How we help founders debug growth using the AARRR framework

Are you a founder wondering why growth feels stuck while you and your team are shipping features nonstop? Or maybe you are just not sure which part of the product you should fix first while users are leaving complaining that it's just too hard to use. Hi, I'm Daniel, product designer and founder of Duran, and I help tech companies fix what's broken in their product so they can finally drive activation, retention, and growth. In this video, I show you how we help our customers fix exactly these challenges by using the AARRR framework, or acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. But here's the twist. We don't just use it as a simple funnel. We lay on top the whole user journey. This gives founders and product teams 3 important insights. First, they clearly understand what are those friction points that hurt growth, where users struggle and eventually leave. Second, they get a shared understanding across the team what activation and retention really means for their product and how they measure it. And third, they have a map to prioritize experiments that actually move the needle. So if you want clarity on what's working, what's not, and what you should tackle first, let's dive in. To get things started, we first map out the whole user journey. For this, we use the user story mapping framework. We start with the activities, which are the high-level tasks the users do. Then we have the backbone or the steps or the narrative that explains the whole story of what's happening and what the user is doing through the product and the user tasks, which are a granular view of what's happening at each step. This is also good practice to use for defining MVPs or even different release phases. In our example, we have a product that users can create job posts and then select a candidate review them, and eventually make an offer. So for this, we have the Discover phase because we also want to understand how users are discovering the product. It can be outreach, it can be inbound. So outbound, inbound. Then we have the Learn phase where they want to actually learn a bit more about the product before committing to this and where they go. It can be the website, it can be a demo call, it can be, I know, different blog posts and so on, or landing page. From there, we usually want them to create an account, and we display here what should happen to create an account. Then they have to go through the onboarding phase, from the onboarding questionnaire to set up the company to creating maybe their first job post, and then in a way engaging with the product, checking the dashboard, seeing who applied to that specific job post, reviewing the candidates, managing the offers, maybe reviewing and editing company details. And eventually view, edit job posts, and maybe creating a new job post. So if we move to the whole acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue part, under acquisition, we want to understand how people are discovering the product. So we have the discovery phase, right? The outreach, the inbound, learning about the product, and eventually creating an account. Now we could stop here, but what we also do is we add touchpoints, objectives, and metrics. And eventually, if we have questions, they go below. So for acquisition, the touchpoints in this specific case, it might be the sales team, it can be the ads, the emails, the website, or the landing pages, and eventually the platform if they create an account. What we want, we want people to convert to demo and we want people to create an account at this point. Then the next step is to understand how we can actually measure this or what we can measure here. And for example, we could measure the percentage of people that create an account. Moving to the activation phase, this is where people start to experience the real value of the product. Then we have the part that they go through the onboarding, the onboarding questionnaire, setting the company profile, creating their first job, and eventually maybe seeing that job live and reviewing some of the candidates. This is where discussion starts to happen. You know, what goes into activation? What goes into retention? And I just put this here. So in my opinion, the value is not just the job posted in itself, but like maybe getting 1 or 2 or 3 candidates. And then you see that this thing actually works and it might deliver value for you. In this specific case, the touchpoint is the platform. The objective is to create a first job and maybe eventually getting some candidates. And then we could track the percentage of accounts that create their first job. Moving forward for retention, we could review the candidates, and here are all the steps for that. We could manage the offers, we could review, edit company details, view, edit job post, and maybe create a new job post. So in this case, again, the touchpoint— I'm interacting with the platform. The objectives would be to hire the right candidate and create a second job. And then we would say, oh, okay, this person really understood the value because they not just created one job, they created another job. And they are looking for more candidates. And then we could track a couple of things. This is also a discussion that happens in the team, like what we want to track, what retention really means for us, what are those metrics that we want to improve, right? So we could track the percentage of jobs with an offer sent, the percentage of jobs that end up with a hiring, or the percentage of accounts with more than 2 jobs created. And then moving into the referrals, we could have things like inviting colleagues, sharing job posts, or maybe even like referral, like inviting other companies into the platform as well. And in this case, again, the touchpoint would be the platform and the objective is growth in the company. And then we have the revenue, obviously, because we want to have revenue of this. It can be through subscription maybe, and like maybe boosting some posts. And again, in this case, it might be the platform. The objective would be to get revenue. And from here, you basically have a map of all of the things that are happening in the product, how things move to one point to another, what are the metrics that you should track. Think about this whole thing as a funnel, you know, from acquisition, how many end up in the activation zone, how many end up in the retention, how many in the referral and and so on. It gives you a good overview of the product, of what's happening, what are the touch points between your business and the customers, what are their objectives at each point, and just have a good understanding of the metrics that you want to grow. Hope this is helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Thank you.