Who is the king? reflection on product metrics

Mo Salah is the king , content is the king ,king analogies are ubiquitous, touching any field ,So for product metrics especially in the growth stage we can assemble around the retention to be the king.

As without retention, the product is going to be?a money eater. We are feeding it with as much dollars as we can on marketing and acquisitions activities though this ends up with no long term users ,taking a long time to be profitable , getting more risk to be eaten from the competitors and new entrants.

If you are in the product field or tech industry be careful about this and keep monitoring it especially if you play on the mobile app industry ,as there is a fact says that "?Over 4 million apps now populate the Apple App Store and Google Play Store alone "

Despite this the mobile users spend almost all of their time on only 5 apps such as social media apps and likewise. From here appears a good question which needs to be answered - how do we have sustainable growth and keep the users around along the way?

So filling the top of the funnel isn't healthy to that much if it is hard for the product to retain its users and build a bottom line of engaged ,loyal users. So the retention impacts the whole cycle and the appetite of the investors towards the product as well.

?“The point is, every improvement that you make to retention also improves all of these other things — virality, LTV, payback period. It is literally the foundation to all of growth, and that’s really why retention is the king.” — Brian Balfour,?former VP Growth, HubSpot & Co-founder, Reforge

Another good thing about retention is that it can give precise insights about vague areas of any product and save the time and money for many teams and founders ,how!

It can answer the question of - Is this product has a market fit or not?- simply speaking if we have looked on the graph below ,we can find that Product A has achieved product-market fit. Its retention drops off initially but stabilizes at roughly 45% active users. Product B’s retention, on the other hand, trends straight to zero and never levels off.

For product B we can see that over time the line becomes straight that reaches zero instead of a curve that stabilizes — so here we need to solve a product-market fit problem, not a retention problem which means that the product lacks a user base who regularly uses it. Hence we are supposed to work on this to flatten the curve.

For product A it needs to continuously optimizing the retention by improving the experience and enhance the app performance to level up the curve.

It is an ongoing process to build and develop a sticky product not just a one time hack , so hope all of us to be lucky for figuring out the ways which lead to it.

For references and further information.

• https://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/
• https://andrewchen.co/new-data-