Sean Ellis: recommendation

Transcript context

…The other element of this is coming up with an activation metric and aligning on here's what we consider so activated. I know this is very dependent on the product, but any advice or heuristic for how to help people decide this is our activated user. I tend to start qualitatively. So just like when do I think they've had a good enough experience with the product to really know it? And so in the case of LogMeIn, it was pretty easy. If they didn't do a remote control session, they didn't use the product. There was no value along the way there. And then at least try to see if there's a correlation to long-term retention of doing that. Causation is you need to do some experimentation to prove causation. At the very least, I want to see that correlation, but if I start with two or three ideas of what it might be and then go and study the data, that can help you focus. But again, I don't think there's necessarily one exact right answer of what is that aha moment. There might be two or three different things. I think it's that intentionality about picking something that's experience-based and saying, "What is a likely experience that someone's going to get a good enough taste of this product?" And then I do see some companies that are like, "Well, the activation moment should be, they've used it a hundred times." That's going to correlate to long-term retention, but it's just not very actionable. It's so far down the user experience. So ideally if there's a way that I could get them there in the first session, in the first day, that's great. And so it's sort of something that's value that can be experienced super early. To give you an example from the first company I worked on was a game company, where I actually flipped it and basically instead of making a traditional funnel where they could play our games after they signed up, I made our games the advertisements. So basically we syndicated our games to 40,000 websites. They started gameplay experience on the other website, then they would get a message that they now have a qualifying score and if they register, they'll be in the drawing for the weekly cash prize and then we could pull them into multiplayer games on the site. And so it's kind of the strategy that YouTube used to grow, but it was two years before YouTube introduced the approach. It feels like you basically created Zynga, is what I'm hearing there. So let's move further down the funnel. So we've talked about activation, onboarding. The next phase that you focus on is basically some people call this growth loops, growth engines, flywheels. Basically it's the thing that helps your business grow and something I am curious if this resonates. I found there's basically four ways to grow and usually one of these engines is responsible for almost all of your growth. So what I've seen is basically you're going to go through sales, you're going to grow through SEO, you're going to go through virality, word of mouth or paid growth. Does that resonate? Does that feel right?…

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