This detailed blog post does an excellent job in explaining the concept in more depth for the more curious ones who want to know the mathematics behind it. Therefore, the goal is to find an action that maximizes the area of intersection of action taken and the retained users - which was adding at least 10 friends in Facebook’s case. Now you may wonder, why 10 friends and not 1 or 50 friends.Ĭhoosing only users who added at least one friend will mean that most of the users who performed the action didn’t retain, whereas choosing 50 friends as a barrier will mean that you’ll miss most of the users who retained but didn’t add a lot of friends. In the early years of Facebook, after rigorous experimentation, its Growth Team found out that if a user adds at least 10 friends within the first 7 days of signups, then that user is going to be more engaged and thus going to stick with Facebook longer. Let me try to decipher the meaning of the last line by picking up a company familiar to everyone - Facebook. What were the common action(s) these users took to realize the value of the product and get to the Aha? And the action(s) you pick is the one that maximizes the area of intersection of retained users and the users who took that specific action(s). To get to the “Aha”, you need to find the most engaged/loyal users of your product and mine their usage data to understand how they arrived at the core value of the product. Once you know that your product has a strong product-market fit, your next task is to find out “who” the loyal users of your product are and understand “how” and “why” did they become loyal in the first place?įinding answers to these questions is necessary to identify the “Aha” moment of your product.Īha is the moment that the utility of the product really clicks for the users when the users really get the core value - what the product is for, why they need it, and what benefit they derive from using it. For those intrigued by the concept, here is an excellent write-up by Rahul Vohra, founder of SuperHuman, a company that is rethinking email experience from the grounds up, about how they found the product-market fit using Sean’s frameworks. The author’s criteria for a strong product-market fit is that “at least 40% of the existing users will be very disappointed if they could no longer use the product.” And it can be easily measured by conducting a simple survey. There is one concept that is tentpole to growth frameworks covered in the book - A company needs to find the product-market fit before committing any significant resources towards growth initiatives, i.e., acquisition, activation, retention, monetization, or referrals.

The author augments these frameworks with the real-life examples of how some of the today’s iconic companies (Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, etc.) hacked their way to the growth in their early years of existence. The book covers structured and scientific frameworks needed to take your startup on a growth path. I recently finished reading Hacking Growth, a book by, Sean Allis, a Growth Hacking expert who has played a pivotal role in the growth of many tech startups.

Whats an aha moment