Shitty retention is ubiquitous

First, perhaps obvious, but no wonder retention in mobile products is terrible. I’ve often written about these benchmarks for retention:

daily retention of consumer apps: D1/D7/D28 of 60/30/15

the % of active users — that is, DAU/registered — should be 25%

or, for consumer/SMB subscription: M12 of >30%

When you reflect on these metrics, they are actually outright terrible, but I assure you that these particular benchmarks are in fact the good numbers! (That is, most of what I see in pitches/data rooms/etc are much worse than this). In other words, tech products live in a world where you can lose ~90% of our DAUs after a month, and >75% of your user might be inactive. And that’s not only acceptable, but it’s actually good! I’ve written much more about these disturbing metrics here and here, and in general it’s a depressing topic. But obviously a small % of products do succeed each year.

The important part and how it fits into Dopamine Culture is that whatever value your product provides, it has to deliver it fast . If you don’t provide value in the first session and the first day, you’ll have such severe drop-off that you won’t get a second chance.

If you had “Products” as a row at the top graphic, you’d get something like this:

Slow/traditional culture : Save up for years, buy a product, use it even if it sucks

Dopamine culture : Download the free app, tap a few times, if it doesn’t do what it says, swipe out, go to Instagram, go back to scrolling

Good luck.