The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”)

27:08Yeah, cool. And we'll talk about customer acquisition slash growth. Sure. Another question I wanted to ask in a couple listeners asked is the 40%. So I had a Jag from NewBank on the podcast. I think you may have worked with them and they use 50 % of their threshold Because apparently Brazilians are very nice and they just will be optimistic Yeah, so I guess the question is do you find instances where you should increase that percentage and Slash in B2B is anything indifferent? Do you change the percentage in B2B any advice there just like when you adjust the threshold? Yeah, I had a really thought thought too much on that again for for me I'm trying to just figure out, is this a product that can grow?

27:52So when I'm using it, I'm trying to just, so if I got a 37%, am I going to be like, oh no, this would be impossible. Or if I get a 70%, is I mean, I guarantee, like say, oh yeah, I want to jump in and work with this company. It's more nuanced than that. like obviously if it's a 70 % but I have no idea how I grow the business that I'm going to be stuck there. But I do think he brought up a really good point that culturally some people are going to be more optimistic or pessimistic. Interestingly, when I came up with a question, I used to just use was kind of a normal satisfaction question. I was when I was working at Zobney, I would, I'm just like an intensely curious person anyway, so I'm just trying to dig in and understand the customers.

28:47And so I've always done lots of surveying, but at Zobney, I was gonna ask it as, like use my filter as a satisfaction question. So, you know, how satisfied are you with this? I'm very satisfied, I'm somewhat satisfied. And our main customers were actually the senior management. And so I thought senior management's never satisfied. I mean, get always this like super lukewarm thing. How can I change this question to be more, give me a more real answer from these guys? Well if I flip it and say how would you feel if you could no longer use this product, I'll probably get a more honest answer back from them.

29:25And of course they're very disappointed if they can't get what they want. And so initially it was just for the case of Zobney, but then I went to Dropbox right after Zobney and like, oh, I'll try the question again. And the insights I got back were really useful. And so each company I went to, I kept using the question, I'm like, this works way better than your typical satisfaction question. But initially it was more about thinking just senior management to get a more honest answer out of them. So that's the origin story right there. Yeah. Wow, that senior managers are just very harsh and they don't need anything.

30:02Yeah, and you have to flip it. That is so interesting. Just like that question is such a good reminder of how hard it is to build anything people really would be disappointed not to have. That's why this works so well. People are like, ah, I don't need this app, cares. That's the core of this is just that is hard. When I first moved to Silicon Valley, so first like 15 years of my career were not in Silicon Silicon Valley. And so that was an Eastern Europe and then New York and then Boston. You move to Silicon Valley and you have people who get really excited about technology for technology's sake.

30:36And so, you know, just something being cool is, like, isn't it cool that we can actually do this? You know, drives a lot of people. And so, you know, to me, I'm very like practical. If it's not something that is really bringing value to people, then And then the likelihood that that product's successful long -term is going to be pretty low. And so, even interestingly at Dropbox, I, through the six months I was there, I would ask, I'd ask one question like, like multiple times a month to, I broke kind of the early beta users into a bunch of different lists. And I'd ask which best describes you?

31:16I like to be among the first to try cool new technology or I only try things that I think will be useful for me. And over the six months it flipped from 90 % being people who try things that they want to try cool new technology to six months later. It was people who only you're going to try something that they feel like is useful. But what's kind of cool is just because what motivates you to try something is like you're an early adopter and you want to try something cool. If you're going to keep using it, it's because it's giving you some utility. And so I could I can still use those early adopters to help me figure out where is the value inside the product.

31:54Awesome. So actually two questions along those lines. How durable do you find this percentage being? So you hit 40%. How often does that fade and go away versus stay there or go higher? Yeah, I haven't seen it really like fade back down, but it's seen companies fail despite having it. And I think a lot of times then it's, it's, you know, it's, it becomes like an execution challenge. Once you, once you have product market fit, you know, not everyone's going to be a good executor. But before that, like, I think getting to product market fit, obviously there's, there's a lot of methodology for, for, for doing it today that, that might make it a bit easier for people.

32:37But I still think it's fairly random and pretty dang hard. And so ultimately like the risk factor of creating something that people care about is really difficult. So if you can get to the point where you have 40 % of the people are using it, saying they'd be very disappointed. And you have a reasonable sample size. Let's say you know you got 10 people and four of them said they'd be very disappointed without it. You're still going to get something useful from those four, but I wouldn't say that's a sample size that you can really like go to market on. So yeah, what's a good sample size you look for just like okay, this actually good day day I want to really that it's really funny like I so so much of this stuff I kind of like self learned but I basically at one point said I need at least 30 responses And you know just thought I just kind of randomly made up a number and then and then I had people telling me yeah 30 is kind of the minimum that you want on stuff like okay, and even when I first created this survey I remember showing it to the to the co -founder of SlideShare and she was like her PhD was in you know survey related stuff like cognitive psychology but she basically said it was really about surveying and she's like this methodology is amazing how did you come up with this and so having some of that validation around these things helped but you know a lot of it was just again driven by my own curiosity and also just knowing that the failure is such a likely outcome that trying to reverse engine to that failure and the number one reason for failure would be that people don't actually care about the product.

34:08And so when I find that, that's a really good sign that we're now down to an execution challenge. And there's this obvious element of you may have product market fit with people, but that group might end up being very small. And the business you build around it could actually be cool, but it's not gonna be a massive business. Is there anything there you can share just like, it's hard to know the size of opportunity, even though you know some people really, really like it. Yeah, I talked about, I go to a multiple choice after I initially use open -ended questions to sort of crowdsource the different use cases, but then I try to force people in a bucket.

34:48And then I can run filters on each of those buckets and they'll be like, oh, people who use it this way are like 60 % likely to be very disappointed without the product. But people who use it this way are 35 % likely to be very disappointed. But way more people use it the 35 % way. And so then having to like, you want that like intensely loyal group or the much broader, much broader group that's maybe be a bit less, but almost there. I think that becomes a bit of a strategic conversation of like, do we want to have a better chance of surviving going after a niche that we know we can serve well?

35:30Or have we raised so much money that we have to go after a really big market and that that's not going to be long term, but maybe then you're like, once I have traction in that market, I can start to try to appeal to some other markets. But I think that's where some strategic decisions come in. The characteristic of which you often recommend is that very dependent on the situation. I prefer a more passionate customer base that's in work from there, just because I think your biggest competition when you're really innovating is just being irrelevant. And so if you're deeply relevant to anyone, I think that gives you a much better chance of long -term success.

36:12Awesome. Let's get really good insight. Okay. Two more questions along this line. I want to talk about growth strategy. One very tactical question. Is there a tool you recommend for doing this sort of survey? Do you recommend inline in the product, an email, something else? I've used a lot of different tools. I actually had a survey business that I sold the private equity years ago and there was say on product. You know, it's called Qualaroo that's like kind of, yeah, in flow survey tool. I don't think, you know, I think just like using survey monkey with emailed surveys works fine. And for me, it's a lot more of like, what do I, what's like pleasant for the customer to fill out?

36:56And then how, what's gonna give me something where I can work really easily with the data? So at Bounce, for example, they had already intercom in place that had just introduced surveying, but it was kind of a really crappy customer experience on, at least at that time, that's been almost a year now, or actually a little over a year. And so I'm really sensitive to like, is it a good survey experience for the consumer itself? And then, but yeah, I don't think I'm stuck to any one platform there. such an important topic. Just like, again, to remind people why this is so important. One of the most common questions founders ask is, do I have product market fit?

37:37And have I built something people want? Like, that's just an endless series of, I don't know, how do I know? When do I know? And this is telling you in a really interesting way. So your advice is this is a leading indicator. You don't actually know until people actually start using it and whether they retain and continue using it. Is there just like advice on the shift you make from relying on the survey to actually looking at retention cohorts is it just once you have enough data, once you have a couple of cohorts, then start looking at that, forget about the survey. Yeah, what I would say is, but retention cohorts don't give you any of the qualitative insights into the why.

38:12So that's why we continue to do the survey. So initially, I would say if the survey comes back and it shows, whatever your target number is, if you want to be like new bank, it'd be a 50 % or you know, I spent a few years, two of the companies that launched, we launched in Hungary and I would say it's kind of the opposite end of the spectrum of Brazil, maybe more pessimistic than the average kind of culture and so maybe 30 % is good enough there, but that ultimately, whatever your target is that you have the signal that says, okay, we have enough value here. Let's start working on growing the business.

38:50But while you're working on growing the business, I would be paying attention to those retention cohorts. And if you're churning out all the customers who were saying that they'd be very disappointed without the product, then, okay, let's retrench and rethink, do we really have product market here and what do we need to do to get it if we don't? Awesome. And speaking of new bank, if anyone wants to see how a company is actually operationalize this in the way they operate that there's an episode that we'll link to in the show notes where every new product at new bank they build. Before they launch it, they wait for a 50 % threshold for people to say 50 % of people would be disappointed if this product did not exist as they're developing it and only then do they launch it publicly.

39:36Yeah, I think they even do it down to the feature level. Wow. So if you think about it, like, you know, how would you feel if you can no longer use this feature starts to give you again the signal is that feature, I must have feature. And if it's not, maybe we shouldn't have it. And so yeah, I was super excited when I saw how they were using the survey. And they were doing it before I engage with them. Oh, wow. But yeah, they were doing it. I think from pretty early on in the business. The reason they can do this is they have a lot of users. They have millions and millions of users. So they can ask some small percentage people's question because people hearing this might I'd be like, oh my God, how many times am I going to be asked this question?

40:14I'm using this feature, but they have a lot of users. So it's easier. Yeah. Okay. Last question, I promise along these lines, say someone is listening and they're like, okay, man, I'm getting like 10%, I'm getting 15%. I don't know what to do to increase my product market fit. You should just like a strategy of just dig into the people that are very disappointed and see what they have to say. But any other advice slash, what do you find often works in helping people move from say 10 % to 40%. Yeah, so one of the things that's kind of cool about almost like open sourcing the survey approach is again, watching like how New Bank has evolved their usage.

40:55But one of the other companies that I think used it in an interesting way is superhuman. And I would say that they basically ended up probably putting a lot more momentum behind the question than it had even before. They posted something about how they did it on first round capitals blog. And what I have always said, and again, is me coming at it from probably initially a marketing background, which is, like, I'm kind of taking the product as a fixed thing. And how do I actually figure out how to market and grow this product? And product changes are going to take a long time. And so, what are the variables that I can control with a marketing background?

41:36But so one of the things I've always said is just ignore the somewhat disappoint the people who say they be somewhat disappointed They're telling you it's a nice to have like there. There is good as gone So just ignore those guys and then but what superhuman did what and the reason that Yeah, put one piece in the middle there before I say what superhuman did the reason that I say ignore those guys is that If you start paying attention to what your somewhat disappointed users are telling you and then you start tweaking, onboarding, and product based on their feedback, maybe you're going to dilute it for your must -have users.

42:12And that ultimately, it becomes kind of good for everyone, but not great for anyone. And so that was my fear of trying to read too much into the users who say they'd be somewhat disappointed. But the superhuman guys actually found, I think, a good way around that, where they said, OK, what is the benefit that my must -have users are focused on? and then of the users who say they'd be somewhat disappointed. So the nice to have users of those users who are also focused on that benefit, what do they need in the product for it then to become a must -have for them? And so they're staying true to that kind of core benefit, but they're trying to essentially take those on the fence users and moving them up.

42:56And so I think they're a way of approaching that, address what my concern was, which is, are we gonna, are we gonna kind of break it for the must -have users? That's an awesome insight. By the way, did Rahul and the team there just do this on their own, or are you involved in any way in this? No, I mean, that's the same thing, like I said, I wasn't initially involved with NewBank, I wasn't involved with them, and that's the benefit of, you know, we wrote about it in our book in 2017, and so I think that, I got it out there, but I actually teamed up with the Kiss This metrics team in 2012 and essentially published this survey on survey .io where we just made it freely available for people and a really easy template to prepare and send out and the how to guide on it.

43:42It was all just, yeah, free. I think KissMetro is kind of using it as maybe lead gen and for me I just wanted a way to kind of put something out for the community. and so it's been out there for a long time, so it's not surprising that different companies have found different unique ways to use it. That's awesome. I think that post is one of the most popular in first round, really had an impact on a lot of people. Yeah. So just to repeat the approach you recommend for when you're digging into, I wrote this down, when you're talking for how to dig into what benefit people are finding. Your advice is it's basically a follow -up survey to the extremely disappointed people asking them, What is the primary benefit you get?

44:23It's an open text initially. Then once you get a collection, it sounds like another survey as multiple choice. Here's like, I've been to a different group of people to be called a different group. Got it. Awesome. And then it's like, which of these four or five benefits is what you're getting at this product? And then the question is, why is this benefit important to you? Yeah. And then you'll see, we have, like, eventually, the survey .io got closed down, but essentially the template that I typically used was then moved at pmfsurve .com. And so you'll see some other questions that I have on there as well, like what would you use instead if this product were no longer available?

45:02And that's one of the interesting things as you start to see, people who say they'd be somewhat disappointed, usually they're focused on a commodity use case and they know an easy alternative to switch to. So to be a must have, it needs to be both valuable and unique. Okay. Anything else on this topic of the Sean Ellis test, product market fit test, before we move on to growth strategy advice. No, I think that's okay. That's right. I think we did almost an hour on that one topic, which I love, because I feel like this is such a powerful tool that I think people sort of know and have used, but I think there's a lot of opportunity to use them effectively.

45:37And all the stuff you point out about it, like it's not just you have to start a short call. Let's move. Let's grow. It's like this is just, this is how you figure out how to make it better and better and grow faster and faster. And it's actually gets like way talking about growth. So even though you coin the term growth hacking, you spend most of your time on the opposite essentially, which is helping companies figure out sustainable growth strategies, not just a bunch of hacks to grow for a little bit and then disappear. And from what I've seen, it's all rooted in this idea of product market fit and what helps you find product market fit.

46:08And imagine many of this stuff we've talked about. Yeah, just one quick interjection there is that when I coined growth hacking I did not think of it as a bunch of one off hacks that What when I thought of it was much more about what what is the way to ultimately drive sustainable growth But it's over time come maybe more Interpreted the way you described it, but just just jump in and say that that's a really good clarification So how did you actually initially frame it? Yeah, when you just I just said it's it's about you know looking at every single thing that you're doing and scrutinizing its impact on growth in the business.

46:45And particularly, I think most marketers, when I first moved to Silicon Valley, most CEOs who are asking me to help their companies, they were saying, we need help with awareness building and I'm getting introductions from top VCs. And so, so much of, I think, the way people were approaching growth was sort of like textbook book marketing, marketing textbook, how to approach it. And startups just don't have the luxury to do all of those things. And so you got to really focus on how do I acquire customers to an experience that's going to make them want to keep using this product. And so I maybe I picked the wrong term in calling it growth hacking, but I think it at least opened the conversation to gain more people thinking about maybe we should be thinking about growth in a different way than yes, it's traditionally taught in marketing courses in school.

47:33Is there another term you think you should have used? Do you always think back? Should I call that this? Is there anything that you've had in your mind? I don't. I think sometimes having something that's a little divisive is almost better because it's too easy to just go completely unnoticed. But I was trying to put a name on not just how I was approaching growth, but seeing Facebook Quick obviously had a very different approach to growth than the most companies. LinkedIn, Twitter, there was a handful of companies that were approaching it in the same way I had previously been approaching it and I just thought we need this thing needs a name and so sat down with a couple of friends, came up with a name and it stuck and but yeah, obviously from day one it was pretty divisive with different groups.

48:23That's a fun story, thanks for sharing that. Okay, so talking about growth and helping companies figure out how to grow. So say you go to a company, they're getting 40, say 2%, 42 % on the show on Alice Test and they're like, okay, cool, let's start thinking about growth. What's your first piece of advice to them to start when they're thinking about growth? And then just broadly, how do you approach helping them figure out how to grow? Ultimately, it's about trying to get as many of the right people that that same state that we just talked about with the must have users. So trying to get as many people to experience the product in a way where they'd be very disappointed if they could no longer use the product.

49:01And so that's not just acquisition, which is how most companies think about, initially it was awareness. Then maybe the more developed way was like, oh, let's at least focus on profitable acquisition. But in my experience, the hardest part is really sits inside the product team. So how do you shape that first user experience? So they actually use it in the right way, and it's not so difficult that they give up. And that ultimately, we understand what makes it a must -have product, and then what we're trying to do is build a, yeah, sounds kind of theoretical here, but I can go into the details on how, but build a flywheel around that must have value.

49:45So step one would be, would be understand it. Step two for me is then figure out a metric that essentially captures units of that value being delivered. And so when I think about a North Star metric, that's what I'm thinking about is like something that reflects how many people are coming in and experiencing that product market fit experience, whatever that is. And it's not just me telling them, here's what your North Star metric should be. It's ultimately, ultimately the team needs to decide that together. And then really just diagramming. What are all of the different ways that we can grow that North Star metric?

50:31So that's where you start to actually build. I call it like a value delivery engine, but it's what is our onboarding look like? like, what's that, that aha moment, that activation? What does the engagement loop look like? Is there any referral? Like, trying to capture it as it is today. And then from there, thinking about where are the biggest opportunities for improvement? So there's high leverage opportunities. And then ultimately, starting to run experiments against those opportunities. Generally, I think I touched on it a little bit earlier, but generally, the sequence that I like to do is start with activation because that's, That one's just so critical and it's easy to get lost in between.

51:11It's best for an early product. The product team's so focused on the roadmap. Like, two features away from not even needing marketing anymore. This thing's going to take off. And then a marketing team's so focused on bringing new people in, but how do you get those new people to a great first experience? It's going to fall through the cracks a lot of time. So a lot of focus on activation. and then engagement and referral and getting the revenue model right. And then once each of those pieces are working well, then starting to really obsess on the channel side. One thing that I'll say, like when I go in and directly in and involve with the company on the acquisition side, I am thinking about my hypotheses on the acquisition pretty early on, Because if I go into it and I have no idea how we'll acquire those customers, I'm not I'm not real confident I'll figure it out when I'm there So I want to have like two or three things that seem pretty viable as as ways to Profitably acquire customers and knowing that once I get deep into it I'll probably come up with one or two more and I've got like five one of them slightly to work But I don't want to like just be under the pressure of having to come up with that once I come in if I if I don't at least see an angle from that before I get involved with the company.

52:36What I'm hearing is when you come into a company and they're asking Sean, how do we figure out how to grow this thing? You actually focus first on activation onboarding when we're going to talk about all these things. Then, after that, basically, these are a priority order for you. Then it's flywheel engagement, referral stuff to see if there's a way to drive that. Then revenue, how do we make money with this and how do we make sure we're doing this profitably? And then only then do you start to go big on acquisition top of final growth? Yeah, I may need to do some acquisition stuff before just to bring enough flow through, but I'm not I'm not obsessing on like how scalable is this is just like yeah, let's get let's get enough people coming through the Again, we can start to Take take the slack out and part of it comes down to that the acquisition side is so competitive now That if you're not really efficient at converting and retaining and monetizing customers you just you can't find scalable profitable customer acquisition channels.

53:32This is fascinating because I think a lot of people are probably do the opposite. Start driving a bunch of girth to a product, then we'll fix onboarding, then we'll figure out how we're making money and referrals comes along there. So I think this is really important for people to hear. So again, the reason you invest first and focus a lot on onboarding slash getting people activated is because that is very correlated to retention and this must have customer, this like, I'll be very disappointed customer. Yeah, and that's, and they're, you're, they're at highest risk, risk of losing them at that point.

54:03They, they're probably a little skeptical about a promise that you put out there, but they're intrigued enough to want to use it. But until, until you get them to that must have experience, until you, until you kind of get them to that aha moment, they, they're, they're, they're at high risk of, of being lost. And so a lot of people focus on, well, I better get their email address or their phone number. But then, then you're essentially having to re -acquire them at that point. So to me, you can collapse that time to value. I'm giving you a couple of like incredible examples of like what when we felt so at log me in when we initially tried to grow the business, I was stuck at being able to spend, you know, I couldn't spend more than $10 ,000 per month profitably trying to grow the business.

54:50And then I dug into the data and I saw that 95 % of the people signing up for LogMe and so, LogMe at the time, free remote access for your computer. And so you install software and you can control it from any other computer. So 95 % of the people signing up never once did a remote control session. And so not surprisingly then, I had to get my kind of monetization off the 5 % who did, that was really limiting my ability to find channels that worked. And so our credit, our CEO with this, that I shared the data with him. And he basically told the product team, we are putting a complete freeze on the product development roadmap.

55:34So every single person from product, engineering, design, and then also said to me, stop trying to find new channels. The three of us on the marketing side are all going to focus on improving the sign -up to usage rate. And so in three months, we improved the sign up to usage rate by a thousand percent. So we went from only five percent of people using the product to 50 percent. I went back, tried the exact same channels that previously only scaled to $10 ,000 a month. Now they scaled to a million dollars a month with a three month payback on marketing dollars invested. 80 % of new users were coming in through word of mouth.

56:12So, there's this like major inflection point by just focusing on activation. This episode is brought to you by Merge. Product leaders, yes like you, cringe when they hear the word integration. They're not fun for you to scope, build, launch or maintain, and integrations probably aren't what led you to product work in the first place. Lucky for you, the folks at Merge are obsessed with integrations. Their single API helps SaaS companies launch over 200 product integrations in weeks, not quarters. Think of Merge like PLAD, but for everything B2B SaaS. Organizations like RAM, DRATA, and Electric use Merge to access their customers' accounting data to reconcile bill payments, file storage data to create searchable databases in their product, or HRIS data to auto -provision and deeper vision access for their customers' employees.

57:03And yes, if you need AI -ready data for your SaaS product, then merge is the fastest way to get it. So, want to solve your organization's integration dilemma once and for all? Book an attend a meeting at merge .dev slash Lenny and receive a $50 Amazon gift card. That's merge .dev slash Lenny. What do you find often works in helping increase activation? I know there's a million things that people do, but I guess what are like three or four things that you think people should definitely try to help improve activation and the onboarding conversion? One of my favorite quotes is a quote from a guy Kettering, it was early like 100 years ago at GM running innovation and he says a problem well stated is a problem half solved.

57:51And so I think a lot of it comes down to not the things you try, but how you deeply understand the problem that's preventing someone from getting using your product effectively. And so yeah, I'll just give you one example. We We had one channel like that kind of after we made a lot of these changes and had already driven a ton of improvement in in the we logged me in onboarding, we found a demand generation channel that was like really cheap and the economics looked great. But at the just the download step, we had a 90 % drop off rate. And so we AB tested a bunch of different things there to try to improve that conversion rate.

58:34And then finally, we, you know, 10 plus tests, not able to improve it. Finally someone said, well, these people are registering. Why don't we just ask them? Why they signed up and didn't download the software and so we didn't want to do it in two kind of a creepy way So we just said you know made it look like a note coming from customer service We had this this channel was sending 200 ,000 people a day so 20 ,000 20 ,000 people were converting to registering so we had Essentially, yeah 20 ,000 people we could email and then 18 ,000 of them who didn't download and so we just asked hey knows you have any chance to use the product yet It looked like it was coming from customer support.

59:13What happened and the answer we got back and not a formal survey was, oh, I just, this seemed too good to be true. I didn't believe this was free. I mentioned to you, we were one of the first freemium SaaS products out there. And so people were skeptical when, especially in a demand -gen channel where they hadn't sort of seen a radio or a TV advertisement from our competitor who was a premium -only product, like these are people who are discovering the category for the first time, they were getting there. And so our next test, once we articulated what the problem was, our next test gave us a 300 % improvement in the download rate, which was a, we gave them a choice.

59:55Download a trial of the paid version or download the free version. Put a big graphical check mark next to the free version, but when they saw we had a business model and a trial of a paid version, the free version was credible. and so that essentially made that channel work for us. So I think, again, it's a combination of qualitative research, looking at how others did it. We had this theory, our previous company had been a game company that didn't require a download. So initially we had this theory that maybe just downloadable software can't be in the millions of new customers a month. And so we're being unrealistic here.

1:00:31But then we were like, are there any counter examples to that? And like, no, the instant messengers are downloadable and they have hundreds of millions of customers. So let's study there, download and install process, and see if we have any ideas that we could borrow from that. So again, some inspiration, tried some of those things. It was a combination of just trying a bunch of different stuff that ultimately led to, there was, I wouldn't say there was one big gain, it was a bunch of small gains. Awesome, okay, so a few things for people to try if they're like, hey, how do I improve my activation rate?

1:01:05how do I improve my conversion rate is just like drill further into what is stopping people from progressing like ask them why did you bounce here why did what did you think this was going to be why didn't you end up using this look for inspiration from other products I think people probably already know that you talked about earlier this idea of the positioning having a big impact of just like figuring out they want to antivirus software let's make that very clear hey we've got the best antivirus software that's what we're here for so there's probably just like messaging that you find works a lot of times, right?

1:01:36I mean, you're two big levers on driving a conversion are increased desire, reduced friction. And so, yeah, you definitely want to increase the right desire. And then, and so sometimes it can also just be reminding people along the way of what benefits you're going to get. Of course, in the case of Logneon, it was probably the most complicated funnel I've ever seen, because you couldn't even get to the aha moment while you're sitting in front of the computer. You had to actually go to a different computer and to use the service to remote control the computer you're in front of. So it's not surprising that there was like so many steps where we could lose people, but we just weren't that intentional about designing each of those steps initially, and it wasn't until we kind of thought through, why would we lose someone at this step?

1:02:26been studying the data, which tests were we losing the most people at, then deeply trying to contextualize why are we losing them there, coming up with a set of tests that we want to run, and then having a good way of deciding which one to test first, and ultimately, you know, ultimately focusing the tests on the areas where we're losing the most people. The other element of this is coming up with an activation metric and midlining on like, here's what we consider so unactivated. I know this is very dependent on the product, But any advisor he risked for how to help people decide this is our activated user?

1:02:58I tend to start qualitatively. So just like, when do I think they've had a good enough experience with the product to really like know it? And so like in the case of Lymeano, it was pretty easy. If they didn't do a remote control session, they didn't use the product. There was no value along the way there. And so, and then at least try to see if there's a correlation to long -term retention of doing that. Cossation is, you need to do some experimentation to prove causation. At the very least, I want to see that correlation. But if I start with two or three ideas of what it might be, and then go and study the data, that can help you focus.

1:03:40But again, I don't think there's necessarily one exact right answer of what is that aha moment. There might be three different things. I think it's that intentionality about picking something that's experienced based and saying what is a likely experience that someone's going to get a good enough taste of this product? And then I do see some companies that are like, well, the activation moment should be, they've used it a hundred times. They're going to correlate to long -term retention, but it's just not very actionable. It's so far down the user experience. And so, ideally, if there's a way that I could get them there in the first session in the first day, that's great.

1:04:22And so it's sort of something that's value that can be experienced super early. But I actually give you an example from the first company I worked on was a game company where I actually flipped it in basically instead of making it a traditional funnel where they could play our games after they signed up, I made our games the advertisements. So basically we syndicated our games to 40 ,000 websites. They started gameplay experience on the other website. Then they would get a message that they now have a qualifying score. And if they register, they'll be in the drawing for the weekly cash prize. And then we could pull them into multiplayer games on the site.

1:05:06And so it was kind of the strategy that YouTube used to grow. but it was like two years before YouTube introduced the approach. Yeah, it feels like you basically created Zingha. I'm hearing there. Okay, so let's move further down the funnel. So we've talked about activation onboarding. The next phase that you focus on is basically, some people call this growth loops, growth engines, flywheels. Basically, it's like the thing that helps your business grow. And something I'm curious of this resonates, I found there's basically four ways to grow. and usually one of these engines is responsible for almost all of your growth.

1:05:43So what I've seen is basically, you're gonna go through sales, you're gonna grow through SEO, you're gonna go through virality, word of mouth, or paid growth. Does that resonate? Does that feel right? And I wanna say it's necessarily one or the other. Like I think bounces are really interesting example where SEO was super important for bounce and is super important for bounce. So people who are essentially saying, luggage storage, Paris. Luggage store, most people, when they're trying to find a place to store their luggage, they're starting with Google. But at the same time, a huge percentage of the people who use bounce are dragging their bag down a street over cobblestones in Paris.

1:06:28And then they pass a sign that says, store your bag here for $5 a day. and it's like, oh, no brainer. And so 10 ,000 partners around the world means that there's a lot of people kind of in the right situation on the demand genocide. So yeah, one would be, I actually think of kind of like, I'm not sure how it would map to this, but like demand generation versus demand harvesting. And so, one of those examples would be a demand generation example, like when you see the signs when you're passing, it's like high context, right place. and then obviously the demand harvesting would be anyone who's Googling and so that they do paid search and organic search there.

1:07:10Interesting. I don't see that like that sign approach work often, but I definitely have seen it work like Yelp, I think grew in a lot of ways of just like little Yelp stickers and all the restaurants, DoorDash, I think probably grew through that. Yeah, I think every business could be a little bit different, but for bounce it makes sense that that would be a really good opportunity for them. How do you help a business figure out which area to bet on? Like whether they should go paid, whether they should go SEO, whether they should hire sales. That sales probably an easier one. I've probably be to be, you're probably gonna have to do sales.

1:07:41Seem, I guess just to help them pick, like here's where you have a big opportunity. Again, it kind of comes down like as I'm going into it, I'm thinking what are the realistic customer acquisition angles for this business? and I want to have ideally two or three that I'm coming into it with. But it's going to, obviously, like Dropbox is a classic one of, I mean, this product, user -get -user is going to be just like a classic. There's file share built into it, folder collaboration. There's so many pieces of it that cross from one user to the next. But interestingly, it was fairly similar to logmeon in some senses as kind of solving two business that are solving similar problems in different ways.

1:08:29Where logmeon, we grew almost entirely off of paid search. And part of it again is that for us, we had a competitor that was spending tens of millions of dollars a month and creating the category with a premium only product through radio and TV advertising, go to my PC, they were just creating all this latent demand. And so it just made sense for us to disrupt them with a premium service and to insert ourselves in the flow of someone. Like, what was that thing that I heard about on the TV commercial and now they go and they Google it and yeah, same thing but for you. So we weren't really pushing for differentiation but just really trying to harvest that.

1:09:15So I couldn't do that at Dropbox. Like no one was looking for Dropbox when I went there. And so we tried a little bit with search to see can we make it work on cloud storage or backup or kind of going to some of these traditional category. And I called storage one of the even traditional categories at that point, but backup was. And it was fairly expensive to be out in the woods just not that much demand there that way. And so it just made more sense to focus on the user -get -user loops at Dropbox. I think, basically, for each business, it's just thinking about what's unique for that business that is going to open up channel opportunities.

1:10:02And everyone's going to be a little bit, I think, jaded from whatever the last thing that worked really well. They're going to think they can apply in the next business. but after enough times myself, I've just, I tend to get the most inspiration by just talking to customers and finding out how did they find it, how did they typically find something like that, and that's to give me some ideas as well. I think that last point is really powerful, and I'm just writing it down. You said, essentially, one of your tactics is talking to users, asking them, how did you find this product and how do you normally find products like this?

1:10:40Was that the second question? I think that's, it's like similar to your start -on -else test. It's such a simple question, but it's so powerful because how else will people find your product? They go to a place to find stuff like this. And like Google searched Google for folder sharing, like there's so much there that I think you did a skip over. I think the reason that you don't actually kind of hear people taking the obvious route there a lot of times is because And I I used to be in the same thing that people tend to be either over indexed on qualitative or over indexed on quantitative so it's a kind of like, you know Analytics, I'm gonna get all my answers from from testing and analytics or I'm gonna get all my answers from traditional customer research and I I was very much in that initial camp for the first five years of my career I'm just you know measure everything and test the heck out of things and find stuff that works But I had a VC who Was our lead VC at log me in who just said when was the last time you talked to a customer Just like pushed me to survey and talk to customers all the time and and At first I was like Yeah, okay.

1:11:52Give the smart ass answer. I don't care what they say I care what they do and that's that's what you know He's like no, you got to talk to them Then then just to appease him I would I would try to have a conversation every day because he was in our office a lot I could say, hey, yeah, I talked to a customer today when he would ask me. And then, but I started finding that my experiments were so much better, the more I talked to customers. And eventually, I became very much like the blend of qualitative and quantitative research leads to much better tests. That is another amazing story and insight.

1:12:23It's so interesting that people sometimes think of you as a growth hacker guy, experiments data when most of the advice you've been sharing so far is very qualitative driven, very survey driven, talking to customers driven. Yeah, and it's just really hard to run good experiments when you can't deeply contextualize what's going on. I love this. By the way, I don't know if I knew this, so you helped develop the Dropbox referral program? I was there at the time. I basically, When I, even when I first started talking with Drew before I came in, I was like, I think the way we're going to grow this business is by leveraging the really passionate customer base.

1:13:02And that's what we need to double down on. And we had tried a similar kind of referral program at Zobni. And my friend who actually started, who started ring, Jamie Siminoff had previously had a company called Phone Tag, like way before Ring, and he had actually done a lot of the testing on, you know, double -sided referral programs and having a set of on both sides, and he found that that worked the best. And so, I, between what we had tested at Zobney and those conversations with him, I hadn't actually seen PayPal yet at that point what they were doing. But yeah, that was kind of like yeah, it seems like a referral program where we have incentives on both sides is the best way to go interestingly, you know six months before I was at Dropbox.

1:13:54I was at Log Me Inn and I Really thought about having incentivized referrals at Log Me Inn, but 80 % of our new users were coming in through word of mouth and You know, I had a hundred million devices connected in on our on our system and I was just so afraid of breaking this growth engine by adding an incentive that I didn't want to risk it. But at Dropbox it was so early that yeah, I would still say like no experiment as one person. It happened to be when I was there. I had some insights that I brought in, but ultimately the guy who built it was actually an intern in Albert Knee and he ended up dropping I think out of MIT to stay with Dropbox for a few years after that.

1:14:40But yeah, he was kind of my right -hand guy to collaborating on growth day to day. Wow. I would say Dropbox is a referral program and the PayPal referral program, as you mentioned, with the two most legendary studied copy and referral programs out there. And unfortunately, I think that what they don't realize is that before the referral program, Dropbox had amazing referral rate. You know, like they're kind of companies that are trying to copy it are like, why isn't anyone talking about our product? Let's add a referral program with incentives like, yeah, to me, I think it's a great accelerant when it's already working, but it can't fix it if people don't want to don't want to talk about your product.

1:15:23That's an awesome point and something I was just going to ask about and just kind of coming back to this topic of growing engagement, growing referrals as a growth mechanism. What do you look for to tell you that there's an opportunity there? And I'll just answer it partly, I've seen exactly what you just said, which is you need to already have strong word of mouth growth, because referrals kind of sits on that and gives you a little more incentive to share. So maybe you agree with that, not agreeing that, and any other advice on helping figure out, is there some kind of loop to hear that we can build?

1:15:53Well, one thing I will say is like, When we first started with it, as I said, we were one of the first with it. So it took me a while to figure out exactly how freemium worked. But to me, freemium towards having a free and a premium version of your product, to really work in any business, it needs to be that your free product is so good that people naturally have word of mouth around that product. and then to be economically viable, you have to have a premium product that's better enough and differentiated enough that people are going to upgrade to the premium product. But I think a lot of times people are so worried about the second part that they make the free version not very good and then they're surprised when word of mouth isn't very strong there.

1:16:43So I think you have to essentially have two distinct products that are great on their own. So that would be the one piece. But then obviously companies that have any kind of collaborative layer to them are going to benefit from or are going to be more likely to work well with referral. And then I think on the engagement side, a lot of it comes down to just the nature of the product. Like Airbnb, you're not going to use it every day, like unless you're, you know, like a vagrant or something maybe, but then you wouldn't have money to pay for it. But the, so there's kind of a natural usage cycle to products and you want to be able to maximize against that cycle.

1:17:31And I think that's where I say, coming back to the hooked model, I think is a really good way to help to have a framework to think about how do I improve engagement. One good counter example, the to that though, the kind of natural frequency of using a product is Facebook when they change their North Star metric from monthly active users to daily active users. I think, again, just having what gets measured gets managed. Once Facebook was on a daily active user goal, the team suddenly had a lot more incentive to think about how do I bring people back every day and use this product where when it was monthly active users, they kind of only got credit for that person for using once in that month.

1:18:22And even if they use 10 times, they didn't get 10 times of credit, it was just like, oh, that's cool too, but they weren't sort of measured on that. And so I think it was sort of a random decision for Mark Zuckerberg to move from a monthly active to a daily active, because they hit one billion monthly active users and they're like, okay, let's go for one billion daily active users. But it had a really big impact on making that product way more addictive to the point where obviously you ended up in Congress or get a lot of pushback. I'm not sure they got went to Congress for that, but they got a lot of pushback for having a product that's maybe too addictive and the same thing carrying into Instagram and and some of the other meta products, or basically anything that is highly engaging.

1:19:10So I do think the right incentives can actually help a team to focus on it, and then, but there's gonna be sort of a natural usage cycle to any product as well. I'm glad you mentioned North Star Metrics. I actually have a post -bullying tuna show notes where I collected the North Star Metrics of 30 different companies to give you some inspiration. I know this is a deep topic of its own, but just when someone is trying to pick their own North Star metric, which I have 1 ,000 percent agree informs so much about how your company operates. It basically focuses everyone's incentives to let's drive this thing and that changes so much of what you're building.

1:19:45And you just like bullet point piece of advice for helping you pick your North Star metric. I start with the value that's on come through the the channelist test. So with a company, I'll say, okay, this is, this is what the must have value is according to our most passionate customers. And we want to think about a metric that reflects us delivering that value. And then I'll give them kind of a framework of ways to think about a North Star metric. But I think it's really important for it to be a time -capped group conversation. And if you give a team 30 days, they'll take 30 days, if you give them six months, they'll take six months.

1:20:24But so I think generally a team can come up with a pretty good North Star metric after 30 minutes if they have like the right kind of wrong gradients and a checklist of what's important in a North Star metric like something that it's not a ratio it's something it can be up into the right over time so you can keep managing it and feeling good it should correlate to revenue growth but not necessarily like revenue shouldn't be the should be the North Star metric but you know as you as you grow value across your customer base you should be able to grow revenue at the same rate. And so there's some other things, but I think that would be the most important is that it's something that could be up and to the right over time and reflects value that you're delivering to customers.

1:21:12Well, so then I was gonna ask about revenue in your opinion there and see your advice as don't make revenue in your North Star metric. No, and it gave an Amazon, and again, this is just what I know of Amazon's as being, but monthly purchases. But yeah, someone else might say Amazon, Amazon, no, Amazon's is GMV or something, but I think monthly purchases is great because it maps to value that people are getting from Amazon. Even if I spend $1000 on a TV set with Amazon versus $3 on an electric toothbrush, Amazon from the consumers perspective delivered the same value. I needed something, Amazon helped me find that thing.

1:21:58And so units of value from the customer perspective, I think is more important than overall revenue, but clearly, with Amazon focusing on driving more monthly purchases, at least on their store side of the business, that has helped them become one of those valuable companies in the world. So I think focusing on value is, revenue should be a byproduct of doing things right. it shouldn't kind of guide you day -to -day actions. To make this even more concrete for people, are there some North Star metric examples? You could share that you've seen that are good, like say for Ventbrite or Dropbox turning companies.

1:22:36You've worked with, and I'll share one real quick as you're thinking about it. At Airbnb, it was, or North Star metric was Nights book. And so it's similar to Amazon. It's not like the money Airbnb made from bookings, but it's like Nights book. And it was really, and basically every experiment ran as like, is this increasing Nights book? is decreasing. And so that's like a really good marketplace one, Uber, obviously, you know, weekly rides. I'm always surprised with the Airbnb that it's there's not a kind of time piece on it like the weekly rides that you have with Uber, but maybe maybe it's because it's such an in frequent use case on travel that it doesn't make sense to to focus on.

1:23:17Yeah. Yeah, why is the time frame important to you. Why do you encourage that? I just, you know, daily active users, you saw the difference between monthly active users and daily active users could, could change behavior a lot of Facebook. I did. Here's you like a quantifiable way. If you're just kind of taking an aggregate number over time, it always looks like it's going up. So it's an engagement element. How often are they engaging? Yeah. But yeah, there's, yeah, there's real quick. Yeah, I mean, I didn't really think about North Star Metrics when I was at Dropbox in Eventbrite, you know, like the term itself.

1:23:54But I was thinking about what is a valuable experience with Dropbox and how do I get people to have that more time? But I don't even know what they go with today, but maybe like, you know, files, files in Dropbox, files access might be better than just files, you know, hosted, and then probably for Eventbrite again, I would say like weekly tickets or something like, you could say weekly events, but then you have events that don't sell any tickets where weekly tickets would be more likely to reflect events are going to be happy if they're selling tickets. And yeah. Okay. Sean, we've gone through so much stuff.

1:24:33I'm trying to limit how many more questions we get through just so that we don't go along. We're going along, which is amazing. I think there's so much value here that we're collecting for folks. So let me just ask maybe be a couple more quick questions. One is actually from Andrew Chan, who has currently partnered at A16Z. He was abroad about growth for the longest time. He, I think, helped popularize growth hacking for better worse with his article and it being the future of VP. What is it? Growth hacking is the new VP of marketing, right? Is that the title? So he actually had a question for you that he should read me.

1:25:05His question is, growth strategies have changed a lot over the past decade. What is the biggest difference now versus when you first started working on growth. When I first started just being data driven on customer acquisition was enough to win. And being test and data driven on customer acquisition, all the other companies were like CPM focused. And so we could do really well, just with lots of testing and some creativity and how it all worked. but that over time as as now I would say most marketers are very most online marketers are very like data and test driven. They know they need lots of testing and so to be competitive today you actually have to be able to be super efficient at all parts of the business.

1:25:57So, again, how you convert, retain, monetize, and that's when it gets hard. Getting a marketing team to be data and test driven is pretty easy. Once you start getting into activation and referral and engagement and retention, now you're talking about the overlap between marketing, product, if it's B2B, bringing sales in there, customer success, and those teams are not used to working together. And so it's really hard to drive the collaboration that's needed to have an effective testing program across the entire growth engine. And that's pretty much any business that's been successful with it, implemented it super early in the business.

1:26:48And so very, very few later stage companies have been able to make much progress in replicating that type of approach. It's just gotten harder, basically. Things are just getting harder. That's gotten harder, but I think it's possible. So it's what I obsess about all the time is how do you get cross -functional teams working together on growth now? And it's still a huge advantage when you can pull it off. Okay. Totally unrelated question. Going in completely different direction as we close out, or chat. So you came up with ice, the very popular way of prioritizing work, which is crazy. I did not know that until I started prepping for this conversation.

1:27:27What's your thoughts on rice, the intercom version of ice, where our stands for reach, I believe, thoughts? So I think it's an unnecessary addition, but maybe it's just being protective of my original idea that the eye in ice is impact and it's essentially saying, in best case scenario, how much impact could we get from this and reach is a super important part of impact. And so, like, I think it's already factored in the eye in ice. And so, I think if there's anything that I would be accused of, it would be being over simplifying things. And there's, I'm not saying them, but there's a lot of people who approach things with that there's got to be a more complex way to approach this.

1:28:14And that's just not me. And so, yeah, more testing is better. Like that's, oh, it doesn't just work like that. I mean, better tests are better than bad tests, but just if you have to hold yourself accountable to anything, more testing would be better. And so I think one quick note on ice is that, in order to be able to effectively run a high velocity testing program, you need to be able to source ideas from across the company. And that's why I came up with ICE. That if you, if you're having people submit ideas and you can't tell them why their idea was not chosen, they're just going to get upset and you're going to waste a lot of time.

1:28:57But if you have a systematic way of being able to compare ideas, it's more likely that people be able to get it and they'll be able to come up with better ideas. I love the way you think, Sean. I have a post on fertilization where I basically just make the same argument that there's all these fancy complicated ways to prioritize in the end. It's just impact confidence and effort and it really works and rarely is more work. Yes, sir. On the other hand, I do also have a guest post called Drice by these two guys called Detailed Rice, which actually I think is a really good point where sometimes it's worth spending like 30 minutes per idea to just really estimate how long will let's take to avoid doing things that are just going to not work and very unlikely to work.

1:29:40Basically doing this reach piece and spending this time to do right. And I think there's a lot of good value there. Yeah. And what I think is going to be really interesting is that over time, I think AI is going to actually change our ability to model out potential outcomes on experiments and start to, whether it's a more informed way of doing Is or replaces ice that ultimately, you know, probability of outcomes is something that AI will be pretty good at. Well, amazing seg. Wait till the final question. Actually final question is, I want to just give out any ways you've been using AI or ways you think AI will impact the work you're doing or other folks are doing and maybe just answered it.

1:30:24Oh, you told me. All right. Now, I'll touch on a couple. One is that probably the funnest way that I'm using it today. Like obviously I've done it for coming up with experiment ideas, but the funnest way I personally use it is I get a lot of people asking me for advice and I don't have very much time to answer, you know, with thoughtful answers to people. And so almost every question that I get, I go to chat GPT and say, how would Sean Ellis answer this gives me an initial draft to like make a couple of tweaks and definitely allows me to answer a lot more so it helps to have a book that's indexed in there and lots of writing.

1:31:07That is so funny. And is that the question? That's as simple as the prompt is how it's showing Alice. Yeah, because then a lot of times I'll say Sean Ellis author of Hacken Growth believes that you know and then it'll like help. I'll find out in the answer. Oh my God. So like you're one step away from a Chrome extension or something that just automatically plugs that into your house. Yeah, exactly. I can even start to have my personal system maybe start to answer some of those questions as me. But I'm a little bit afraid to send something without reviewing it first because sometimes there's sometimes there's stuff that's pretty different from how I would answer it.

1:31:41But longer term, I actually think, as I said, I think the cross -functional challenge to growth is a thing that holds a lot of companies back from being able to implement this a bit later mostly like yeah product teams don't want to be at direction from marketing teams, don't want to get direct, marketing teams don't want to get direction from product teams and maybe a growth layer can help to do these things but I find that you know like if AI is essentially saying you're underperforming in this area of your business you should drive some experiments in this area. It's a lot harder to kind of let ego get in the way when it's kind of dispassionate recommendations from a system.

1:32:22And so I actually think the ability to come up with great experiments is going to keep growing with AI and identifying opportunities. And then obviously like the analytical AI side of things is going to be really exciting in terms of being it. I do find with most companies once we get a real high velocity of experiments going, the bottleneck ends up happening more on the analysis side. and I think AI will help a lot with that as well. Super cool, and these are awesome examples. Okay, Sean, is there anything else you wanted to share with our listeners with before we get to our very exciting light and run which we'll go through real fast because we've gone very long and I want to let you go.

1:33:01Yeah, as I've gone through and done a lot of workshops and programs with companies, I keep coming back to this advice that I heard from Guy Oleg Yakuubankov, which is, it often comes down to asking the right question at the right time in how you figure things out. And he's a former data scientist from Metta. And so, you know, where he basically boils data science down to learning how to ask the right questions. And so I actually have a course with him called gopractice .io where that's really the big benefit of the course is to learn how to ask the right questions. And yeah, you learn how to query him in amplitude.

1:33:40But more importantly, being able to ask the right question, And I think it's kind of cool to hear that from a data scientist from Meta that the importance of that. But every time I'm going through exercises in my workshops, it almost always comes down to people who aren't able to come up with the right or a good answer for a challenging in a business. It's because they're not asking the obvious question. And as soon as they out like, why aren't users downloading the software, let's just ask them that question. and that would be one example from my workshop. Who considers the product that must have that part of figuring out the must have kind of the benefit that then allows you to hone in on product market fit.

1:34:30And so, yeah, right questions, right time. I think is a really important way to think about growth and even getting the product market fit. I love this advice, because I think it gives us a glimpse into how your brain has developed these really simple, seemingly simple ideas that end up being really powerful. And it feels like the advice is just think a lot about the question you need to ask because that'll get you to something that a lot of people just kind of under think or don't. There's like things to think maybe it's too simple. Yeah, they just jump right into the solution side of things where they're not really trying to understand what's going on.

1:35:08Yeah, amazing. Okay, well with that, Sean, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I am. All right. Our first question is, what are two or three books you recommended most to other people? Increasingly, I'm recommending a book called Presenting to Win that's been around forever, but it really helped me with my presenting. And so, of course, when I'm out traveling, I'm often sharing the stage with other speakers and, yeah, I'd like to recommend that one to them. I've already talked about Neary All's hooked. I recommend that always. And well, the stick with two, that's a good two.

1:35:47Within presenting to win, is there one tip that you sticks with you? If like, here's something that really helped me be a better presenter? Ultimately, like confidence in presenting comes down to having very well organized information that you're going to present. And when you organize it correctly, you are much more likely to deliver it with confidence. and so he basically says, if I had a presentation to do and I had an hour to present, I'd spend 55 minutes creating the right presentation and then five minutes practicing it, and uh, but yeah, there's a lot more to it. But that... Wow. Yeah, amazing.

1:36:19Okay, we'll link to that book in the show notes. The favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? Yeah, so I've been binging the Olympics. I love that. Just, you know, watching people who like like work their ass off for years and then maybe have 30 seconds to do the thing that they worked hard for. So, Olympics have been awesome. And then the movie, I actually just saw Blackberry. I don't know if you've seen that. Oh, the story of the Blackberry. Yeah, I mean, obviously, we all kind of know the story, but it was, so really, I mean, it's a classic example of like product market fit and then not.

1:36:53And actually, it's probably even a counter example to the dangers of the, how would you feel that you could no longer use this product. Pretty sure most people would have said on Black Berry, it's the keyboard. And, you know, until, until iPhone came along, you know, the keyboard was super important. And then suddenly it wasn't. But yeah, it's also also interesting on like egos and other things that like everybody's good and friendly in the beginning. And then egos take over and things get a little harder later on. That was actually a really good movie. There's also an amazing movie called Tetris for some reason.

1:37:27and I think of these two together about the story of Tetris. And there's like some similar parallels to those two movies. Awesome. I'll have to see that one. Next question. Do you have a favorite product? You recently discovered that you really love? I forget the name of it, but it's, I think, well, it's got pack gear hanging suitcase. And I, basically, like, I've done almost 100 ,000 miles in travel this year and I have another trip scheduled for next week. and I love it because it has all my clothes folded in this little insert that goes into my suitcase and then I just pull it out and hang it up and just makes travel way easier.

1:38:06It's called the pack gear suitcase. Pack gear hanging suitcase organizer. So cool. I'm going to check that out. Two more questions. The other favorite life motto that you often come back to, they find useful and worker in life, maybe share with friends and family sometimes. Focus on reputation and learning over earnings has a served me super well that and I'll give you an example I had I had two companies when I was doing a lot of this early interim stuff yeah 10 plus years ago and I had two of them where I talked to the the founders afterwards and I could tell they weren't like that stoked on my contributions and I offered a full refund to both of them with a thought that like I have this reputation that's that's like I randomly pulled the number I said my reputation were five million dollars.

1:38:57Why would I possibly you know mortgage that reputation for twenty thousand dollars. And so you know one of them I gave the the check back to them and he was happy to take it and then but he had said oh you can make it up to me you could you know like I don't know you don't have to give me the check just make it up to me by continuing to help me for an unlimited amount of time I'm going for it. I was like, take the check. And then the other one said, no, no, I'm actually really happy with what you did. We're fine. But the two VCs who had made those introductions were the first two to give me term sheets when I went out to raise money for my company and the pre -money ultimately ended up being valued at more than double what I had put my personal reputation at.

1:39:41So I think the, yeah, of course, the company didn't do it well itself because of the elusive of product market fit challenges, but yeah, the learning there of, yeah, just focus on learning and reputation. Reputation opened the door to more and more learning. And as I got more learning, the reputation grew. And so, yeah. There's a really good core layer there with customer support. Like if someone just hates your product and wants a refund, just give them a refund and let them move on. Or just being upset. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. Final question. You mentioned to me before we started recording that you were maybe indirectly responsible for TikTok's success.

1:40:22Maybe share that story. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but I, yeah, my trip around the world that I did three months ago, I think I wrapped it up.

1:40:43I started with the previous product and then when TikTok came, they were in place to be the initial growth team for TikTok and they basically said, all the early stuff we did to grow TikTok was based on your writing. So that was before the book came out. So it's a lot of just blogging that I had done, but it was really really cool to get that feedback that, that yeah, I've always said I have some really good wins. I've said a lot of unicorns that I helped, but none of the really, really big guys. And then to hear that, it felt really good to know that I played some kind of role in TikTok. Of course, almost the same week they told me that that was, you know, Congress having TikTok band conversations.

1:41:28So it was good. And at the same time knowing that maybe if they had it read my stuff, Congress wouldn't be wasting their time on TikTok bands. Oh man, better sweet. I hope they don't pull you into some hearings. Sean, this is incredible. This is everything I was hoping it'd be. I feel like we collected so much wisdom here for folks to help them figure out product market fit, find product market fit, iterate, grow their product. So happy we did this. Two final questions. Where can folks find stuff that you're up to? If they want to learn more and maybe work with you in various ways. And how can listeners be useful to you?

1:42:00Awesome. So Sean Ellis .ME is the website where I kind of linked to all the things that I'm doing and so that would be one place where you know and there's contact forms on there if anyone wants to reach out obviously LinkedIn people can contact me there and then I did mention go practice so go practice .io really cool way to learn growth through a simulated environment of being able to to try to grow products so check out check out go practice and maybe go to shonellist .me when this comes out I'll put a special offer on there for Lenny's listeners, so you can save some money. There's also a LLM AI.

1:42:40I wasn't directly involved on that one, but there's some other really cool stuff that Oleg and the team are doing. I've been data -driven product management and the user growth programs are the ones that I helped with. Awesome. Then for folks, if they're wondering, do you do advising? How do you work with companies in case they're like, hey, any John? Yeah. I mean, the sweet spot for me on companies that I go hands -on with are ideally pretty early just after they get to product market fit and now you know how to measure it. So like if you're kind of pre -scale but you're seeing that 40 percent or even if you're a bit earlier than that we can start talking earlier but to me that's my favorite time to get in there.

1:43:22Build it right from the beginning. It's so hard to retroactively do these things and I'll go in for three to six months and I'm all in full time. One of the team trying to really help build traction in the business. I do one of those every maybe year or maybe every year or two. I purposely burn myself out and then have fun doing more lecturing and workshops and stuff. Awesome. Well, you might get a flood of requests after this comes out. Hope you're ready. Sean, thank you so much for being here. Awesome, thank you Lenny, I really appreciate you having me on.