— Analytics, Learning — 1 min read
I was told about this lecture video a few weeks ago. It's a bit long (47 minutes) and I watched it at 1.30AM. But I didn't regret delaying my bed time to watch this video; I learned a lot. So I'd like to share those learnings here:
Retention: growth is only possible if you can retain your users. Your retention curve can drop, but it should flatten at some point. If it keeps dropping and reach zero then you shouldn't start talking about growth, because maybe you don't have a product-market fit (your product isn't good enough!).
There's no single rule for a good retention rate. Different business need different retention rate to survive. For example social media sites need to have higher retention compared to e-commerce sites.
You need to define a North Star Metric (where you want to go)! That metric should be the numbers you look at & report both internally & externally. For example: FB-> DAU, Whatsapp -> total sent messages, AirBnB -> total nights booked, e-bay -> GMV. It will help a lot in alignment and decision-making.
Magic moment can drive users to get hooked into your service. For example, if a user searched a product and land on e-bay, it's better for him to land on the product page instead of a signup page to not lose the magic moment. For social media sites, you probably want something like helping users to get connected to their friends within the first few days. Otherwise they have nothing to do on the site.
Building a great product is all about power users. But those users are not the one to worry about when you think about growth. Instead, it's the marginal users (churned, inactive, etc.) that you need to focus on.
Misconception: if you make a good product, customers will come. That's not true. You still need a good marketing.
Virality: Payload (how many people can you hit at once?), Frequency (how many times?), Conversion Rate (whether they're gonna convert).
Watch the full lecture: