Why Retention Is The Silent Killer

If you take nothing else away from this post, it should be that retention matters. A lot. No other metric is as singularly telling of whether your business will thrive or die. And so, the better you understand what good retention looks like for your business, the better shot you have at the former. We hope this research proves useful to you whether... See more

- It isn’t just about retaining more users, it impacts every facet of your growth model and has multiple layers of impact on the health of any business. In fact, retention is one of the key factors that determines the long term success of any startup. Retention will make or break your company.

- There is a lack of understanding why retention is the priority. Without understanding this, people end up working on the wrong things and missing the biggest opportunities.

- 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.

1. Retention drives acquisition: As you retain more users, those additional users take more of the key actions that accelerate acquisition, either through sharing, inviting, word-of-mouth, or creating content.

3. Retention builds an acquisition competitive edge: - As you increase retention, monetization, and LTV,  you can pay more to acquire a customer. In doing so, you can push competitors  out of acquisition channels, open up new channels that were previously too expensive,  and grow faster.