The Locksmith Moment
What is the Locksmith Moment?
Coined by Matt Lerner, the “Locksmith Moment” refers to the exact time when your customer realizes they desperately need your product. If you can intercept your customer at that Locksmith Moment, your chances of winning their business greatly increase.
The phrase became popular as the most highlighted Kindle passage of Matt’s bestselling book Growth Levers and How to Find Them, where he told the true story of how a San Francisco locksmith was the smartest “growth hacker” he’d seen.
Matt used to live in an apartment complex surrounded by a wrought-iron fence with a locked gate. Each tenant had a key. One day, a sticker appeared on the gate:
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“24-hour emergency locksmith
1(415)321-4545”
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Genius! For 99.999% of our lives, we won't need a locksmith. But when we do, we’ll be right here at this gate. The locksmith knew exactly where to find us in our moment of need. He could’ve bought billboards, mailed brochures, and sponsored podcasts. But we would’ve tuned it all out.
The same point applies to your customers: 99.99% of the time, they won’t need your product, and they’ll ignore your messages. Where will they be when they suddenly realize they do? What’s their Locksmith Moment?
The Locksmith Story
Best examples of locksmith moments:
PayPal. While living in that gated apartment complex, Matt was helping to get PayPal pre-integrated as a payment method on major ecommerce platforms. That way, every time somebody set up a new ecommerce site, PayPal would be available as a default payment option.
Instagram. Instagram’s founders understood that their early customers wanted to post their photos on Facebook. So, they made it easy to cross-post Instagram images to Facebook. Each cross-post showcased the app and brought new users to Instagram.
Airbnb. Before Airbnb got popular, people mostly looked for vacation rental apartments on Craigslist. Airbnb’s founders realized this, and started automatically cross-posting Airbnb listings onto Craigslist. That brought them massive amounts of highly qualified free traffic.
Soy milk sits in the dairy aisle at the supermarket, even though it doesn’t need to be refrigerated.
How to find your customer’s locksmith moments
You find your locksmith moments when you understand how your product fits into your customers’ daily lives. The better you understand the contexts in which your customers are likely to use your product, the better your chances of finding their locksmith moments.
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Speak to new customers, ask them what happened right before they bought your product.​
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Where were they, physically or digitally, right before they realized they needed you?
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What were they doing?
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Who did they ask for help or advice?
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What did they search or ask AI, and in what words?
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How can you be there? Not with an ad, but as the answer?
If startups focus on building a channel list first, like SEO/AEO, paid social, content, and email, and then try to fit a suitable message into each, marketing becomes a mindless checklist. This is clearly backwards.
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Instead of trying to find the right marketing channel, look for the right situation: where will your customers be standing at their very own locked gate, at the exact moment they realize they need your product?
Why marketing misses it
The customer journey behind The Concept
Every Locksmith Moment sits somewhere on a 6-stage journey that ends with them buying your product, or not. Understanding which stage your customer is in tells you what they need to hear and where / how to say it.
Struggle
Search
Selection
1
Unaware:
They have the problem but haven't noticed it yet (most people, most of the time).
2
Problem-Aware:
Something makes the problem visible. They start noticing related things around them, without yet acting.
3
Actively Researching:
A trigger (a health scare, a deadline, a bad week) pushes them to start looking. Their list of "solutions" is often wider than your direct competitors. Workarounds count too.
4
Comparing Options:
They weigh the alternatives against specific worries: will this work for me, can I stick with it, will it embarrass me.
5
Trying a Solution:
First use. They're task-focused and looking for fast proof it works; the "aha moment."
6
Trusting a Solution:
It becomes the default. Decision turns into habit.
Often, startups only focus on stages 4 and 5, because high-intent prospects are low-hanging fruit: easy to spot (they're the ones Googling "best X"). The biggest, least contested opportunities happen usually earlier in the funnel at the Problem-Aware stage, before anyone's searching at all. That's where Locksmith Moments live.
The mistake many companies make
The bigger Picture
The Locksmith Moment is one way of applying Growth Levers, Matt's framework for finding and prioritizing the handful of moves that actually grow a startup, built on North Stars, growth levers, and 80/20 experimentation, not channel checklists. You can grab the whole book here, or download the first 2 chapters for free.