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Dig 100 oil wells 🕳

Credit to Daniel Gross who gave this advice to me+my team while going through the Pioneer accelerator.

One approach to initial growth is to “dig 100 oil wells.” To clarify, once you have built your MVP, test out 100 different demographics and simply see where your product is most sticky. Rebrand your MVP (including specific use cases) to each demographic and expose different communities to what you’ve built. This will ultimately help clarify your target audiences and further provide insights influencing your future strategy.

Understand users 🧐

Record metrics and figure out how users are interacting with your product. Talk to your users! (follow the mom test) This will help understand their motivations, intentions, and pain points. The quantitative data from metrics complemented with qualitative user interviews will give you a very good picture of how your app is being used, who your target user is, and will be vital in improving the product.

Tip: Put your most active 25 users in a group chat! Keep them engaged, they are great early testers+power users, make sure to listen to them! (and it never hurts to hear ppl enjoying your product 😊)

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Watch Retention! 🔬

It is easy to focus on # of downloads and DAU, but don’t forget about retention!

How to improve your retention:

• Improve product: understand users! (reference above)
• Find new users: your current users may not be the right target audience. Hypothesize which clusters/communities may benefit more from your product and test, test, test!
• Focus on density: a density of users within communities is vital in keeping users engaged.