There are two ways that users can advocate for your product: One-to-one and one-to-many. Like most of my breakdowns, this is a spectrum, but the dichotomy should be helpful for building a mental framework...
Sometimes when I'm on the internet, jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink, I try to imagine what's happening from a bird's eye view. I imagine myself as a 2-dimensional point moving from node to node on an infinite graph...
Once you have your metric locked in as your north star for all things retention, the next step is visualization. This will provide you with the foundational understanding that you'll perform analysis and make decisions...
Derek Sivers has become one of my favorite thinkers. His writing is concise and just flat-out fun to read — I'm happy to say that his latest book, Your Music and People doesn't lower that bar one bit...
It's not super controversial that retention is a big deal for startups. What is a little more controversial, or maybe just less well-known, is how to go about improving retention in your product...