Nobody who quietly left is going to tell you why. The people still here will — if you ask them the right question.
Growth.
The Sean Ellis Test
If you sent one question this week to everyone who's genuinely used your product — how would you feel if you could no longer use it — could you predict the share who'd answer very disappointed to within ten points, and would you actually want the number? Most people can't. Most quietly don't.
Sean Ellis ran marketing at LogMeIn and Uproar from launch through to their public offerings, and was the first marketer at Dropbox, Xobni and Lookout; in 2010 he'd coin the term growth hacking. A year before that, on his Startup Marketing blog, he published The Startup Pyramid, the piece that gave us the test now carrying his name. Survey the people already using your product and ask one thing: how would you feel if you could no longer use it? Very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, not disappointed, or no longer using it. Then count the first bucket. Ellis set his benchmark at forty per cent after comparing results across close to a hundred startups — the ones that struggled for traction sat below it, the ones that took off nearly always sat above — and he was candid that the exact line is somewhat arbitrary. What the score does is separate two conditions that feel identical from inside the building. Weak numbers with a strong score mean you haven't been found yet. Weak numbers with a weak score mean you've been found and passed over. The trap is spending an acquisition budget on the second condition, which is how a great deal of money goes quietly missing.
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