Lookout raised its PMF score from 7% to 40% in two weeks
Sean Ellis · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · Sep 5, 2024 · at 11:45
Sean Ellis discusses his early growth advisory work with mobile security startup Lookout after leaving Dropbox.
0:00 / 0:26exact quote · 26.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And so the next cohort of people that we surveyed were at 40% saying they'd be very disappointed without the product. So that was really took two weeks to make those changes. Six months later, it was 60% on, on the Score. And then I think they hit the billion dollar valuation four or five years later on you know, ultimately being one of the, you know, early unicorns.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Sean Ellis
Ellis: Customer acquisition should be the final step in growth
“Like customer acquisition is so hard that if you, if you're not really efficient at converting and retaining and monetizing people, you're gonna really struggle on the customer acquisition side.”
Ellis: Modifying products for lukewarm users risks diluting core user value
“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 going to dilute it for your must have users. And that ultimately it becomes kind of…”
Ellis: The 40% PMF benchmark is an alignment tool, not a rigid rule
“I don't think it's that firm. You know, to me, I think the real power is having some kind of target for the team to be shooting for that basically says, we're not going to aggressively start to grow until we hit this target.”
Ellis: PMF survey scores reflect both product utility and switching costs
“So sort of switching costs, I think can factor in there. So it's a function of both switching costs and utility of the product.”
Survey active users who used the product at least twice recently
“What I recommend is a random sample of people who've really use your product. So they, they've gone in, they didn't just sign up, but they went in and hopefully like hit that activation moment. They've used it twice at, you know, two plus times and they've ide…”