Users return to products at different rates: daily, weekly, monthly. LinkedIn became an everyday app by adding features like Pulse and Card Munch to pull people back more often. Most startups overestimate how frequently users will engage and confuse retention metrics with actual business value.
Do you have a large enough kind of class of user coming into your product or service that's coming back really quickly, right? Because we almost always overestimate how often people will come back. And what I found is there are almost like these different cohorts that come back maybe weekly, maybe daily, maybe monthly, maybe it's longer than monthly, right? And it's not necessarily a bad thing, but you should understand those folks probably have different needs, and for them once a month makes sense, whereas other people would use it every day. LinkedIn's a great example of them trying to figure this out because I don't know if you remember back, if you guys use LinkedIn, there's this great article written up on like, is LinkedIn an everyday app? And for a long time it wasn't. It was this thing you came back when you're ready to switch jobs and you furiously like update all your resume and then you spam people with connection, like invites, and you know, it's not something you would do every day, it's something you would do like once a year, once every couple years or whatever that turnover rate looks like. And they've taken a really specific approach to getting people more engaged in LinkedIn. So if you look at LinkedIn now, there's all this content now, like Pulse, there's things, there's like little apps they've built like Card Munch where you just take pictures of cards and it uploads it to your contacts. There's like all these little hacks they've done, and to be honest, it's like, now I go there more often because I know some folks are gonna write some good content only on LinkedIn, I'm more interested in what people are up to. So it's been over time that they've taken that approach to increase the engagement. But a lot of startups I talk to, you know, we completely overestimate. People are gonna love it, they're gonna use it all the time, and then when they don't, they're kind of stuck with, oh, why don't they use it all the time? What's our strategy? And it's also probably a worthwhile conversation with all of you, because like, what does that mean, they come back? Like, is it another purchase? Are they coming back to update something? You probably have a list of things based on your business that you have in your mind, like, "Ah, I wish people were doing this," over and over again. You know, because if you don't have revenue yet, investors are going to ask, like, "What's your churn rate? How are people coming back? What's your retention look like?"
