The ‘Usage Gap’: The Real Reason People Don’t Use Your Product

Photo by C D-X on Unsplash

Your signup rate is great.

Your churn rate is terrible.

The problem isn’t your product — it’s the invisible chasm between “I signed up” and “I actually used it.”

Here’s how to bridge it.

Three years ago, I was advising a productivity app with a beautiful problem.

They had 50,000 registered users.

Their product was genuinely excellent — thoughtfully designed, powerful features, rave reviews from the people who actually used it. But their 30-day retention rate was a catastrophic 8%.

The founder was bewildered.

“We’ve built everything users asked for. Why aren’t they coming back?”

After interviewing 100 churned users, the answer became painfully clear. It wasn’t that the product was bad. It was that the gap between signing up and getting value was too wide.

I call this the Usage Gap, and it’s the silent killer of otherwise great products.

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