Retention

“I have seen companies shift their curve outward by 10, 15, 20 percentage points from making those changes, especially when you consider that churn is most likely to happen in the very earliest usage of the product. If you can get people past that hump, it's a really invaluable part of the product to work on.”

“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, that's super hard. Then you're dealing with totally different business models where you're paying for users, you're trying to aggressively upsell them before they hit any habitual usage patterns with your product.”

“People think that stories was the sole reason why Instagram grew. Story brought us a lot of people, but we literally, our retention doubled over the course of a year and a half. The connections pivot - making sure that people got connected with their friends early on rather than celebrities - changed the way that people perceived the value.”

“People here are so mission oriented and they stay because they get these offers and then they say, 'Well, of course I'm not going to leave because my best case scenario at Meta is that we make money and my best case at Anthropic is we affect the future of humanity and try to make AI flourish and human flourishing go well.'”

“If you look at history once again, it was never the person who had the biggest distribution at the moment of time. It was the one that had the best retention and engagement. Google had the best retention and engagement over the others. Facebook was smaller, but had way better retention and engagement over the others.”

“When you think about retention, that's just not specific enough. So there is this mental model that I use from made to stick where they'll tell you like, 'Lenny, think of everything in the world that is orange.' And you're like, 'An orange. What else?' And then if you change that structure with sandbox to think of everything orange that's in a construction site, then you really start to realize and grasp at concrete concepts.”

“One of the immediate things that you see when you build these is that your growth is much more sensitive to customer retention than you can ever intuit because there's a lot of interaction between having a healthy retained customer base and everything else you care about, which is the rate at which they're referring new customers, generating content, generating contribution margin.”

“The journey of making Figma Design was a lot of table stakes features had to be built, as well as the shiny cool new stuff. We literally had a team called Blockers. They just went in one by one, struck them down. Each time we saw improvement in retention, improvement in activation - you could literally see the change in the graph.”