Unique visitors to BuzzFeed with its popular lists and quizzes has quintupled in two years.
One of the driving forces, if not the driving force, behind that growth, is Dao Nguyen, reports Inc.
“Since she’s joined, we’ve had this tremendous and unprecedented run of growth,” said BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti. Nguyen started as manager of the data science team last summer and the traffic has tripled since then. The incredible jump in unique visitors coincides with the time she joined the company two years ago.
She attributes her success to her driving curiosity.
“I love talking to people, like, ‘what’s going on in this part of the business, and why are you seeing that? What information do you think would be interesting to have to think about your problem?’ And I’ll find that for them,”
Nguyen has been particularly successful in analyzing the data and looking at what it means to content and driving visitors to the site.
Yet she admits data can only take you so far in the decision making process. Human interaction is still key.
“You have to know where its limits are. Using data properly is a constant stream of experiments and feedback. The human-learning of that is part of the culture that I think is probably the most difficult to replicate.”
You can read about some of her most successful projects and dismal failures in Inc.
