Sean Ellis

I prefer a more passionate customer base and work from there, just because I think your biggest competition when you're really innovating is just being irrelevant.

It often comes down to asking the right question at the right time in how you figure things out.

A problem well stated is a problem half solved. I think a lot of it comes down to not the things you try, but how you deeply understand the problem that's preventing someone from using your product effectively.

I started finding that my experiments were so much better the more I talked to customers, and eventually I became very much... The blend of qualitative and quantitative research leads to much better tests.

Just ignore the people who say they'd be somewhat disappointed. They're telling you it's a nice to have. If you start paying attention to what your somewhat disappointed users are telling you and then you start tweaking onboarding and product based on their feedback, maybe you're going to dilute it for your must have users.

Before the referral program, Dropbox had amazing referral rate. Companies that are trying to copy it are like, 'Why isn't anyone talking about a product? Let's add a referral program with incentives.' To me, I think it's a great accelerant when it's already working, but it can't fix it if people don't want to talk about your product.

When I first moved to Silicon Valley... you have people who get really excited about technology for technology's sake. And so just something being cool is like, 'Isn't it cool that we can actually do this?' drives a lot of people. And so to me, I'm very practical. If it's not something that is really bringing value to people, then the likelihood that that product's successful long-term is going to be pretty low.

Customer acquisition is so hard that if you're not really efficient at converting and retaining and monetizing people, you're going to really struggle on the customer acquisition side.

Focus on reputation and learning over earnings has served me super well.