👥 How to Find Your Growth Customer...

3 essential steps to identify and focus on your 'must-have' users for scalable growth: Conduct a bait survey to measure dependency, analyze responses to find at least 40% very disappointed users, and segment your audience to pinpoint your core growth segment.

With the “must-have” method

You have your product and some traction, nice! Now, how do you blow the roof off this thing? Turns out true scalability starts with focusing 10’000% on the exact right user…

This goes back to product-market fit in a big way, but Facebook- and Google-level growth hacker Sean Ellis always said that you can scale almost anything, as long as you can find its “must-have” user.

The user for whom the product is a non-negotiable, they absolutely NEED it in their life. End of story. That’s the user whom, if you can find more of, your product will snowball.

So, how do you find them?

3 Steps to nail down that growth user

1. Start with the “bait” survey

Send users a survey asking them how they’d feel if you took your product off the market tomorrow. And just give them a few options like – “happy”, “not affected”, “disappointed”, and crucially “very disappointed”.

2. Find your “very disappointed” 40%

What you’re looking for is for at least 40% of users to say “very disappointed”. Because that means the product has become entrenched in their every day. That’s your must-have user, the one you will be focusing on for growth.

But what if it’s less than 40% 😢?

3. Segment until you get your 40

If you have less than 40% “must-have” users, start segmenting them. If you sent out a survey to mainly, for example, doctors, start splitting them up – male VS female doctors, by different specialisations, by geographical location, age etc. Keep segmenting your data until you find a segment that has a 40% “very disappointed” rate relative to the number of users in that specific segment.

Then, brush your teeth and comb your hair, because you just got a new job at a new company targeting ONLY that user segment. From now on, that segment is your new user – build for them, market to them, and delight them.

With a bit of luck, the segment’s still big enough for what you need, because there and only there (until proven otherwise) is probably where your growth lies.