"cohort retention rate is the most important product market fit metric"

"When a product has “product market fit”, it means that the product is good enough to start shifting focus from improving the product to growing distribution channels."

"you can also think of product market fit as “time to start building scalable acquisition channels”."

"NPS is sometimes used as a product market fit metric, but some of the biggest tech companies in the world have terrible NPS, but are still able to grow to over a billion users"

"any product with great cohort retention rate can be distributed with good growth strategy and execution."

"As you improve your product, newer cohorts will have high cohort retention rates. So, it’s important to have a cohort retention “triangle” chart to track progress"

"Once you have a few cohorts that level off at a vertical-specific number, then you’ve achieved product market fit!"

"Different types of products have different “points” of product market fit, so it’s important to find the retention rate of some comparable products that have been able to significantly grow to find the right benchmark for you."

"A good rule of thumb is for consumer products, 25% is a good floor and and for B2B SaaS products, 70% is a good floor."

"Good retention amplifies your acquisition efforts, since the users you acquire actually stay. Good retention is also usually correlated with how much users love your product, which amplifies your word of mouth. Users are more likely to share your product with friends if they are still using it after a long period of time."

"Actively measure your cohort retention rate using a “triangle” cohort retention chart"

"Signup and login conversion is the art of building new user intent and converting intent to authenticated users."

"To summarize, in order to set yourself up for success, you must understand unauth user mix, understand how signups and logins interact, and build data tools."

"In my experience, the best way to think about unauth users is to realize that there is a wide distribution of product comprehension and intent, so we should create flows that perform decently well with all users and very well with the most common users."

"Skeptic: Users who have heard of your product, but do not have enough intent to sign up yet -> sell them on the value proposition of your product to increase their intent"

"Returning core user: Users who have already signed up and want to log in -> make it easy to find the log in flow and go through it"

"It may be tempting to just copy what these high growth companies do, but this probably won’t work for most new products. This is because most people already know about what these big companies are and have probably signed up for them in the past, so most users fall into user categories dormant user and returning core user."

"One common mistake that occurs with new growth teams when growing signups is that they are grown without thinking about logins."

"Compared to SEO, you don’t need a special AB experiment framework to successfully run signup or log in experiments; a normal AB experiment framework will work, as long as you measure both signups and logins."

"One common problem here is too many steps."

"Another common problem is including a captcha. This causes some users to drop off because it is too much work and some captchas are actually pretty difficult."

"In general, adding social signups will increase your overall conversion rate."

"When you get a response from Facebook or Google after they authenticate with those services, you should check if that user has an account already, and sign them up with those credentials if they don’t, or log them into their account if they do."

"When testing timings, you have to understand how user intent changes over time as they browse through your product."

"For example, for a lot of users, they do not have enough intent to sign up right when they land on your page. That’s why modals that pop up immediately usually do not perform."

"As the user browses your products and learns more, intent can increase, but the longer you wait, the more users that leave."

"A good growth opportunity is an area of optimization that can lead to a sustainable increase in growth rate. To make a product grow, usually one area of growth is not enough, and having many areas diversifies your bets to reduce the impact that losing one area will have."

"First, you want to pick some sort of north star metric that you want to grow."

"To measure acquisition opportunity sizes, you need to know your unauth traffic, signup conversion rate, and activation rate."

"A common problem that new growth teams have is that they over-invest in a growth opportunity that is not paying off, while there are many other good opportunities lying around."

"As for specific opportunities, I would recommend trying at least one acquisition opportunity and one retention opportunity to start out."

"So, you will eventually need to solve both problems."

"SEO - Product has a lot of web content"

"""The biggest pitfall I see when people work on new opportunities is too much planning and not enough experimenting and learning."""

"So, the first thing you should do when working on a new opportunity is simply to run some quick experiments."

"To come up with experiment ideas, I have three main sources of inspiration: see what other products do, look into the metrics to find opportunities to improve, and go through the flow as a user."

"Once you have a couple of experiment results, now you can assess whether or not the opportunity is worth pursuing."

"The first thing you have to do is build a basic SEO experiment framework."

"To be able to run SEO experiments, all you need is a utility function that buckets pages into the right groups and logs traffic."

"Traffic gain = ((avg enabled after - avg enabled before) - (avg control after - avg control before)) / Experiment group size"

"From this basic SEO experiment framework, which is essentially just a bucketing and logging function, you can upgrade it now or later by automating the data aggregation and graph displays."

"Finally, another important thing to note is that we require that all experiments that change the layout or content of unauth pages to be run in conjunction with a SEO experiment, in order to avoid inadvertently dropping traffic."

"Titles and descriptions are the easiest way to increase your SEO traffic because as long as you have an SEO experiment framework and you can run a lot of experiments easily, each variant just requires a new copy."

"In fact, titles and descriptions are so important that once you start scaling out your SEO team, you can consider building a tool to run these experiments from UI so somebody could just produce tens of variants and have them automatically tested."

"The first goal you should set is to get 1,000 search sessions/day on one of your scalable landing page types."

"At this amount of traffic, you can start running SEO experiments at around 500 sessions per day per group, which should be enough to get statistical significance."

"A scalable landing page is a quality landing page that you can build hundreds or thousands of programmatically."

"Blog posts aren’t scalable landing pages because to scale you need to write content, and the home page isn’t scalable because there can only be 1."

"Use the same template, so it's easy to scale thousands of pages"

"Usually Best of X pages, where there are many topics that X can be"

"A big part of getting to 1,000 search sessions a day is just waiting after you built a quality SEO page."

"You have to wait for Google to crawl your pages and for more sites to backlink to you. However, you should leave your landing pages at a high-quality bar before “waiting” for traffic."

"Write a good SEO title and description."

"Make sure there is much content on your page and that the content is viewable in the DOM."

"Make sure the pages link to each other and from other main pages in the product so that Googlebot can find them."

"Check your crawl rate on Google Search Console to make sure it is healthy."

"Fetch and render as a Googlebot to make sure your page displays correctly."

"The time when you start investing in SEO depends on how promising the other channels can be for you, for example, paid or referrals."

"In short, invest a little now, and perhaps more later on."

"If you don't currently have engineering resources to make SEO changes, your first SEO hire should be a web engineer. You need someone who can make changes to the page to increase your rankings."

"Backlinks are valuable, but the best way to increase backlinks is to focus on building quality pages."

"For scaled landing pages, the main thing you should check is that the sector in which you are trying to rank for has high search volume, and there are a few free tools that you can try for this."

"for growing SEO on non-scaling landing pages such as blog posts, keyword research is more critical because there are usually fewer landing pages, and we want each page to rank for specific high-value keywords."

"The basics of effective referral programs are simple: if you invite another user, both you and the user get a monetary reward."

"Since advertising on Google to get referrals is now mostly banned, a lot of people have resorted to using SEO to drive traffic to their websites advertising their referral codes."

"Product-channel fit for referrals"

"Determining product-channel fit for referrals is done by figuring out if there is a discount rate that is high enough that users are encouraged to refer, but low enough that the effective CAC (customer acquisition cost) isn’t too high."

"The third metric to consider when determining discount rate is CAC through paid channels. If your CAC through paid channels is significantly lower than your discount rate, you may want to lower your discount rate."

"After considering these three metrics, if there is a discount rate high enough to entice users, below LTV, low payback period, and below paid CAC, it’s a strong indicator that referrals as a growth channel is worth pursuing."

"The highest valuation US consumer startups[wiki] currently are: Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Pinterest, Coinbase, Instacart, Robinhood, Peloton, Doordash, Wish, and Houzz. How did they grow?"

"the most common: Referrals and SEO."

"The reason why SEO is such an effective scaled growth channel is the sheer number of searches done per day with high intent."

"Google processes over 3.5 billion searches per day, which can be thought of as 3.5 billion chances per day to show up for free to a user."

"Product-channel fit for SEO (at scale)"

"growing base of quality user generated text content."

"Let’s break this down into 4 parts: growing, quality, user-generated, and text content."

"The first key part is that content base grows."

"Quality content is important in order to compete with the top pages already listed on Google."

"Why user generated instead of generated in house? It’s hard to reach the massive scale of quality content needed to hit big numbers by doing content in house."

"Usually a large percentage of your pages won’t contribute significantly to your SEO so it’s important to be able to make up for that with scale."

"The number of pages needed to hit 1M SEO traffic/day is usually in the 10 or 100 thousands, if not more."

"Quality text content is the most valuable type of content for SEO because it’s the kind of content Googlebot understands the best."

"If your product produces a growing base of quality user generated text content, SEO has good product-channel fit for you and should be a top growth priority."

"However, I think cohort retention rate is the most important product market fit metric, so I would recommend using it along with any other frameworks you use."

"A good product market fit metric will have a low rate of false positives and false negatives. It won’t tell you that you should start distributing when your product isn’t good enough, and it won’t tell you that you shouldn’t start distributing when it is good enough."

"To summarize, a good product market fit metric:"

"Will tell you when the product is good enough to work acquisition channels"

"Minimizes false positives - won’t tell you to work on acquisition channels when the product needs more improvement"

"Minimizes false negatives - will tell you to on acquisition channels as soon as the product is good enough, to maximize growth"

"“40% of your users would be ‘very disappointed’ if they could no longer use your product” is a commonly used metric that most recently was used by Superhuman to find product market fit, with great success. This is a much better metric than NPS and if you end up using this and reach it, you probably do have product market fit."

"I’ve never met with a startup where after studying the product, my conclusion was “there are no distribution channels that will work for this startup”. In my opinion, any product with great cohort retention rate can be distributed with good growth strategy and execution."

"I think cohort retention rate is the one to use."

"it’s important to find the retention rate of some comparable products that have been able to significantly grow to find the right benchmark for you."

"“pushing a boulder: don’t have product/market fit. Chasing a boulder: have product/market fit.”"

"The two most important skills in growth are finding great opportunities and executing with high velocity."

"I boil it down to four main factors: Hypothesis, Investment, Precedent, and Experience."

"Hypothesis"

"Why will this idea have a significant impact on metrics?"

"Most hypotheses fall under the categories of increasing intent or decreasing friction."

"Investment"

"How much time will we have to invest in this project?"

"Precedent"

"Is there a precedent for this working in the past?"

"Experience"

"Is this change a good user experience"

"Usually, if you optimize for only one metric, your experience will trend towards an extreme that performs very well for that metric."