Sean Ellis: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? Is that the second question? I think it's similar to your [inaudible 01:21:02] 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 I searched Google for folder sharing. There's so much there that you just skip over. I think the reason that you don't actually hear people taking the obvious route there a lot of times is because, and 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 like 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 LogMeIn who just said, "When was the last time you talked to a customer?" Just pushed me to survey and talk to customers all the time. And at first I gave the smart-ass answer, "I don't care what they say, I care what they do." And he's like, "No, you got to talk to him." 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. But I started finding that my experiments were so much better the more I talked to customers, and eventually I became very much... The blend of qualitative and quantitative research leads to much better tests. That is another amazing story and insight. It's so interesting that people sometimes think of you as growth hacker guy experiments data, when most of the advice we've been sharing so far is very qualitative driven, very survey driven, targeting customers driven.…

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