Retention & Engagement

"User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one."

"When you lose a game now as opposed to surfacing your blunders and your horrible stuff that you did, we flip it on its head and so we show you your brilliant moves, your best moves, and we have coach say something encouraging, 'Losing, just part of learning, keep it up.' That type of thing. That change alone was pretty dramatic for us. It grew game reviews by 25%, subscriptions by 20%, user retention by a lot as well."

"I think when you have your D one retention somewhere around the 30 or 40% mark, that's quite solid I think for a consumer app. If it's much lower than that, then sometimes I might question the intent of the user or the ability for that, you to I guess acquire just mathematically acquire enough users such that you can grow a big enough daily active user base."

"It's actually worth spending some time making sure that that resurrected, for lack of a better word, experience inside the product is really excellent and that you find novel ways to try to bring them back."

"Jorge actually had this model of gamification patterns having essentially three pillars to it. You have the core loop, you have the metagame, and then you have the profile."

"One of the things that I'm constantly reminding myself of is that a tool like Codex naturally is a tool that you would become a power user of... it's just critically important to go look at your D7 retention. Just go try the product, sign up from scratch again."

"In ChatGPT, if you are liking the answer, you can actually give a thumbs up. Or if you don't like the answer, sometimes customers don't give you thumbs down, but actually regenerate the answer. So that is a clear indication that the initial answer that regenerator is not meeting the customer's expectation. So these are the kind of implicit signals you always need to think about."

"The way we think about churn is really going back to Shopify as a kind of our mission and what we want to do, which is to increase the amount of entrepreneurship on the internet. And so as a business, we want to make it as easy as possible to get started with your online store, with your business. But most businesses do ultimately fail. And so the way we look at it is can we lower the barriers to getting started and get as many people in the door trying their hand at entrepreneurship?"

"The simplest way to increase my signup to activated thing is just make it harder to sign up. Nuts and bolts, that will always happen is when you have teams on that local conversion rates, you get all these weird team incentives, because they're optimizing to basically implicitly make it harder to do the step before them."

"It turned out that what was happening anecdotally is that people were revving up Instagram, following a bunch of people, following a lot of celebrities... and then when they actually went to make their first post... none of their friends were following them. And so there was posting into an echo chamber."

"If it's a free product, 60%. It has to be at least 60%. If it's a free product, we go over a week. If it's a paid product, I usually look at that more as maybe 20 to 30%."

"I think it is important to get someone into a product and very quickly have them experience some special sauce, something that's amazing about the product... shortening the time to scene and having that incredible moment and seeing the true value of the product."

"Specific things that he's encouraged us to focus on are not just innovative features but a consistent emphasis on fixing the blocking issues that might prevent a user from adopting... removing the blockers is as important for retaining users as adding cool new stuff."

"It was 12 months plus of usage that had to happen before sales contracts can be created on sustainable way... it takes a year of usage to escalate the problem from individual to a company-level solution."

"Growth teams are often too obsessed about removing friction... just removing steps or yanking or simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable of doing is a completely failed growth tactic."

"Recurring revenue businesses, you cannot think about marketing and growth and the business overall as ending an acquisition, otherwise you're not in business anymore. And the vast, vast majority of these models don't take post-acquisition, retention, expansion, all of that into account."

"The only way to catch them if they fall is if you're measuring something meaningful along the way. We have that storyboard that we were talking about. We also have a map where it's the experience to get them to a certain value moment, but then that win back experience to get them back in should they fall out for any reason."

"I really believe that... the most important thing for the growth of anything tech, maybe in general, is retention. Of course, you need acquisition, but retention is important. And I simplify it a little bit because retention, I don't think of it in terms of like, wow, I must retain this user. It's like, is this thing valuable or not? That's what retention is to me. Either it's actually providing real value or it's not. If it's providing real value, people stick around. It's as simple as that."

"What Duolingo really focuses on is, how do we help users build habits around language learning? Getting user come back the next day is the biggest problem to solve."

"We've looked at the data for our retention curves, and what we found is that once you get to seven days, loss aversion kicks in, and you retain. So, going from a one to a two-day streak, huge jump in retention, two to three day streak, slightly less but still huge and it's up until day seven. Once you hit day seven, it flans out."

"The metric that is most effective, where a percentage change in that metric is most effective at driving DAUs is current user retention rate (CURR). And this is just users who are not new or resurrected, getting them to come back tomorrow."

"Our CS team developed 110-page bulk of research from working directly with customers around retention engagement, then we had a PM and a great content writer, Archana, zero in and kind of make it palatable, then we did ARC for it. So, it didn't just magically appear... It's a company filled with passionate experts of these things, and it was like tested, iterated, tested, iterated, expanded, tested, put into motion, put into practice."

"I was able to ship changes in the new user experience, especially on mobile. That moved the needle by a lot, like double-digit percentages... We're talking about top line metrics like activation."

"The reason that the Periscope app failed, it really comes down to a few things. One, we did not address the core problem that retention wasn't good. Our poor retention was mapped by just an incredible surge in top-line user growth."

"I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both signup conversion and increasing long term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important."

"We are all present bias, which means we prioritize our present self over our future self, so there are plenty of reasons that somebody, your customer, your user should take an action, but you actually have to give them a reason to take an action today."

"When you want to get somebody to do something more, you make it easier. When you want someone to do something less, you make it... Put up barriers."

"The analogy I have for this is pilling a hot dog. So if anyone's got a dog or an animal you have to feed a pill to, it's like you can't just feed the pill to the animal, it's never going to happen. But if you shove it inside of a hot dog, which looks good and that's exciting, then you can get them to consume it more easily."

"Onboarding is that first really important choke point that from which downstream of onboarding so many important metrics and results flow for the business, from converting someone to a paid customer to closing a deal to growing, how many people in an organization are using your product. So, all of that really comes back to onboarding and if you can get that right, lots of good things will follow."

"To stop churn, you need to attract customers who won't leave. That sounds counterintuitive, but that's the best way to actually stop churn... The way to stop churn is to start acquiring customers who won't leave. And that is the most important thing. So if you look back at your data and say, 'Who are the types of customers who actually tend to stay longer?'"

"We don't care at all how much time you spend in the product. In fact, our incentive is just to solve your problem and if you really like the product, you'll subscribe, but there's no incentive to keep you in the product for long."

"If you can't demonstrate value in the first three seconds, it's over... You really have to craft onboarding everything to ensure that that's where the design part comes in."

"There is strategic retention and then there's tactical retention... tactical retention, it's typically about 25 to 40% of your churn problem, which is a significant amount, but you don't really look at it because again, you're like, 'I've got to go focus on features.'"

"Take your best sales people and make them CSMs... What we cannot under any circumstances do is lose our existing customers because replacing them is going to be impossible. So it's kind of like you got your leaky bucket, you got to patch that leak really, really fast and really hard."

"The test for me, of whether you're building a product that has the ingredients to create a retentive product on a micro level, just at the user level, is that the product should get better the more you use it, and you'll have more to lose by leaving it."

"I particularly love to look at that on a weekly active user completing the core action pieces of like, are users completing the core action? How is that changing overtime for each of the cohorts? And then also, looking at activity level within those cohorts."

"Until you reach a point with your cohorts where there is a plateau, you have more work to do on figuring out the retention of your users."

"The happiness loop, the idea is you have a lot of new sellers coming in, and of course you have new buyers, but you want to make sure that you are matching your buyers with the sellers that are going to give them the best experience."

"It's usually much more function of onboarding to the right user experience than it is about the kind of the tactical things that people try to do to improve retention."

"One of the things I've always said is just ignore the people who say they'd be somewhat disappointed. They're telling you it's a nice to have. They're as good as gone, so just ignore those guys."

"At Facebook, it was 10 friends the first seven days. At Instacart, it was three orders in the first month. And at Ramp, for our activation... we've got four events that the customer needs to do in the first 30 days."

"Facebook knew that it needed to get you to 10 friends in 14 days. If you got your 10 friends in 14 days, you were probably going to use Facebook."

"I think they [templates] can be tremendously helpful if you are horizontal because they help to narrow the surface area for a user, so they understand how to connect the dots between their problem and your product."

"I think [the aha moment] as a moment, as a first time a user experienced value of your product... At GitLab we actually did a bunch of analysis. We ended up have something along the line of two users, two features used in the first 14 days."

"I think how I think about retention, there are two steps. One is how to build a habit in their usage pattern, so that they are using this maybe every week, every day. The key to do that is, first of all, your product need to have a high enough frequency. If you are using this once per month, it's not likely you can build this into a habit."

"The second part around retention is I actually think extension is part of retention. Basically you already have a steady usage flow... What are the right moment to prompt you to think about maybe buying more? And there are three buckets of product-led extension. The first one is up upgrade to a higher tier. The second one is buying more seeds, buying more license. The third one is if you have some sort of a consumption add-on component."

"what I'm really proud of is, 12 months later we've been inching it up and up and up, despite getting further away from the earliest most passionate adopters. So, our retention curve's going up and up a little bit"