Stage 3: Your First Channel

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 ge...

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 ...

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. 

1. Get the magic in front of ev...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...