Product-market fit is fluid. Just because you’ve attained it once doesn’t mean you’ll have it forever. The market is constantly changing. And that means the intersection where supply meets demand will always be changing as well. That said, regardless of how and where you move to, you’ll always have a subset of your customers who aren’t happy. Who might miss the old ways. Who might wish for something else entirely.
To put it into perspective, I’m going to quote Casey Winters (his blog), the current Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite:
“Product-market fit isn’t when your customers stop complaining, it’s when they stop leaving.”
Retention and its Touch Points
If you run a business, you’re going to have a leaky funnel. Your job is to minimize the leaks. Double down on not just adoption, but especially retention. What does that mean? Engagement and the often, overlooked category, for many early-stage teams, re-engaging those that have become inactive over a set period of time. Whether 30 days or 7 days. It depends on what solution your product is providing for the market and how frequently you normally expect them to use the product. For example, for most consumer apps, as investors, we expect a minimum of usage for 3 days out of the 7 calendar days a week. So I characterize inactivity aggressively as after a month of inactivity.
In the past few months, since the health and economic crisis began, the conversation has shifted from ‘growth at all costs’ to profitability. And similarly, from an overemphasis on adoption to a better understanding of retention.
Speaking of retention, 2 days ago, the afore-mentioned Casey Winters and Lenny Rachitsky published their homework on the the dichotomy between good and great retention, which you can find here and here, respectively. Their research provides some useful touch points about “golden” numbers from some of the smartest people in the industry. Of course, as their research suggests, everyone’s “golden” number is different. At different points in time.
So, how are you tracking how lovable your product is?
One of my favorite ways to track what keeps users coming back for more is the Depth vs. Breadth graph. Plotting how long people use certain features and how often they click into it. You can easily substitute length of time (depth) with the number of actions taken for each product feature you have. Or as you grow into having multiple product offerings, this graph works just as well.
Below are just a few examples of breadth and depth metrics:
| Breadth | Depth |
| # of logins/week | # actions/session |
| Session count | Session time length |
| D1/D2/D7/D30 sessions | # concurrent devices logged in |
| Platform-specific sessions | |
| DAU/MAU | |
| # paid users/ # total |
The above graph should also help you better optimize your features/offerings. For instance, let’s say you’re a startup in your growth stages. Going by Reid Hoffman‘s rule of thumb for budgeting, spend:
- 70% on your ‘popular‘ product offerings,
- 20% on your ‘niche‘ product offerings,
- And 10% exploring your any hidden gems in your ‘broad‘ quadrant.
In closing
If you have your finger on the pulse about what your customers love about you at all times, you’ll be able to create a more robust product. As a final note, I want to add that while this piece has been dedicated to what your customers love, please always keep in mind what they hate as well. And why they hate what they hate. Who knows? You might discover a larger secret there.
Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash
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