Learn more about startup with this collection
How to analyze churn data and make data-driven decisions
The importance of customer feedback
How to improve customer experience
Stage 0: Idea Validation
The Milestone: Get a small number of users very excited by your product, to experience ‘the magic’ of the approach.
The magic is that moment when your user mentally puts together a big problem they have with the way your product solves it.
Typically, founders will get caught up in trying to make the first experience rock solid. That’s not important. It doesn’t have to be perfect to determine this, in fact it’s best if it isn’t because if you can get somebody excited about a bad product, you can later get them more excited about a good product.
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214 reads
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Stage 2: Habit
The Milestone: 65% of users should retain d30.
The simple math of organic user acquisition is that you need very high day 7 and day7->day30 retention to grow. A high (but achievable) bar is 80% for each. When you combine those, you get an overall d30 retention of 65%.
60
203 reads
Stage 7: Monetization
The Milestone: 10% of top of funnel visitors become paid users.
Conversion to paid can happen at very different points in time and one app may require a very different conversion rate than another in order to have a good business. For products with a trial, you want a very ...
62
133 reads
Stage 4: Growth
The Milestone: You need to grow payers by 20% MoM organically.
That seems a bit insane until it doesn’t. You won’t maintain 20% MoM forever, but you should during seed or you don’t have PMF.
One of the biggest challenges I see is that a founder in an interesting ...
60
121 reads
Stage 6: Engagement
The Milestone: Users should use your product daily.
For every product, there is a natural cadence which determines the number of times a user is going to use the product. Generally, the higher the frequency, the better. In the report card, I have 7x per week because that’s ...
61
142 reads
Stage 1: Magic
The Milestone: 80% of top of funnel users retain day 7 (i.e. come back at least one more time in the first week).
If your users aren’t retaining day 7, it’s likely that the smoke isn’t coming out of their ears, they never exclaimed ‘aha’ and all of the things people do when...
60
187 reads
Stage 3: Your First Channel
The Milestone: Find a channel that can generate 1000 new users a week for you.
Before you waste your money, don’t do this with paid. Do the hard work to find out where they are and get the word out. That might be a set of working moms Facebook groups for an...
61
138 reads
The PMF Report Card
John Danner of Dunce Capital created it as a way to track the progression of a startup from ideation to Series A. The stages are benchmarks for measuring product market fit:
- The magic refers to value proposition, the excitement people have when exposed to your approach to a clearly sta...
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479 reads
Stage 5: Activation
The Milestone: 80% of the top of the funnel should retain day 7. (same as magic, but now you are getting down in the dirt).
2 main components of activation usually result in the best chance of getting to that big hairy 80% d7 number.
- Get the magic in front of ev...
60
143 reads
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Life-long learner. Passionate about leadership, entrepreneurship, philosophy, Buddhism & SF. Founder @deepstash.
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Customer Validation
Customer validation means test selling at every point in the process (all the while keeping costs low — it’s not the time to scale up yet):
- Phase I. Get ready to sell.
- Phase II. Go live. Try to sell.
- Phase III. Refine your p...
Unlearn your own product
Over time, you as a PM may become so used to your own product that it limits your ability to notice small flaws in the user experience.
Look at the product from the perspective of a new user, and find the missing pieces of information that prevents the user from a great experience.
The Impostor Syndrome: Self-Efficacy Is The Antidote
The antidote to the impostor syndrome is self-efficacy, which is about learning one's own value.
Self-efficacy is described as a perceived ability to succeed at a particular task. It means having rock-solid confidence, a supercharged belief in your ability.
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