to them this just like they get the value that the Creator provides but the Creator gets their control center it's very interesting how did you identify the super nodes like I guess like the raid leaders anything like that um early on

4:10we went to we we had a lot of connections we went to forums we went to subreddits um we went to uh gaming conventions we went to packs for example um we would go to streamers and they usually either would have exposure to these raid leaders or or they had a following where these raid leaders H up and so um it it depends like depending on what what approach what channel you use you you kind of have to have a different I would say you you have to have a different way of approaching them and in many ways like as your company scales as as your business scales you

4:53have to evolve it right like what worked when Discord was 100,000 users did not work when Discord had 10 million users did not work when disc cod had 200 million users right and so the strategies you used have to change and evolve and it's normal it's okay um later on maybe fast forward like a year post launch this of Discord like one of the things that really unlocked us when we got to like the more than five million user Mark me when I say users I usually mean monthly actives um is uh for us to use uh twitch streamers and YouTube streamers as our awareness driver and then making sure

5:33that all of the users that join through those um through that top funnel uh actually got exposed to at least creating a server most users never touched their server again but because of we did that flow we captured those that would so we were able to kind of like passively organically capture super nodes and have them set it up by basically having them join a streamer server first seeing Oh I could have this for myself and having an easy button to create their own server and it was kind of a giant seeve um to basically like find and weed out all of the people that would uh be good as at creating a

6:13Discord server for their friends okay interesting so early days you were just like building like a TeamSpeak competitor basically like a simpler not as developer minded software yeah teent you have a server yeah and so you guys basically wanted to disrupt that you saw the need for it you went game specific you said Final Fantasy was the first game for for marketing wise obviously yeah yeah interesting and then you just went to Reddit forms you Tred to find the guild leaders the people who were organizing the lands everything like that and then once you get to a little more scale you go after twitch streamers so what the strategy to just

6:44like pay them a little bit of money to then just make a server and then promote it on their twitch so uh I credit this strategy to AOS who ran our early marketing um but it was a little more nuanced than that yes we did have some twitch streamers who we partnered with and made it a paid partnership most of the many of them we did not so many of them were not necessarily the top 20 but they are maybe the bottom half and we call it the partnership program and we basically gave them some help setting up their server some extra features that weren't available to normal Discord

7:21users and uh in return for for them for us doing that for them they got to promote Discord they got some swag they got to wear the Discord partner hoodie in their twitch streams and they would link to their Discord server so that people that watch the twitch streams can go to Discord server and hang out with them together as they're streaming um for the larger Discord streamers we would have some some amount of like paid agreements with them I can't disclose how the terms worked or what not I just don't remember this forever now but basically with them we had a much more clearer business relationship but the

7:56idea was the same the idea was you have audience of people who need this tool and the best way to sell Discord is to actually just show it show how it could be by just getting you into your favorite streamer server did you okay so you just basically for the smaller people you just made them like a Discord partner basically gave them some merch to wear during the stream and then told them say for this just make a Discord server and refer people that way yeah did you ever reward people like based off how many users they got or um we certainly gave more merch to

8:31people who like were quote unquote more successful um but we didn't necessarily uh we didn't do like oh you get a bounty for each user that you drive as far as I remember um we did kind of like tier our marketing to where like Beyond just like the super like the very top we would pay them the middle we made them into Partners the smaller and broader you got we targeted um actually a lot of uh colleges universities and schools um with our what's called hype Squad program this is all early days all these things evolved later but the hype Squad program is really cool as well like we

9:14basically found we had people apply on our website to become part of hype Squad what you did you got a little bit of a budget and you got some swag to give out to your friends all you had to do is host the land party at land party um at your University or whatever or we called it an event it doesn't have to be L party but most of them did cuzz they're Gamers right um and so uh people would be like doing a Discord sponsored thing in their cool in the in the college dorm and they're like running this like intermural I don't know League of

9:42Legends tournament or something right whatever it was um but that created a lot of Grassroots kind of like beliefs and Goodwill among our target audience which was our high school and college right people who play games in high school and college right and so uh we then combined that with our team doing events at various conventions think of like Pax PX East P West uh twitchcon ComicCon Etc we would have our team go to those have booths there and we would go invite all the local hype squatters to come hang out with us we would do promos with them we would do like um posts on social Etc um and that

10:27kind of like created this like feedback loop like oh you can be part of this exclusive Club you get to organize and be close to a brand you really care about and you'll get in with like cool stuff was there like a budget they got like so they go on your website they'd apply to be part of this hype Squad thing and if they got approved you would give them a budget to basically throw a land party or like a local tournament or something if I remember correctly yeah I don't even remember the details but it was some version of that yes just at the very minimum we sent them a Swag Box

10:56yeah that is such like a gritty tactic just literally sponsor local land parties but I think that's a tactic only like you guys were so dialed in on your Target demographic of Gamers yes and so I'm very curious how the product evolved around that what was the very first thing that was built was it just voice chat like group voice chat so Discord started as text and voice mhm um The Voice Tech we took from the the previous duration company which was a mobile game um we we built uh the game was called face forever um it was a mobile game that we uh built uh that was a mobile

11:34MOBA part of the mobile MOBA had to have good voice chat when you're talk when you're playing together with other people so that was the voice Tech behind it and then uh Stan was one of the lead Engineers on the mobo who then became the co-founder um he had the idea because he had been working on on the side on a project called Guild work which was effectively like a better way to run like a guild forum um he had the idea of combining that voice chat with text chat and like with an app called flow do that was before slack um and uh to basically come up

12:10with what we know now as Discord and so it there was always a component of text chat there was always a component of voice chat because you need text to organize hey when are we hanging out and you need voice chat to be able to actually play the game together we call it kind of like the before during and after playing games before playing the game you hang out on text chat and you organize it during you're actually just like talking to each other and you're not in Discord you're in the game and then after you talk about what happened with the game I I think the biggest

12:38differentiator between you guys and team speak was that you were free right out the gate as well uh yeah it I would say what we heard from our users wasn't just the free aspect it was actually just the fact that you needed one click to just get it up and running yeah not some copy paste IP yeah it was in link system I spent a lot of time working on that and like we spent a lot of time like perfecting it the idea that I could create I'm in a in the Discord server I can click on my voice Channel create a link send it to you you click

13:11one link and you type in one word which is your username and you're straight up in voice chat with me and it works just straight up it's super efficient so it's probably a great growth Loop but I'm very curious where did it was important because if you're in between matches and you're trying to play with somebody and your match is like counting down to like 40 seconds left to the next game you're like you're on the clock to get somebody in your voice chat with you and it's amazing like if I join a Counter-Strike match with five random people we put a Discord immediately in the chat just

13:38copy paste done Y no like it's so simple probably the best product I've ever used I literally my favorite product so I'm curious then where did I have a ton of questions around like little products that you guys have created so like on that note the invitation competitions or like you guys figured out like the beauty of Discord is like you can gate access to different channels through different roles and permission system roles permissions like that is absolutely genius for like actually running these businesses and really engaged communities but like where did the idea for like invite competitions like you have to invite 30 people to

14:10then get this role come from um that was actually a community thing that was actually um something that happens organically so interesting about this interesting thing about Discord and something that I don't think many people realize like a lot of things that happened on Discord weren't created by us they are behaviors that happen organically sometimes we see a behavior and we're like this should be a thing and we make it easier to do um one great example of that is go life or screen sharing we saw people hacking that together where somebody would be on Discord voice chat and also streaming on Twitch and tell their friends go to

14:50Twitch mute go to voice chat and I'll talk to you while I'm playing the game and like we were like this is moronic like why would you do that twitch chat is delayed Discord is real time like we can make this better better um other things like invite invite competitions or a lot of what You' seen Community servers with like rules or engagement uh engagement type uh competitions those are things that Discord mod men's moderators adment um came up with organically on their own it's them doing that for their communities and we were just observing it and we're like this is cool but you guys should totally do that

15:25and we later on spend some time like kind of teaching other moderators how these things work and Etc But ultimately like that's something that the community drove how the hell did you guys build a live streaming feature because at the time like it was even hard for me to get like a twitch stream to have like a high bit rate and to like be clear that was uh yeah uh it doesn't affect my go live yeah yeah yeah that was a really cool project it was as I mentioned earlier like it was a behavior we saw obviously people were doing it people would get on Skype to screen share their screen to

15:57their friends because skp support of screen sharing and we didn't and initially we built it the first version of it we built as just like regular screen sharing and we didn't actually release it because we just wanted to test it and we realized that like the screen sharing that we had built wasn't wasn't quite good enough to make it feel like oh this is like 10x than what you can do on Skype um and it's something that we felt was very very important for uh just like bringing people together that weren't just playing games together so the purpose of go live is actually such that you as a friend uh of somebody

16:42who's playing a game right now can just hop in and talk to them while they're playing a game it's kind of like sitting down on a couch with a friend they're playing some whatever console game and you're just watching it them watching them play and talking about the game that was the actual human behavior um it took us a long time to get it to be really good with perform it our engineering team like took a long time but like kick really kicked ass on like um making the streaming aspect of it you could stream in Source resolution on like a really not great PC without

17:13dropping frame rate like that was a really cool achievement and it felt really great because it was like one click stream to my friends everybody can just like join and watch and when we released this like second version it was no longer called screen share it was called go live now it suddenly like started just like we started seeing people more and more people just randomly started streaming to each other even when they're all playing the game together they would stream to each other so that somebody can run my friend's screen on one Monitor and like play the game on the other monitor and just like

17:45talk to each other about what they're what they're seeing in the game it was it was a really cool kind of like behavior and we it was one of the few features where we just saw consistently more and more and more people every week just keep using it because it was such an addictive behavior that like you would use it one week and you're like oh I want to do this again this was so fun there's like no latency like it was like and it's so crisp now it's real time twitch is it not expensive to do that like is that not expensive to let people

18:10run it is expensive it was by far most expensive infrastructure project um it wasn't obviously we at that point we had already built Nitro so we were able to burden to cost without needing to raise crazy money um which was good um but it took a lot of time and effort also to make it uh very efficient on the infrastructure side and make it cost efficient um we later on sign deals with Google who was our main C provider to help make that even cheaper for us because we're able to optimize and work closely with their team together um but yeah it's not a cheap feature to run

18:49which is why also if you want to stream in more than 720p like the cost of such a feature goes up with resolution right like the more frames or the larger the frames the more expensive it is to Discord because everything runs through Discord servers um and so that's why when we released it we were like well it's perfectly fair to ask people to be paid Nitro subscribers if they want to stream in super high resolution and the high frame rates because that's very expensive for us and so it was actually funny enough also one of the top features that made people want to get Nitro because it was so

19:27valuable to them like yeah like watching my friend stream in real in real time at their native resolution is really cool Nitro is now your business model what is nitro tech like how do you answer that question what is Nitro um Nitro Nitro is the premium membership of Discord and what that really means is that Nitro is the the the set of features the set of functionality you get if you want to um a support Discord but B if you want to show off to your friends at the end of the day what Nitro really um hooks into is the fact that you hang out on Discord all day

20:09every day you don't want to look like everybody else it's a very normal human thing if you spend a lot of time somewhere somewhere you don't really want to blend in and Nitro allows you to not blend in Nitro both by allowing you say for example to use emoji from other places you hang out with um or allows you to bling out your profile it allows you to actually buy decorations cheaper it allows you to have access to high quality streaming all of the features in Nitro are tied to you hanging out with your friends if your Discord if you're using Discord just for yourself there's

20:43almost nothing and not not almost there almost nothing in Nitro that is worth buying minus the upload limit which again it's just very expensive to Discord for people to upload gigabytes files so that one yeah you can use Discord without any friends and still get Val from Nitro most of the features the actual value is you and your friends M and it's actually the thing that you pay for for many people is not just for myself it's not just for foming towards myself but it's also for my friends M like actually go life is a great example like me buying Nitro so my stream is higher resolution is something

21:21that my friend appreciates more I know that my friend appreciates more it's a very non-obvious business model it's like boosting Serv it's like you spend money to be selfless when most products you're spending money the original version of boosting was called server Nitro oh okay is that the segue uh that was the that was one of the things we did after go live that really um I think clicked in terms of when we're building out our business model um where basically uh the basic idea is actually pretty straightforward like you Discord server is a place for you and your friends to hang out and it's kind of like a treeh house uh if

22:01every Treehouse looks the same it's boring we want to bling it out we want to make it our own space and we can all chip in together to make it our own space that's why server boosting allows you to deck out your server with features with decoration with various like say banners or intro screen Splash screens whatever it is um but ultimately it's we all chip in together to do this thing mhm and uh that behavior of like Hey we're spending you know 12 hours a day in the server hanging out all the time we want to make it our own it's also very natural human

22:36thing mhm and that is something that people really want to do and that's actually something that made Nitro really worthwhile for a lot of people where like I wouldn't get Nitro for just myself necessarily it was 10 bucks a month but if I can get Nitro and for those 10 bucks a month I not only get it for myself but also for this place that I hang out in a lot for everyone else to enjoy that is worth it it's so interesting how you guys like settled on that business model CU I always wondered how it was free like for the first few years when I was using it I think I was

23:04using it the second year it came out and I was just so confused how is this free and you guys have you and everybody else funny fun fact um when I I was I had just joined Discord maybe like three months prior and then I was leading the Nitro project um when we first built Nitro and the first when we first origin came up with Nitro and the reason why it exists wasn't to make money it was not going to be our business model that's not what we're pitching to investors it was not what we're going to do we built Nitro uh to basically expose very simple

23:38features for users and to primarily just give them a way to pay us money so that we can tell on all our socials and all of our uh and all of our like Partners being like hey it's not free here's how we make money to like here's a way you can support us here's a buy button the purpose of nitro the very first version was just just a buy button just a donation just we didn't want to make it a donation because we were a business cuz it's kind of weird to ask for donations for something that's a for profit business um so we did want to

24:08give something back to for people who are paying for it but the purpose was to answer your question it's like how is this free it's not you you can pay for it if you want to but it wasn't our primary business model for years until afterwards what were you pitching investors on the business model like how were you the original discord's original business model this is public knowledge was going to be a game store um we were going to have the largest uh group of Gamers on the planet using our product and we were going to sell them games just like steam get a cut on the

24:40distribution just like steam um we built that we built that a couple years after we built Nitro and we quickly realized that it wasn't a 10x problem that we're solving like Discord as an ethos as a company as a product was really good at solving few things really really well and we couldn't build a 10 times better steam it was better in many ways a lot of our users who love the store would tell us it's better but it wasn't something that I would want to use Discord for instead of steam a lot of people who could buy the same game on Steam and on Discord chose to buy it on

25:22Steam because that's what the library still was um there was also at the same time was epic who had just launched an epic game store and they the only reason people bought games on Epic is a if they were given away for free or B if they were only purchasable on Epic um and so but for anybody who could buy a game on Steam they' rather to buy it on Steam people actually want one place to have their games Library people don't want to have many different apps that have different games like it's a lot of overhead like imagine your phone having 10 app stores and you have to open each

25:54App Store individually in order to figure out which one was this app in terrible experience and so we quickly realized that we launched a game store we launched it with a subscription so we as part of the game store we got a collection a bundle of games that we would put into a higher pric Nitro we together with that we increased the price of nitro but also included a bunch of games for free in it um this was before Xbox and all of that um and uh we quickly realized that like yeah we could keep pushing on that but it wasn't going to be the runaway

26:30success that we had wanted for the business model and it just wasn't something that our users really wanted and we kind of like went back to Our Roots went back to being like okay let's solve our users problems as the best we can and we chose to shut it down we chose to Sunset the game over time at the game store over time obviously we had we couldn't do it immediately took us more than a year to do that but we basically pivoted the business model to just focus on Nitro and we realized hey why don't we just let people have more ways to have a better experience on

27:08Discord and that we're not like required to use Discord you could still use Discord for free uh and you could still talk to your friends on Discord for free but if you wanted additional cool blingy features you can get Nitro and we just went double down we built server Nitro which is now called boosting we built um a lot of uh features around the profile we built like you know uh you can set an animated uh Banner on your profile you can have a decoration on your profile you can have custom statuses on your profile we made a lot of different um things Nitro that's all fed into this

27:46model of like hey if you're using Discord 12 to 18 hours a day you want to have all the best functionality of Discord and that's what Nitro is it's like all the stylization and status within a server that you spend a lot of time into you put emphasis on that how much time were you guys spending like on that store Builder because your thought process was like not store Builder but your store the game store game store like the game store was a more than oneyear project for most of the company to build it out before even launching it so the thought process just make the

28:15best voice coms for gamers platform get all the gamers on the platform and they'll naturally want to just buy their games on the platform too that's right but the problem is it sounds great in a PowerPoint slide it sounds great in theory but in practi the act of hanging out with your friends is actually quite separate from where you launched the games and played the games from unless these games are built in to the act of hanging out with your friends and so we're actually now releasing well I'm no longer at Discord full disclosure but like we're now rolling out the ability to build games inside Discord inside a voice Channel

28:55and we're now actually releasing or already have released the sdks for it where people have started building games inside Discord and there it actually makes sense because since the game can only be run inside a voice Channel while hang out with your friends yeah it makes sense to have a game store to have a launcher there and to have you and your friends hop on a voice chat together first and then launch the game together when you think about businesses growing their sales Beyond forecast like Mattel sure you think of a product with demand a focused brand and influence driven marketing but and often Overlook secret

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30:04for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com wgmi all lowercase go to shopify.com wgmi to upgrade your selling today that's shopify.com wgmi thank you for sponsoring the episode I think the most interesting thing that you've shared with me before this was that you guys when you were like planning up like you're doing this like you called them semesters and when you guys were doing marketing and You' push it youd like anticipate a new trend for this year it wasn't anticipating and we wouldn't plan for it okay but what tended to happen is that Discord because Discord is ultimately a platform to get a bunch of people to talk about

30:40something and hang out around something um whether it was a new game expansion that launched a big game of the year or some sort of trend happened whether it's crypto or Pokémon go or AI or whatever it is um or mid Journey um every year of discords existence something happened that we could not predict nobody could predict but something would happen that would suddenly cause a lot of people to just create a bunch of Discord servers to do that thing together I still remember the summer of Pokémon go we called it but we would suddenly start seeing like in every city in the US we would start seeing tens and hundreds of

31:18Discord servers pop up that are all Poke go servers all the largest servers on Discord with Pokémon go and everybody was using Discord to organize raids together on Pokémon go this was six years ago or something like that like it was a while but it was a really cool Behavior we could have never um predicted it like the game was a hit um the game had this unique mechanic where you had to get together in person in your local neighborhood to do a rate together um and you had to go spot where the Pokemon are so you have to coordinate with people that is something discord's uniquely suited for you can

31:53create a server for your neighborhood and you can post whenever you see something on your Pokémon go being like hey this rare Pokémon is over there let's all hang out let's let's go raid um and so the best that we could do when we're building a platform that ultimately grew because of these Trends is to make sure that like we built all these Primitives that I was talking about earlier such that the it was easy for anybody who is familiar with Discord to be able to use Discord for this new Behavior so that invites were super smooth so that we could have um we built a feature where

32:28you can just open up the app and see who's nearby and if they both have Discord open you can just add each other as a friend right there um that helped actually a lot of Pokémon go users right because you would just walk up on the street open up Discord and hey we're all on the same app right so we would built these generic features and that worked over like it's not built into iOS where you can bump people um but ours worked over like um the audio jack actually in Bluetooth um but we we basically built out all this functionality such that when such a

33:00thing happened which we couldn't predict Discord was ready to handle it and we wouldn't have to scramble and try to figure out what do we need to build for what here interesting so like every year there's like a trend and in each Trend there was like these slight nuances that would then but these nuances would actually map out to a primitive feature that could apply broadly and so for Pokemon go it was actually geographically mattered to where you were and so I was like oh nearby this makes sense people who are close to each other want to be friends and do stuff together and sometimes EX and sometimes

33:29the feature that ended up being the thing that enabled the behavior was something we built years and years ago mid journey is a great example M Journey was just an image generator bot all it used was Slash commands and Bots um obviously they built the they built a phenomenal model and they built a whole system of like you know taking photos that people generated or pictures that people generated and feeding them back into their model and make it better that they did that and it's a fantastic product But ultimately the Discord functionality that mid Journey was using existed for8 years before mid Journey was a thing I mean how crazy is that the

34:04mid Journey decided to fulfill through Discord like was that like surprising to you guys like to me when I saw that that was like mid Journey was a huge Trend and it's kind of a it felt like a just a really bizarre way to like like fulfill your own SAS just to do a Discord server but it was also super intuitive for like Discord users so I'm very curious what was that like seeing that are you surprised by that or was that like 8 years late we had seen similar behaviors on the platform to Mid Journey where people would create a bot and like use the bot to basically

34:36collaboratively have a fun time collabora basically be creative together those Bots existed before mid journey I think mid Journey really nailed the loop of that bot really early on to where you would generate an image it would inside the mid Journey server it would take some time to generate it would ping you back to go check out what you've generated you can select one and you had Emoji reactions to go take the next action maybe regenerate something or you loved something and made you a big version of it and your friends could use those same reactions to do those same actions um and so it was very easy for

35:14people to just go take the mid Journey bot and install it in their friend server and just start riffing on each other's stuff and having a lot of fun and so we had seen that behavior in other Bots not nearly as polished as mid Journey not nearly as cool as what the the mid Journey generated but when we saw it we basically saw the server popping off and we got in touch with them and they actually really wanted us to just like uncap their server and support you know at the time our hard cap for all servers was a million members they kept hitting that cap for a

35:45while um because it was really addicting what people were doing and people couldn't get into mid journey early on the problem was Discord was never built to have more than even that many people talking to each other at the same time like imagine a million people in a single place talking it's cacophony um and it's a really hard infrastructure problem and so we actually worked with the mid Journey team together our infrastructure team and their team worked together to basically make it possible for Discord to even support more than a million people inside a server that still works that still is performant that still can be used that

36:22was a whole infrastructure project and the infrastructure team spent a lot of time getting that right but nowadays there's like mid journey is what like a 15 million 17 million member server um a number of other larger servers have since um popped up and like it's not possible it's cool it would we would have never done it if not for M Journey so you guys saw how like BS how much traffic was going there and just reached out and started working together basically to help them support them I don't remember who reached out to whom to be honest with you um but we started working with them pretty early on it's

36:57just so bizarre like not bizarre in a bad way but just like you would think that a company like that with that model would just make their own UI very simple go on their website type in the prompt to get the image but instead they're doing yes did that that was not the behavior that was fun I know exactly it's like instead they just put it in a Discord server and then made it a bot that you can include into your server so it's like they make it a product for you to offer to your community and they had the distribution the fun thing about mid

37:20journey early mid Journey nowadays it's fairly ubiquit as many many Bots have copied it the fun thing is watching how how other people used it copying that prompt trying it out getting something similar but your own flavor of it it's kind of like this Community Learning it's learning through osmosis um and doing that and then transporting that for the more engaged users to their friends server where it's you and your friends doing that together and riffing off each other was the kind of like level one and level two of the really fun Loop that's that worked and that's something that we heard from a lot of

37:57our users like that was the thing that made mid Journey magical on Discord and also why just having a UI isn't nearly as magical cuz like you don't see people doing it it's not active it's not like a busy Cafe where people are drawing the mid Journey server is literally like the modern version of like a cafe in Paris where a bunch of artists are drawing things together and so the same thing with like the Bots and like bot libraries like people be able to buy Discord Bots and Implement them into their server was that something that you guys like encourage like veler portal or like how did that all come to be that's

38:31a great that's a great story um so early on we've always so our our product and our infrastructure has always been built on very strong principles um and one of our principles was to have a very robust API early on we didn't we exposed that API so somebody else could have built something on top of it but we didn't advertise it we didn't we didn't have any developer documentation whatever we just exposed it people just started randomly hacking around it created the Discord server um called DVS Discord developers and there's a couple others different like librar sprung up around like oh we can hack around a Discord API

39:08and just build our own things that H into it and we spent some time making sure that it still worked and it's compatible but we didn't spend much time encouraging that for ages um it's funny enough actually the um the uh the person that created the disc developer server actually joined my team later on as one of our earliest earliest Engineers um she's she's fantastic and uh we later on realized that like we at Discord would never be able to build all the cool stuff the community would need nor should we because the bot ecosystem can create so much breadth of functionality that a small team like Discord and back then

39:50when we built when we exposed our first API we were like smaller than like 20 people like it was a small team we would never be able to build all the cool Bots people built um and we didn't have to because we had a community to do it and that's actually the cool thing about Discord like you can you can just organize self-organize around Discord servers to go build these libraries to go build these Bots it took us I think three or four years after we made it possible to create bots on Discord to actually spend time to solidify all of our documentation make sure that like

40:24all the libraries are actually good and worked well we took ownership of some libraries we helped other Library developers really organize themselves and keep it up to dat um and we called it the bot City team for a while um but ultimately like the goal of that is just to allow people to build functionality and do things that the company should never do what were some of the most unique Bots that you saw that you would have never came up with to build yourself well early on um listening to music in a voice channel was a huge beh it's not it sounds obvious now but like

41:02when we when we first saw people doing it and just like spending hours and hours just jamming together in a voice Channel while hanging out at home that was cool that looked really [ __ ] awesome um and uh the that behavior even though these Bots a lot of them ran into trouble with the rights holders Etc on YouTube um nowadays it's activity actually uh rhythm released as an activity there's another I think YouTube is an activity so you can actually do that quite legally and people do it a lot um another one that that early on comes to mind we uh someone set up a couple of bots that are

41:45effectively like not pre llm chat Bots that will be talking to each other all the time and you can join the Discord and watch what the hell they're talking about at the moment and it was hilarious like early Discord we would just like randomly pop in there and being like hey look they're talking about this some random thing and it's a constant stream of conversation can someone please invent a crystal ball until then over 40,000 businesses have already future proof their business with Nets Suite by Oracle the number one Cloud Erp bringing financial management accounting inventory HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management

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42:56agents in any way I'm sure you guys are deep in the llm world we have we actually built an AI bot um we built Clyde we launched Clyde Clyde's the man um yes funny enough we didn't choose to keep Clyde and the interesting thing is like yes so Clyde for context was a builtin bot inside Discord it was built into Discord you it work anywhere um and we were testing it for a long time where you and your friends could basically have an I about to chat with mhm in multiplayer so imagine chat gbt but all your friends can chime in MH um and we worked with open a on that it was like

43:34oh really yeah it was a collaboration I did not know that and uh uh because back then like open AI didn't even support a lot of things that we needed to make it work um and so interesting we found that like Clyde was hilarious for creating really funny memes with your friends but it became stale pretty quickly and it actually became kind of cringe after a couple of weeks um if if you if if the same Discord Ser with your friends kept using Clyde it kind of just became stale and cringe over time and we could never figure out how to make it feel so natural that it

44:08felt like part of your space part of your friend space and we saw that when we were testing Clyde like we saw a lot of service kind of having a lot of fun initially it was really fun for a couple days a week or something like that and then it dropped off and people actually spent less time hanging out with their friends because Clyde was in their server M and so that's why we decided to shut down Clyde because it kind of took away from the human connection that Discord was so good at it's like a party trick more so MH huh have you guys thought about deep or how do you I mean

44:39maybe not even specific this is like a very hot topic right now ai agents I feel like I just feel like Discord or [ __ ] even is like primed to like somehow like AI agents managing communities or something or being admins or mods like I think the human connection is important but like I feel like if there's any one of the earliest use cases could be in a community platform like that have you ever thought about that we have um we prototyped a AI moderator um it worked quite well basically the the the Prototype we built internally was a um a set of uh you can

45:18basically take your server your server has rules for most Community servers that moderator can take those rules and look at conversations that are happening and flag hey here's a conversation that's happening that's violating the rules and then your moderators can review it or if they really trust the AI they can just like automatically clean it up um and delete that conversation ban the user whatever um a back when we prototyped it this was preeg GPT 4 so it was very expensive M um uh two it didn't run quite well enough even in the Prototype that we felt comfortable building it out as something that truly works well going back to my

46:00point earlier about like discord's really good at making few things really really good we couldn't find a way to make it really really good and so we chose not to pursue it at the time because of both cost and we couldn't make it really really good I'm not convinced that even with today's models it's a couple generations of GPT later you could make it as good as it needed to be in order for it to really feel magical and I think that's the general Trend I see within agents where the broader the use case like interpreting a bunch of rules um is a pretty broad use

46:33case like one of my service has rule of like we don't talk about cats um like good luck somebody posting something about cats and like that that modbot would just totally kill it right um not a very good kind of like general purpose a agent um and so I think like the the notion of like here's an agent that does any sort of thing for me is actually some time away I'm sure it will happen I'm sure the personal assistant the AI kind of like personal assistant will eventually exist I don't think the technology is quite there yet to make it so good that somebody would just trust

47:09them straight up what I do think works and something that we did both internally and you see it out in the wild nowadays is for very specific narrow use cases take something that is very roote and repeatable and turn that into an AI thing that requires nuanced reasoning um but doesn't require a lot of breadth M that works so early on we built out a system that would automatically respond to Discord support tickets that was actually an llm responding we tested it on a number of tickets actually our users loved the responses from the AI better because the AI was able to look up [ __ ] that our own team wasn't able to

47:51look up it's like hey why does this particular version of a razor laptop not work with this particular version of a steel series headset like the AI was able to look that up I couldn't look that up nobody on our team could look that up it was like some super random thing that somebody ran into because how many people use a particular seal serious headset with a particular razor laptop but that was something that was so cool because that person couldn't get it to work wrote into Discord support the AI found the right solution for them helped them make it happen and suddenly it worked for them like that is the kind

48:25of stuff that you use a for cursor is another good example where it doesn't do things for you it helps you if you know what you're doing do things better faster gotcha so those things I think AI agents are great for the more generic version I don't think we're there yet interesting another thing that I'm interested in is like paid Discord communities paid servers I really feel like one did you guys have I I feel like you kind of just released that ability like a year is that prettyy old that's been around for a few years from Discord natively it's from Discord natively um we called it our creator monetization

49:05platform mhm um and uh we we released it um and I think it released in 2022 um it was somewhat successful we had quite a few large communities that became paid communities that um or uh they actually like sold all most commities will have like some sort of Welcome channel that is not paid and then the rest is paid um so that product is actually really cool because it's fully native to Discord it's built in um you have a lot of customization you can do things like multiple tiers multiple trials like you have a storefront page that is like really pretty and stuff like that the thing we found is that in

49:49order to turn that into a full product that is a full business that just like endtoend tool for creators it would take a lot of other things that we would have to build in order to make that really useful for example something that [ __ ] does out of the box right like the internal dashboarding a lot of the tooling a lot of the apps that you guys have like those things we felt like we would have to build a lot there in order to get to something that creators really needed and wanted um and ultimately we didn't continue pursuing that particular um product in part

50:31because we felt that within the world of Discord which is heavily skewed towards gaming um the type of creators that needed this was actually a pretty small number mhm there's lots of creators that weren't gaming that totally would could use it took advantage of it and needed it but that wasn't what Discord was built for and it was a bit of a mismatch to like kind of jury rig this thing into for commity unities that weren't using Discord the way it's meant to be used and so we decided not to pursue it because it wasn't going to scale for us the way it's meant to be used so you're

51:05so focused on Gamers and gaming and their problem that these like paid crypto or trading groups weren't too much of a priority yeah actually crypto was um I don't think this is controversial was a bit of a headache for us in terms of spam yeah the Bots the whitel list stuff all of the above it was it was painful and it was painful in many ways because Crypt these crypto communities LED normal users to behave like spammers and so we frequently rent into this problem where like we would have a normal user who played games with their friends on Discord but also spammed all their friends with the latest crypto thing yes

51:42and I see they would get flagged by our spam rules because they were spamming but they also had a dozen gaming servers and they were super engaged users what do you do that's hard CU these communities would like incentivize people like if you want get whitelisted for our token drop you have to engage in our community so people just sit there and just Spam because they needed to rank up their level that's right that's very I always wondered why because [ __ ] when I first heard of WAP two and a half years ago that was basically what they were they were like Discord Bots to get

52:12paid discords basically and they had a Marketplace of all the paid discords I was like why is Discord not doing this we didn't but it makes sense that you guys didn't have the payments in or the dashboard all the backend infrastructure the backend infrastru we had some of it but we didn't have the kind of like the depth of that tooling to make it really like a 10x tool for creators and the reality of it is that what most of these communities use Discord for was just the community aspect they didn't need all the other stuff that W came with um or comes with nowadays and also Discord wasn't a place

52:48you go to to find these kinds of things MH um it kind of happened there but like the way that these creators got their audience was off platform they would do it on Tik Tok they would do it on Instagram they would do it on Facebook whatever whatever platform or YouTube especially like whatever platform these creators hung out on and got their audience at like it wasn't happening on Discord and we weren't going to build an entire discover page full of like here's all the paid discords like this is a gaming tool for you and your friends to hang out like why we why is Discord

53:16promoting you these paid discords it is an honor to be able to like learn from you and like get a talk to you like this I really appreciate you being here you're the man you built one of my favorite products in the world and I really appreciate you I don't take for it for what it's worth I was on the team that did it but it took a it took a village awesome well you're an absolute gangster you built an amazing product and I appreciate you now you're at w it's very fun to have you as an adviser and I appreciate everything my man thank you it's pleas coming on awesome