Sean Ellis: belief

Transcript context

…Wow. What did you do there just as a case study? Yeah. Yeah. So the company called Lookout, it's a mobile security company, and now most of the things in Lookout are built into iPhones and Androids. But at that time, the product had everything from backup my data to find my lost phone to protecting your phone with a firewall and antivirus. And so when we ran this initial survey, I dug into the 7% who said they'd be very disappointed without the product and found that most of that 7% were focused on the antivirus functionality. So they were like, they know they need to protect their computer from viruses, smartphones were becoming more like computers, so it just made a lot of sense for them that they'd need to protect their phone. And interesting, at the time, I think there was only one kind of phone virus that had ever even happened, but it was a pretty easy mental leap for people. And so now we knew, okay, it's antivirus that people really valued. And so step one was just reposition the product on antivirus. So that kind of creates a filter. So anyone who now is coming in to sign up for the product who doesn't care about antivirus is not going to convert, and those who are excited about antivirus are going to convert. We already know from the initial survey that people value that after they convert. So by setting the right expectations around it up front, you're going to bring people in with the right expectations. But then the second thing that we did was we streamlined onboarding so that the first thing that they did after signing up for the product was to set up the antivirus and then get a message "you're now protected from viruses." And so it's really the combination of those two things. It's set the right expectations and then speed to value. And so the next cohort of people that we surveyed were at 40% saying they'd be very disappointed without the product. So that literally took two weeks to make those changes. Six months later, it was 60% on the score. And then I think they hit the billion dollar valuation four or five years later on ultimately being one of the early unicorns. And interestingly, as all of those things were built into mobile phones now, they've completely changed the business, but they continue to do really well, but they've continued to iterate the business. I think that having that kind of finger on the pulse early in the business was important to build the muscle in the business to be really responsive as the market changed. Sean, this is already amazing. There's just a fractal of topics I want to explore from this very short conversation already. So the first is just follow this thread of basically you're sharing kind of a growth strategy that I imagine you execute, is look for the percentage of people that would be very disappointed if your product went away, see who they are, see what they're excited about and lean into that both positioning-wise, onboarding-wise, and probably also cut out stuff from your product that they don't care about.…

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