Stay another day

My journey with Cookpad began almost 8 months ago. My previous role was as Director of Product at the Guardian and before that was the Head of Product for BBC News. After more than 10 years in the digital news space it felt like the right time for a very different product challenge.

One of the things I was looking for was the opportunity to create a team and to find and apply the best product development methods to a big objective. Cookpad is certainly that. We’ve existed in Japan for 20 years where we have 60M unique users per month. Here in Bristol we’re responsible for the next stage of Cookpad’s journey which is to have a larger impact across the rest of the world. We now have 30 million monthly users outside of Japan which is a great start, but despite this scale we know our products can do a much better job in helping solve everyday problems around cooking.

Large reach numbers on their own are not a good barometer for whether you are providing value. If most of your users are only using your product once then you’re not going to grow in a sustainable way. We believe retention is more useful. After all, if people keep coming back, that’s a much better sign that you are providing real value.

But what does retention really mean? What is the right way to measure it and once you can quantify it, what do you do next?

“Retention … everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.”

I’ve paraphrased from an original quote by @danariely who was referring to big data (H/t this useful paper by the analytics company Amplitude).

This struck a chord. From various conversations with product managers across a range of organisations, the typical response was all believed it was important, but the actual investment in understanding and improving retention often didn’t match.

The good news is that there is a lot of good insight out there. I began by going back to Alex Shultz’s retention lecture from the Y-Combinator StartUp School. Alex used to visit the digital team at the Guardian where he’d share insight about how his team at Facebook were helping power their growth towards a billion users and beyond. It’s a great starting point and our first action was to start plotting our own N Day retention curve.

The next blog that really helped our thinking was John Egan’s postings on growth engineering at Pinterest. This post in particular gave us a number of areas to explore — my personal favourite was around user state transitions.

Interesting stuff but what did good retention look like? This post from Andrew Chen gave us something to work with.

Like most apps, we found ourselves nearer to the green line than the red line.

Based on all of this we decided on Day 1 retention as our first area of focus. Cooking is an everyday activity so looking to see how many people came back within 24 hours of installing the app felt like the right place to start.

Day 1 retention also has the extra benefit that you get data on your experiments within 24 hours. This metric is not about a learning effect over multiple visits. Did the user come back the next day? Yes or no? Simple!

Once we had plotted our N Day retention curve, we then looked at the actions people take on their first visit and whether any of these impacted whether someone was more likely to return. This is pretty standard advice and one of the things Alex covers in his video.

What stood out for us was the act of following someone within the community had a significant impact on the next day retention rate — we saw it nearly double. But the reality was, this action was completed by less than 5% of first day users.

Given Cookpad is more than just about recipes but is the world’s largest community of cooks, this showed we were doing a bad job of communicating and delivering our product value to new users. The good news… the only way is up.

It all sounds obvious but when you have a long list of things you know you can improve, deciding where to put scarce resources can be a challenge. As soon as we put our minds firmly on next day retention, it became much easier to prioritise our attention.

Right now, we’re working on a whole new onboarding experience that explains what Cookpad is about and begins to deliver to that promise. For us, delivering that promise means helping a user find one or more things they want to cook as quickly and easily as possible. This is the path to matching you to the right cook who can help inspire and support you. All from a cold start within the precious first few minutes. And it needs to feel effortless and enjoyable.

I really like the focus this has given the team. What is the value we actually provide? What is the best way to communicate that? Retention provides us with one key measure about how well we deliver to that.

We know we still have much to learn. We’re a global product with communities in over 40 countries and I don’t expect one approach will work everywhere — but that’s a good challenge to have.

Stay tuned, in the coming weeks, we’ll be building up a series of posts sharing details of our progress together with tips and lessons we’ve learnt along the way.

Note: Cookpad is not a customer of Amplitude and the link in this piece is not an endorsement of their product.