Lenny Distilled

Retention is the only metric that matters

Growth → Retention & Engagement

Product market fit have one metric. One metric. That's it. Retention. If you create value, they will come back. If they're not coming back, that means that you are not creating value.

Uri LevineA founder's guide to crisis management | Uri Levine (Waze co-founder, serial entrepreneur)

Product market fit in general have only one metric, only one metric, retention. Look, it's really simple, if you create value, they will come back, that's it. If they are not coming back, that means that you are not creating value.

Uri LevineA founder's guide to crisis management
Supporting

Retention, I don't think of it in terms of like, wow, I must retain this user. It's like, is this thing valuable or not? That's what retention is to me. Either it's actually providing real value or it's not. If it's providing real value, people stick around. It's as simple as that.

Gina GotthilfScaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America's tech scene
Supporting

One of the immediate things that you see when you build these is that your growth is much more sensitive to customer retention than you can ever intuit because there's a lot of interaction between having a healthy retained customer base and everything else you care about.

Dan HockenmaierDeveloping a growth model + marketplace growth strategy
Supporting

We found was the churn in resurrection lines were actually much larger than the new user line, which implied to us that retention and driving those two lines was actually our biggest lever to drive net growth.

Naomi GleitMeta's head of product on working with Mark Zuckerberg, early growth tactics, and more