Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

by Sean Ellis

After the success of my growth strategy at LogMeIn, I decided to focus on helping early stage companies accelerate their growth through experimentation. So when Drew Houston reached out to me to discuss how I could work with Dropbox, I couldn’t wait to implement the method that I’d developed. My first step was to get Houston’s buy-in to conduct a simple survey of the current users to calculate what I called (and what you’ll read about in more detail later in the book) the product’s must-have score. The survey asked the simple question “How would you feel if you could no longer use Dropbox?” Users could respond “Very disappointed,” “Somewhat disappointed,” “Not disappointed,” or “N/A no longer using the product” (I wrote the question this way because I found that asking people if they were satisfied with a product didn’t deliver meaningful insights; disappointment was a much better gauge of product loyalty than satisfaction). Having already run this survey at numerous start-ups, I had found that companies where more than 40 percent of respondents said they would be “very disappointed” if they could no longer use the product had very strong growth potential, where those that fell under that 40 percent threshold tended to face a much harder path in growing the business (due to user apathy). When I saw the results of the survey, though, even I was blown away. Dropbox’s score was off the charts, particularly for users who had fully explored the features of the product.