The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
The Sean Ellis Test. Such a seemingly simple idea that has had such a profound impact on the startup world.

**Sean Ellis** (0:07)
The question is, how would you feel if you could no longer use this product? Once you got a high enough percentage of users saying they'd be very disappointed, most of those products did pretty well. If you fell too low, those products tended to suffer.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:19)
Say someone is listening and they're like, okay, man, I'm getting like 10%, I don't know what to do. What do you find often works?

**Sean Ellis** (0:25)
Just ignore the people who say they'd be somewhat disappointed. They're telling you it's a nice to have. If you start paying attention to what your somewhat disappointed users are telling you and then you start tweaking onboarding and product based on their feedback, maybe you're gonna dilute it for your must have users.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:41)
Moving retention often is really hard, but I guess it sounds like there's often something you can do.

**Sean Ellis** (0:45)
It's usually much more a function of onboarding to the right user experience than it is about the kind of the tactical things that people try to do to improve retention.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:53)
What are like three or four things that you think people should definitely try to help improve activation?

**Sean Ellis** (0:57)
In my experience.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:03)
Today my guest is Sean Ellis. Sean is one of the earliest and most influential thinkers and operators in the world of growth. He coined the term growth hacking, invented the ICE prioritization framework, was one of the earliest people to use freemium as a growth strategy, and maybe most famously developed the Sean Ellis Test to help you understand if you have product market fit, which a large percentage of founders use today and profoundly impacted the way startups are built. Over the course of his career, Sean was head of growth at Dropbox and Eventbrite, helped companies like Microsoft and Nubank refine their growth strategy, was on the founding team of LogMeIn, which eventually sold for over $4 billion, and he's the author of one of the most popular growth books of all time, called Hacking Growth. In our conversation, we've dived deep into two topics. One, how to know if you've got product market fit and what to do if you don't, and two, how to figure out how to grow once you've found product market fit. If you're in the early stages of a new product wrangling with product market fit, or trying to figure out how to jumpstart or further accelerate growth for your product, this episode is for you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Sean Ellis.
Sean, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Sean Ellis** (2:26)
Thanks, Lenny. I'm super excited to be on with you.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:29)
There's so much that I want to talk about. There's so many directions we can go. But to keep it focused, I want to spend time on two areas. I want to talk about how to know if you have product-market fit, and what to do once you have product-market fit in terms of figuring out how to grow.

**Sean Ellis** (2:44)
Yeah.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:44)
And I know these things are very linked. I know you spend a lot of time on these things. How does this feel?

**Sean Ellis** (2:49)
Sounds perfect. Yeah, let's do it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:50)
Okay. Okay. Amazing. Let's talk about, first of all, the Sean Ellis Test slash something people call sometimes the product-market fit test. Such a seemingly simple idea that has had such a profound impact on the startup world. I've never actually seen you talk about the history of this thing, how you came up with these questions, how you came up 40 percent, the whole journey of this thing. So let's talk about this. But first of all, can you just tell people what is the Sean Ellis Test for folks that aren't exactly familiar with this?

**Sean Ellis** (3:19)
It's a simple question that helps you figure out, does anyone consider your product a must have, or ideally who and how many people consider it. But ultimately, it's about trying to figure out, is your product a must have, which could be equated to having product market fit. And so the question is, how would you feel if you could no longer use this product? And I give them the choice, very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, or even not disappointed, or not applicable if I already stopped using the product. And what I'm trying to find are those people who say, I would be very disappointed if I could no longer use this product. And that's a really powerful vein to dig into when you discover that you actually have some people who would give a crap if your product disappears.