Zuckerberg places great value on gaining the attention of users before trying to make a profit from them
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and CEO of Meta, has certainly established himself as one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the 21st century. Thousands of employees have passed through his company and one of them was Sophie Novati.
Novati joined the ranks of Facebook (now Meta) in 2011 as an intern and stayed there for a few years before leaving for Nextdoor , while in 2019 she opened her own business.
During her years at Facebook, Novati had several opportunities to meet with Zuckerberg, describing the atmosphere of Facebook's early years as that of a college, she told Business Insider.
At one of in these meetings, Novati asked him the million dollar question: “How will Facebook make money.” “Facebook was growing users at a rate that no one had seen before,” he said, but at the time it couldn't make money.
Of course, today Facebook – or Meta – is a media giant. social networking worth 1.3 trillion. dollars with Instagram and WhatsApp under its umbrella.
However, until 2012, the year Facebook went public, the mobile app wasn't really making any money. It had no ads and the move to integrate them was seen as risky.
Ultimately, the company was able to turn likes and shares into profit by turning its users into a product. The “aggressive” strategy took Facebook from “zero effective revenue” to $153 million from mobile ads, The Atlantic reported at the time.
“His response to me was, if you can find a way to get people's valuable attention, you can always find a way to monetize it later,” Zuckerberg recalled telling her.
“What Zuckerberg really focused on was figuring out how to deliver value to people,” he adds. “Later, you can always convert that value into dollars.”
This advice follows Novati, who in 2019 founded her own company, called Formation. Its job-hunting company offers various subscription packages and programs to help engineers secure work or increase their earning potential.
Zuckerberg's advice is why Novati has always focused on promotion of how Formation adds value to engineers' lives, rather than worrying about its client list or enrollment rates. “We look at growth in what we offer as the number one metric,” he explains.
