Sean Ellis: belief

Transcript context

…How do you help a business figure out which area to bet on? Whether they should go paid, whether they should go SEO, whether they should hire sales. Sales is probably an easier one. B2B, you're probably going to have to be a sales team, I guess just to help them pick, "Here's where you have a big opportunity." 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, but it's going to... Obviously Dropbox is a classic one of like, "Oh man, this product..." User get user is going to be just 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 LogMeIn in some senses, it's two businesses are solving similar problems in different ways. Where LogMeIn, 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. GoToMyPC, they're 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 of someone... 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. No one was looking for 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 categories. Cloud storage wasn't even a traditional category at that point, but backup was, and it was fairly expensive 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 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 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 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. 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.…

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