On Scope Creep & ZIRP Lessons

Aggressive growth projects often lead to UX cruft, slowly degrading long-term user engagement and retention. Yes, you can move short-term metrics by throwing a blocking modal that up-sells a subscription (yes newspaper websites, I’m talking about you!) but how long before that alienates long-term users?

Focus forces brutal prioritization

Making few bets forces you to make hard decisions. It’s extremely hard to measure the value of something against some abstract and absolute notion of value.

Proponents of diversification argue that it takes the edge off of making a mistake. That would be a good argument if people acted the same way independent of t... See more

The internet and software is only accelerating this trend: as coordination costs get lower, it becomes easier and easier for companies to use outside services instead of building capabilities internally, concentrating knowledge in fewer and fewer organizations.

A company can take a very narrow view of the future and not see threats or opportunities outside of its narrow focus. This narrow focus can help the company excel where it is concentrating, but its peripheral vision may be diminished; as a result, it doesn’t see the impact of a new technology with better potential, the possibility of a new industry

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The same idea applies to investing. The continuous goal, in my case, is a portfolio that has distinct advantages versus the market along dimensions like value, momentum, capital allocation, etc. There are no price targets, no return targets, no staking my results on a given outcome for a given company. A goalless process like this is incredibly ha

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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 ref... See more