Founders

Consumer social products and marketing

1. Marketing creates 1) awareness and, hopefully, 2) demand to sign up

2. For nearly all consumer apps, ~50% of new sign ups never come back to the app after the first day! This declines over the next 30 days to get to a measure of day 30 (d30) retention.

3. Ideally, this decline curve “flattens” (i.e. asymptotic) or even “smiles”. This means you have a retentive product and you can measure $X spent turns into Y downloads and into Z sign ups and into A retained users.

4. However, if your product does not have a retentive curve, then all spending will do is make metrics go up for a bit and then air will slowly come out of the balloon.

5. Retentive social products work because their core value proposition and product / functionality / features creates long-term retention. Exceptional products do that and have a viral growth component (k-factor).

6. So before spending time and money marketing, be sure you have a product that benefits from the marketing.

Not to just keep QT DWR today but this is why you gotta be careful getting too lost in the sauce with some of these indie hackers who post acq, but not retention (they never post retention, and a lot of those products are predicated on a 1-time payment from a viral burst)

The Farcaster formerly known as Kchamp. Books, beats, bodybuilding, bright ideas and beautiful things.

katherinechampagne.com

Don't be fooled by flashy acquisitions, focus on long-term retention