When I started this journey, I thought I knew a lot about how one should think about Growth and Retention, after all these are easy metrics and there's already a ton of material online that one can refer and apply directly. What I learnt is that there's a lot that needs to be in place for you to even begin this journey, especially when you are already operating at a decent scale and and all the "low floor quick wins" have been had already. This post is about the setup journey that is needed so that you can start having an impact. Given the state of where you are with your product, you will likely find different parts of the post interesting, but that's OK..

Here's what I learnt in the last year or so in this journey -

1 Getting Top Management to understand that both Growth and Retention are important areas to invest in is extremely important -

This meant converting fuzzy metrics like M1 Retention into easily understood business metrics like additional users and additional revenue, and building a cohesive story that conveyed this helps in the longer term. It is important to know and understand, that getting executive air cover will be key in a fuzzy area where a lot of your techniques/experiments to drive results will be unconventional and even perhaps, controversial. Hence, if leaders deeply understand the impact of your work in real tangible terms, there’s a very good chance that you will get the right backing to make a dent with your work.

2 Building a Robust Tracking and Analytics system that allows you to see all relevant metrics and key dimensions is key to surviving this journey -

'If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It'

This is the part where we ensured that everything that is worth measuring for Growth and Retention, is tracked properly and is available at its lowest granularity i.e. at a user level with all the important attributes tagged as part of the tracking so that we can break down all metrics by any of the important dimensions as we desire. We quickly realized that we had to standardize our reports and metrics so that we can look at these periodically to check progress and also be able to see what are the dimensions that impact retention and help us drive growth. Some of the metrics and dimensions we found useful were as follows -

Growth - New Installs, Re-Installs at Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Quarterly Levels across Platforms like Android, iOS etc, by Source of acquisition like Facebook, Organic, Paid, Referral program, driven through mobile site etc.

Retention - D0 Activation Rate, D0 Uninstall rate, W0 Conversion Rate, W0 Uninstall Rate, W1 Retention, M1 Retention, M2 Retention, M3 Retention, Single Session Churn, Lifetime Value (LTV) for each week's and month's Cohort of new installs and re-installs possible to be broken down by Source of acquisition, Type of Device model, Platform, Level of coupon/rewards, Key User event activity in the product across different periods since install, latency of experiences, experiment/campaign etc.

This kind of tracking meant that all of our analytics platforms and internal systems needed cross feeding plumbing work so that we could feed data back and forth to sew up user attributes, have a common definition of a user across systems and be able to create custom segments and filtering criteria on top of those dimensions/attributes. All of the above will mean that you will need quality engineering effort to align these end to end, and having different tools lying in silos will not be able to help you beyond the top-level insights.

3 Building a culture and mindset that Growth and Retention go hand in hand -

Growth without retention is like filling up a leaky bucket

https://youtu.be/irjgfW0BIrw

The Pirate Metrics have helped us understand and internalize the relationship between Growth and Retention

4 Creating tools, team structure and processes to impact both Growth and Retention

We used the following Growth stack to think about Growth and Retention and setup our engineering tools/systems so that we could experiment and work on projects to move the metrics for Growth and Retention. This meant setting up a ton of engineering systems and Mobile platform bits to be able to work on even simple ideas for Growth and Retention improvement. Some of the most basic things include the following -

1) Setting up a push notifications framework that allows you to do segmented pushes. This is so important because around 50% of an app's experience is based on push notifications and they are almost central to driving or destroying App retention

2) Setting up an App A/B testing platform so that we can run different tests to see what works and what doesn't

3) Setting up a Deep linking solution that works across all major screen of the app so that we can land users to the right experience from different campaigns and push notifications

4) Setting up Install attribution to work across all channels etc so that we can track where we are getting our installs from

You can find a lot more details in the chart below. This is mostly exhaustive and I have adapted this from Andrew Chen’s Blog

What next?

We are now starting to see fruits of our work in our numbers and are also being able to explain the wins. We are now at a stage where we are experimenting and learning from a lot of user behavior about what works and what doesn't for our product and what kind of improvements we can get in Growth and retention for our apps. Obviously we have a lot to learn and improve on, and I will share more of my thoughts in the future.

Looking back at this journey from last year, I feel this is like climbing a mountain, only to realize that this is the start of another journey towards climbing an even more torturous mountain.

I would love to get your feedback in the comments. You can also follow me on Twitter (Anirudh Maitra)