The original growth hacker reveals his secrets

Sean Ellis, who coined the term growth hacking and created the Sean Ellis product-market-fit survey, discusses how to measure whether a product is a must-have and how to grow once it is. The conversation covers survey design, the 40% threshold, using onboarding and activation to lift retention, and building a sustainable growth engine.

01Key learnings

• Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer use the product; a high share saying 'very disappointed' is a leading signal of product-market fit.
• Survey a random sample of users who have actually experienced the product and used it more than once recently, not just sign-ups or demo viewers.
• Use the very-disappointed group as a filter: find their primary benefit and the context ('why is this important to you') to craft positioning and messaging.
• Ignore the 'somewhat disappointed' group when tuning the product, so you don't dilute the experience for your must-have users.
• Treat onboarding and speed to value as the main lever for improving retention and the disappointment score, rather than tactical retention tricks.
• Prioritize activation first, then engagement, referral, and monetization, and only go big on acquisition once those work, since acquisition is hard to make profitable otherwise.
• Choose a north star metric that reflects delivered customer value, can trend up over time, and is set by the team together rather than imposed.
• Combine qualitative conversations with customers and quantitative experiments; asking users why they dropped off often uncovers fixes that testing alone misses.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.