Retention

“Let me tell you, rate limits kill retention. Like nothing, nothing is worse.”

“The way I think about retention is it's the percentage of your life that you choose to spend together with a product, right?”

“Every VC will ask you, what's your retention? And I'm like, this is not a business for retention. Venless businesses should never be measured on retention.”

“When I implemented these things, retention, I think it more than doubled, I'm pretty sure, because of this, which makes sense in hindsight.”

“Metrics, pre-product market fit, I think the only metric you care about In consumer and SaaS is retention. Like, that's the only metric that you should care about, is do you create a product that people keep using?”

“There's two things that you can't have at the same time. You can have a fast decision time, or you can have very high stickiness. You can't have both, because enterprises are very aware of the risk of the vendor looking, and so the more critical you are to an …”

“And then we built this like button to join me in these really quickly. And it hadn't like 90% retention and it just like started growing and people just loved it.”

“Ultimately, the only thing that matters in our space is retention. So if you can spend as much money as you want. If you don't have retention, it's a leaky bucket. All these people are going to leave.”

“When you're looking at something zero to one, If you decide on a metric too prematurely, that's false precision, first of all, right? Like, you kind of I mean, CTR, when you have, like, thousand people, doesn't mean anything. you know, retention also may not …”

“Product market feed in general have only one metric. Only one metric. Retention. Look, it's really simple. If you create value, they will come back. That's it. If they are not coming back, that means that you are not creating value.”

“If you're going very quickly and you have a lot of revenue coming in, it's easy to ignore your churn, and that's a problem that will catch up with you in a year or two, and at that point, you've spent a whole bunch of money on growth and marketing chasing afte…”

“You're analyzing your business. You're looking for profitable, efficient growth paths, and you think that the issue is pricing and packaging. Most of the time, it is not pricing and packaging, right? So most of the time, the reason that you have the easiest th…”

“So at first, Salesforce had this idea, right, that all you needed to do was load your data into Salesforce, and that would drive retention because they had all of your data. They did a bunch of analyses, and they realized that that's not what drove retention. …”

“Cross device conversion is really, really strong for retention because now you're using it on weekends. You're using it during the day.”

“Do they have, are they at the scaling period where it is now turn on these channels and drive growth because we feel Really good about where we are in terms of retention or any incremental work we're going to do on trying to move activation or move early reten…”

“So my view is that it's the only thing that matters. And if you ask me what's our retention, what's our activation rate, what's our CAC, I couldn't tell you really any of those things because I don't think they're real, like they're completely irrelevant. So t…”

“And what we found was the churn and resurrection lines were actually much larger than the new user line, which implied to us that retention and driving those two lines was actually our biggest lever to drive net growth.”

“Generally the way we evaluate culture through a shareholder lens, quite frankly, is retention. And that is, you should have eight to 12% turnover a year. And if you have a lot more than that, something's wrong with the culture of the compensation.”

“What many people don't understand is that retention is not about product. Retention is about user case. It means that you may create the perfect app for gym and you'll have terrible retention. Why? Because gyms themselves have terrible retention.”

“Because I think when you're focused on retention, and you believe that retention equals value, You're, you can sometimes delude yourself because me spending hours doing something doesn't mean I extracted true value.”

“Moving retention is really hard, but it's usually much more a 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.”

“Retention is a terrible thing to goal on because it's like it, it's almost impossible to drive In a meaningful way in the short term, and yet you want to be able to experiment and iterate quickly.”

“Product market feed have one metric. One metric. That's it. Retention. That's really simple. If you create value, they will come back. If they are not coming back, that means that you are not creating value.”

“In general speaking if you look at something that have high frequency of use, then you will be looking at Three months retentions of 30, 40, 50% is actually pretty good indication, but usually what would happen is that you would know when they convert, and tha…”

“And this is interesting, and this is helpful to build retention, because by giving people and bestowing some kind of status, if you will, for power users, the more likely you're able to incent them to continue that status.”

“Early on, we were basically like, look, if there's an issue with the driver, if there's an issue with the order being late, we'll take it on as the marketplace, because we know if we make up for a bad experience by going above and beyond, we'll actually have b…”

“Retention is a much more difficult thing to solve than growth. Right? Because growth is all upfront. You get the data right away. You can figure that out and move or pivot or persevere with retention. There's a lot of reasons why people may not retain and it t…”

“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 leading it.”

“It's not today. There's no way it is today that that that absolute comp is the biggest driver of retention.”

“Generally new user activation and getting people to the place where they experience the core value of your product and then build a habit around that value is your strongest lever to retention, which is the thing that is going to impact your churn metric.”

“And again, this is back to the, like retention is king, right? Like retention stacks your business. Retention drives engagement, which drives virality. Like it's just all the things.”

“I think retention is the golden metric of if you have a good membership and if you feel like your retention is low, then that is a signal to focus on investing in the experience and making it more retentive because it's better to make the product more retentiv…”

“When you go to the next product, very important if you stay in the same ideal customer profile. Because it's, it will be easier to sell to the same client than to acquire a new client. It's always this. So staying in the same customer ideal customer profile It…”

“Retention is everything. To me, retention is almost like product market fit. If you have retention, it means that people actually like the thing that you made, and it's actually useful for them. And that determines whether something's going to succeed or is no…”

“We gather data on what they're spending time on, and we basically found that you know, there's way more impact on spending a bit more time on monetization, a bit more time on retention, compared to spending time on acquisition.”

“The key to do that is first of all, your product need to have a high enough frequency. Like if you are using this once per month, it's not likely you can build this into a product, into a habit.”

“When I was asked to work on retention, I did a bunch of analysis. The biggest leverage for me is actually activation.”

“Customers who convert from freemium and become paid customers, their retention is typically about 10 to 20% higher than those who converted from a free trial or converted from kind of like a traditional sales process.”

“Upsell and cross-sell is not just, you know, a way to bring more revenue to the company. It's actually a way to improve the customer experience because they're consolidating everything in one place. As a result, the retention goes up. And obviously the revenue…”

“But the reason I say invest early here is that to remember that it also takes time to accrue enough data that you can learn about and make some key decisions around retention, for example, or so that you have enough data to run regressions on, be able to infor…”

“Daily active users is so, so downstream, and by itself, it really does not mean anything. So really, you don't want to focus on daily active users. You want to focus on way more upstream metrics, like retention, or even more upstream than that, what drives ret…”

“I actually think if you're doing it right, sometimes conversion should actually decrease a little bit. So you might actually have fewer people getting all the way through successfully. But I think that's okay because a lot of those people were probably not the…”

“As an example at Patreon, one of our proxies around the eventual success of a creator was how quickly they would reach certain dollar thresholds once they launched. And so your velocity to get to your first patron, your first hundred dollars processed on the p…”

“Tweaking the onboarding experience and trying to tune it in a very micro way, because the reality is like, that doesn't really move the needle that often, especially once you've got it in a pretty good foundational place. And only when you discover something r…”

“I think one of the most common analytical failure modes is this pattern, which is our best users do X. So why can't we make other users do that same thing and then drive future retention? And it almost never works that way because there's something unique abou…”

“Whereas I'd argue when you're running your company, those numbers are important, but there's also your burn rate, your retention, how much your existing customer accounts are expanding, your revenue expansion over time. Those metrics are the ones that can bett…”

“I think the age group between, I would say, 25 to 45 or 50, right? Where, which is where the retentions are not that great. Right. Where say even scaled up brands have seen maximum two boxes in an year being picked up.”

“Product market fit is retention.”

“One of the problems with that is it's probably just like a lagging indicator of the value of the platform. People will leave once there are problems and you want to like isolate the problems earlier on.”

“Basically as you get Bigger. Those two metrics of retention and engagement actually become a lot more important to maintaining growth than new user acquisition.”

“HR has two parts, recruitment, retention. Those are the two big Rs. You must always focus on retention and not forget about recruitment. Actually, there should be good balance. Today, looking back, if your company is excellent at retention, you're not getting …”

“Sometimes when you have a young company, it won't, a young person may not have decided what they want to do in their lives completely. All of a sudden you get a developer that wants to be a project manager. I've had an accountant who wants to be UX designer. I…”

“When they buy the second and the third time, they still have not necessarily decided that you are the company for them in that particular category. So it's not until they make additional transactions three plus that you start getting into the realm of loyalty …”

“Retention is a transactional activity. What I want to happen when the problem is retention is I want to encourage you to buy a slightly different product of the product line. So maybe you came in and you bought a shirt and now I want you to buy a pair of pants…”

“And eventually once you get into a proper place, which is this line should be above 30 or 40%, you want to also start collecting some feed user feedback to drive into the next level.”

“Let's say that our Herbie is that when customers try our product, they're not sticking with it. Well, then investing more money in sales and marketing is useless. In fact, it's worse than useless. We're just going to get more unhappy customers that say bad stu…”

“I believe that sort of the acquisition problem or how do you get more users to get into your app is kind of a solvable problem through money, right? So I think you raise VC funding, you advertise, you deal offers, this and that. So I think that, that is kind o…”

“It's because working on growth before you have product market fit and good retention is not a good idea.”

“If you are working on retention or trying to optimize retention metric, Very often the way to do that is actually quite early in the product experience. The types of ways that you set a user up for good retention, and it could be the first session, first week…”

“Because engagement is a sign of network effect, not growth. This is where the confusion comes. Most people think every fast growing has a network effect. It doesn't. The retention is a strong sign of network effect.”