What is good retention

Retention - not only does it make companies - but it also breaks them. For this reason, poor user retention has become the silent killer. In this post, I will walk you through the three key ways that companies go wrong when it comes to retention: They deprioritize retention altogether, They define their retention metrics incorrectly, They don&rsquo

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Why Retention Is The Silent Killer: 1. To properly understand the impact of retention and prioritize initiatives you need to take a long-term view - and that often conflicts with most teams’ short term goals. 2. Retention metrics are easy to mis-define and can lead teams in the wrong direction when defined incorrectly. 3. A healthy business i

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Retention measures breadth - the percentage of users who are still active in a given time period. But it doesn’t answer the critical question - how active are they within that time period?

1⃣ "Users love you." This shines through via retention. What type of retention and what "great" looks like differs by biz model. For social I look at bounded daily (ex. d30), while for subscription I look at m13 renewal. Data on this for marketplaces:

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%

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- In 2014, my team and I had been digging into retention for our new HubSpot Sales product. The more we unearthed, the more I realized how critical improving customer retention was to blowing out the product’s growth story.