The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Lenny Rachitsky
5 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2024
⏱️ 104 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sean Ellis is one of the earliest and most influential thinkers and operators in growth. He coined the term “growth hacking,” invented the ICE prioritization framework, was one of the earliest people to use freemium as a growth lever, and, most famously, developed the Sean Ellis Test for product-market fit (which a large percentage of founders use today to track if they’ve found PMF). Over the course of his career, Sean was head of growth at Dropbox and Eventbrite; helped companies like Microsoft and Nubank refine their growth strategy; was on the founding team of LogMeIn, which sold for over $4 billion; and is the author of one of the most popular growth books of all time, Hacking Growth, which has sold over 750,000 copies. In our conversation, he shares:
• The proper use of the Sean Ellis Test for measuring product-market fit
• How to increase your activation and retention rates
• How to select the right North Star metric for your business
• Case studies from his work growing Dropbox and other products
• How growth strategy has changed over the past decade
• How AI is impacting growth efforts
• Much more
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Find the transcript and show notes at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-original-growth-hacker-sean-ellis
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Where to find Sean Ellis:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanellis/
• Website: https://www.seanellis.me/
• Substack: https://substack.com/@seanellis
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Sean’s background
(02:18) The Sean Ellis test explained
(06:28) The 40% rule
(08:06) Case study: improving product-market fit
(12:34) Understanding and leveraging customer feedback
(16:50) Challenges and nuances of product-market fit
(22:22) When to use the Sean Ellis Test
(23:46) When not to use the Sean Ellis Test and other caveats
(27:13) Defining your own threshold and how the Sean Ellis Test came about
(36:13) Tools for implementing the survey
(37:30) Transitioning from surveys to retention cohorts
(39:13) Nubank’s approach
(40:18) Case study: Superhuman’s strategy for increasing product-market fit
(45:18) Coining the term “growth hacking”
(48:24) How to approach growth
(57:25) Improving activation and onboarding
(01:05:17) Identifying effective growth channels
(01:10:28) The power of customer conversations
(01:12:43) Developing the Dropbox referral program
(01:14:47) The importance of word of mouth
(01:15:23) Freemium models and engagement
(01:19:21) Picking a North Star metric
(01:24:30) The evolution of growth strategies
(01:27:12) The ICE and RICE frameworks
(01:30:11) AI’s role in growth and experimentation
(01:32:52) Final thoughts and lightning round
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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | the Sean Ellis test, |
| 0:01.4 | such a seemingly simple idea that has had such a profound impact |
| 0:05.8 | on the startup world. |
| 0:07.0 | The question is, how would you feel |
| 0:09.1 | if you could no longer use this product? |
| 0:11.1 | Once you got a high enough percentage of users saying they'd be very |
| 0:14.1 | disappointed, most of those products did pretty well. If you fell too low, those products tended |
| 0:18.8 | to suffer. Say someone is listening and they're like, okay, man, I'm getting like 10% I don't know what to do what do you |
| 0:24.3 | find often works just ignore the people who say they'd be somewhat disappointed they're |
| 0:28.4 | telling you it's a nice to have if you start paying attention to what you're |
| 0:31.6 | somewhat disappointed users are telling you and then you start paying attention to what you're somewhat disappointed users are telling you, |
| 0:33.9 | and then you start tweaking, onboarding, and product based on their feedback, |
| 0:38.4 | maybe you're going to dilute it for your must-have users. |
| 0:40.9 | Moving retention often is really hard, but I guess it sounds like there's often something you can do. |
| 0:45.0 | It's usually much more a function of onboarding to the right user experience than it is about the kind of the tactical things that people try to do to improve retention. |
| 0:53.4 | What are like three or four things that you think people should definitely try to help improve |
| 0:57.2 | activation? In my experience. |
| 0:59.1 | Today my guest is Sean Ellis. |
| 1:05.0 | Sean is one of the earliest and most influential thinkers and operators in the world of growth. |
| 1:11.0 | He coined the term growth hacking, invented the ice prioritization |
| 1:14.6 | framework, was one of the earliest people to use Fremium as a growth strategy, and maybe most |
| 1:19.8 | famously developed the Sean Ellis test to help you understand if you have product market fit, which a large percentage of founders use today and profoundly impacted the way startups are built. |
... |
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