by Rahul Caprihan
That elusive daily user
I have worked on highly viral products with poor retention multiple times in my career and am scarred: it really does not end well. Retention is critical for sustainable growth, and engagement can be a proxy for retention. Thus, a common early-stage roadmap is something like this: engagement → retention → growth. Smart investors will pay close attention to your engagement metrics and make decisions from there.
Finding that daily user to drive engagement can seem elusive for many products. How often do people look for jobs? Book a flight? Buy new glasses? For many product categories it may even be impossible to reach both daily use and massive scale. But before you give up on the DAU entirely, brainstorm and look at how people interact with all products in your category.
Creative thinking can help you find that daily user. Look beyond your current product and figure out how daily use cases relate back to your product/brand.
Wanderlust — the DAU we found at Hitlist
I am the PM at Hitlist, a startup focused on helping people travel more. People do not book trips very often. At best, we might get people booking a trip every couple months or just a couple times per year. We work around this by focusing more on a push vs. pull model, but with so few touch points a challenge will always be for people to think of our brand when the time comes to plan a trip.
That said, we have found that people think about travel way more than that. They dream about exotic locations. They swap notes with friends. They share photos on social media. They lust for travel, and this becomes an itch if it is not scratched: an itch that will eventually lead to a booking.
Beyond a single platform
At Hitlist, we primarily think of ourselves as a mobile company, but we recently built a simple chrome extension to scratch this itch daily and show people a stunning travel photo and our best flight deal in each new tab. This is something our app already does, but leveraging the browser’s usage habits is very enticing and chrome extensions are easy to build.
The browser is an interesting platform for reaching customers every day. I cannot think of something that I use more often in a single day.
Many people have caught on to the marketing strategy here. Ryan Hoover called it “productized marketing.” I would argue that you cannot separate “product” from “marketing”; thus a special term is not needed when they work together. But many organizations still keep the teams completely separate, so maybe it is worthwhile highlighting this in the discourse: Wandertab is built as a marketing product.
It is still too early to tell if this growth hack will pay off, but the user feedback has been tremendous. Some people find it too addicting and uninstall due to “wander overdose”, while others love the daily reminder that their travel dreams are achievable.
Nice! But how does your idea help me?
While I can think of dozens of products that could leverage this playbook for passive engagement, I am not saying that everyone should start building chrome extensions. Building a product that is tangential to your core value proposition is generally a bad idea. I am merely using it as an example to illustrate a point:
Product managers should think beyond their current product and breakdown their entire industry: a daily use case may be lurking around the corner.
A few examples might help kick-start your brainstorm:
- Job search: LinkedIn has tried to solve the seasonality of job search by making a news feed relevant for working life, but they have the opportunity and resources to do more and build engaging, standalone services powered by their network and content.
- E-commerce: the flash-sale helped turn shopping into a daily event, but fashion brands have lots of room to innovate on content distribution. It is industry already built on excessive passive engagement where ads and content merge into one.
- Dating: Tinder super-charged dating by making it feel like a game. Many people do not have the energy to engage in meaningful dating activity every day; but browsing profiles is fun, and social validation is rewarding — bonus points for toilet usability.
Crossing the chasm
There is no secret tactic for engagement, retention or growth. Success usually comes from a dependable internal process, iterative experiments, solid design+engineering…and luck. My advice of "just be creative" is not really actionable advice at all.
But, I will conclude with a few broad takeaways:
- Break out of your product — how do people interact with any related content in your industry? What services can you provide that is interesting every day? Can you tie it back to your brand?
- Build a service, not an app — your app is not some UI on a phone, but rather a service adapted across platforms. We already live in a multi-platform world and will soon be saturated with inter-connected devices. Can you leverage each platform for what it does best?
- Timing is key— what is the key moment when people are primed to interact with your content? Where are they? What have they just done? As more devices come online, the winners will know which content is right for each place, time, and device.
- Design — never neglect your product's user experience. A/B testing is valuable but can also lead you to a local maximum, while design thinking will get you over that hump.
- Keep it simple — do not waste resources on building something complex for V1. As always: release → measure → iterate.
Find me @rahulcap or @hitlist_app to continue the conversation. Download Wandertab and send us your feedback.
