YouSaid · the spoken record

Sean Ellis

lines on the record
119
first
2024-09-05
most recent
2024-09-05
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Yeah, I mean, so 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% 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, build 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, because I purposely burn myself out and then have fun doing more lecturing and workshops and stuff.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I wasn't directly involved on that one, but there's, yeah, 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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Awesome, yeah. So Sean Ellis.me is the website where I kind of link to all the things that I'm doing. And so that would be one place where 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 try to grow products. check out GoPractice and maybe go to Shawnellis.me when this comes out. I'll put a special offer on there for Lenny's listeners. So you can save some money.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “In TikTok, of course, almost the same week they told me that was Congress having TikTok band conversations. So it was good. And at the same time, knowing that maybe if they hadn't read my stuff, Congress wouldn't be wasting their time on TikTok bands.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but my trip around the world that I did three months ago, I think I wrapped it up, I met with the original founding growth team at TikTok. They're based in Singapore. And they had, I can't remember what the previous product was called, but they 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 writings. So that was before the book came out. So it's a lot of just blogging that I had done, but was really, really cool to get that feedback that, yeah, I've always said I have some really good wins. 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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “To help me for an unlimited amount of time going forward, 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. So yeah, I think the unfortunate company didn't do that well itself because of the elusive product market fit challenges. But yeah, the learning there of 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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Focus on reputation and learning over earnings has served me super well, and I'll give you an example I had two companies when I was doing a lot of this early interim stuff 10 plus years ago. And I had two of them where I talked to 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 the thought that like I have this reputation that's I randomly pulled the number and said, my reputation worth $5 million. Why would I possibly mortgage that reputation for $20,000? And so, you know, one of them I gave the check back to them and he was happy to take it. But he had said, oh, you can make it up to me. You don't have to give me the check. Just make it up to me by continuing.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I forget the name of it, but it's, I think it's called Pack Gear Hanging Suitcase. And I basically, 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 basically has all my clothes folded in this little, little... Makes travel way easier.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, I mean, obviously, like, we all kind of know the story, but it was so really, I mean, it's a classic example of product market fit and then not. Actually, it's probably even a counter example to the dangers of how would you feel if we could no longer use this product. Pretty sure most people would have said on BlackBerry, it's the keyboard until iPhone came along the keyboard was super important. And then suddenly it wasn't. But yeah, it's also interesting on egos and other things that everybody's good and friendly in the beginning. And then egos take over and things get a lot harder later on.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So I've been binging the Olympics. I love that. Just, you know, watching people who 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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Ultimately, 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, but yeah, there's a lot more to it”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “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 like to recommend that one to them. I've already talked about Nir's hooked. I recommend that always. And we'll just stick with two. That's a good two.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, they just jumped right into the solution side of things where they're not really trying to understand what's going on.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “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 ask, like, why aren't users downloading the software? Let's just ask them that question. That would be one example from my workshop. Who considers the product a must have that part of getting to figuring out the must-have kind of benefit that then allows you to hone in on product market fit. And so, yeah, write questions, right time, I think is a really important way to think about growth and even getting to product market fit.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, 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 a guy Oleg Yakubankoff, 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 Meta. And so 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 them in amplitude, but more importantly, being able to ask the right question. 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”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “A thing that holds a lot of companies back from being able to implement this a bit later. Mostly like product teams don't want to be at direction from marketing teams. They don't want to get 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 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. And so I actually think, I think the ability to come up with great experiments is going to keep growing with AI. And identifying opportunities and then obviously the analytical AI side of things is going to be really exciting in terms of being able. I do find with most companies once we get a real”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “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 at first because sometimes there's that's pretty different from how I would answer it. But longer term, I actually think, as I said, I think the cross-functional challenge to growth is”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, because I know a lot of times that'll say, Sean Ellis, author of Hacking Growth, believes that, you know, and then it'll obviously pull that part out in the answer.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “No, I'll touch on a couple. One is that Probably the funnest way that I'm using it today. 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 with thoughtful answers to people. And so almost every question that I get, I go to ChatGPT and say, how would Sean Ellis answer this? That gives me an initial draft to 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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah. And that's 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 ICE or replaces ice that ultimately probability of outcomes is something that AI will be pretty good at.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “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'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. But if you have a systematic way of being able to compare ideas, it's more likely that people will be able to get it and they'll be able to come up with better ideas.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So it's an unnecessary addition, but maybe I'm just being protective of my original idea that the eye in ice is impact. And it's essentially saying best case scenario, how much impact could we get from this? And REACH is a super important part of impact. And so I think it's already factored in the I in ice. And so I think if there's anything that I would be accused of, it would be being oversimplifying things. And there's, I'm not saying them, but there's a lot of people who approach things with there's got to be a more complex way to approach this, and that's just not me. And so, yeah, more testing is better. 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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “It's gotten harder, but I think it's, 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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “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 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. And so very few later stage companies have been able to make much progress in replicating that type of approach”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “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. So we could do really well just with lots of testing and some creativity and how it all worked, but that over time as now I would say most marketers are very, most online marketers are very like data and test driven. They know they needed 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. So, you know, again, like how you convert, retain, monetize. And that's when it gets hard. Getting a marketing team to be To be data and test driven is pretty easy.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, I mean, I didn't really think about North Star Metrics when I was at Dropbox in Eventbrite. The term itself. But 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 and dropbox files access might be better than just files 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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I just, you know, daily active users, you saw the difference between monthly active users and daily active users could change behavior a lot of Facebook. It gives you a quantifiable way of just kind of taking an aggregate number over time, it always looks like it's going up.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And so that's like a really good marketplace one. Uber obviously, you know. I'm always surprised with the Airbnb that there's not a kind of time piece on it, like the weekly rides that you have with Uber. But maybe it's because it's such an infrequent use case on travel that it doesn't make sense to focus on.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “At least on their store side of the business, that has helped them become one most 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 your day-to-day actions.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “No, even Amazon, and again, like this is just what I know of Amazon's as being, but monthly purchases. But someone else might say Amazon. No, Amazon's is GMV or something. But I think monthly purchases is great because maps to value that people are getting from Amazon. Even if I spend, say, $1,000 on a TV set with Amazon versus $3 on $10 on an electric toothbrush Amazon from the consumer's perspective delivered the same value. I needed something. Amazon helped me find that thing. And 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 per”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Good. It should correlate to revenue growth, but not necessarily revenue shouldn't be the North Star metric, but 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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “I start with the value that's uncovered through the Chanelis test. So with a company, I'll say, okay, 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 we give a team 30 days, they'll take 30 days. If you give them six months, they'll take six months. But 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 raw ingredients and a checklist of what's important in a North Star metric, like something that it's not a ratio, something that can be up and to the right over time. So you can keep managing it and feeling.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “So, I do think the right incentives can actually help a team to focus on it. But there's going to be sort of a natural usage cycle to any product as well”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “For using once in that month. And even if they use 10 times, they didn't get 10 times the 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 1 billion daily active users. But it had a really big impact on making that product way more addictive to the point where obviously ended up in Congress or get a lot of pushback. I'm not sure they got 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 some of the other meta products or basically anything that is highly engaging.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “To that, though, of 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 It was monthly active users, they kind of only got credit for that person.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “on their own. So that would be the one piece. And so, 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. Airbnb, you're not going to use it every day unless you're vagrant or something maybe, but and then you won'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. And I think that's where I think 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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Well, one thing I will say is freemium 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 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. So I think you have to essentially have two distinct products that are great.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “And unfortunately, I think that what they don't realize is that before the referral program, Dropbox had amazing referral rate. They're kind of companies that are trying to copy it are like. Why doesn't anyone talking about a product? Let's add a referral program with incentives 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 talk about your product.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “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, six months before I was at Dropbox, I was at Log Me In. And I really thought about having incentivized referrals that log me in, but 80% of our new users were coming in through word of mouth. I had 100 million devices connected in 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 Nee. And he ended up dropping out, I think, out of MIT to stay with.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Was there at the time? I basically, 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. And that's what we need to double down on. And we had tried a similar kind of referral program at Zobny. And my friend who actually 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 kind of double-sided referral programs and having incentive on both sides. And he found that that worked the best. And so between what we had tested at Zobni and those conversations with him, I hadn't actually seen PayPal yet at that point, what they were doing.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I think the reason that you don't actually kind of hear people taking the obvious route there a lot of times is because I used to be in the same thing that people tend to be either over index on qualitative or overindexed on quantitative. So kind of like, you know, analytics, I'm going to get all my answers from testing and analytics or I'm going to get all my answers from traditional customer research. And I was very much in that initial camp for the first five years of my career. I'm just going to 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 at first I was like, yeah, gave the smart ass answer. I don't care what they say. I care what they do. And that's what he's like, no, you got to talk to them. Then just to appease him, I would try to have a conversation every day because he was in our office a lot. And so I could say, hey, yeah, I talked to a customer today when he would ask me.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “For that business that is going to open up channel opportunities and 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 it in the next business. But after enough times myself, I've just, you know, you. I tend to get the most inspiration by just talking to customers and finding out how did they find it, how do they typically find something like that. And that starts to give me some ideas as well.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Of someone like, what was that thing that I heard about on the TV commercial? And now they go and they Google it and same thing but free. So we weren't really pushing for differentiation, but just really trying to harvest that. So I couldn't do that at Dropbox. Like no one was looking for Dropbox when I went there. And so, you know, 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 like traditional category cloud storage wasn't even a traditional category at that point but backup was and it was just like it was fairly expensive to be able and there was just not that much demand there that way and so it just made more sense to focus on the user get user loops at at dropbox so i think i think basically for for each business it's um it's just thinking about what's what's unique”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “User get user is going to be just like a classic 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 log me in in some senses as kind of solving two businesses that are solving similar problems in different ways, where log me in, 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 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 freemium service and to insert ourselves in the flow.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Again, it kind of comes down 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.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Yeah, I think every business could be a little bit different, but for bounce, it makes sense that that would be a really good growth opportunity for them.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “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 there's paid, they do paid search and organic search there.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “And I wouldn't say it's necessarily one or the other. Like, I think bounce is a 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 storage, 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. And 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 gen side. So yeah, one would be, I actually think of kind of like, I'm not sure how.”

    2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source