Two speakers argue that paid-seat counts don't reveal whether users actually love a product. Look instead at usage patterns: how spread out it is across the day, whether people use it on weekends, and whether they keep coming back. There's no universal metric. A tool designed for continuous use that gets checked once a month signals no love.
You can always get meaningful retention numbers, right? If people like— I'm not saying like measure shelfware, I'm not saying measure like how many like paid seats you have, because yeah, that may be a total nonsense number that has to do with how much is being bought. But you can certainly measure usage, you can certainly see like, okay, are actual human beings like interacting with it? If they are, that's already a good sign, because even if they're interacting with it but they don't like it very much, If they keep interacting with it, that's not bad. Usually people won't, like literally won't do what they don't like, especially if you're talking about knowledge workers. You really can't force them to do very much in the long term. So you can still look at usage, although not necessarily at things like active, you know, like paid seats or anything. And you can look at things, you can look for other signs that people are using it like more than their absolute minimum. You know, are there— what are the different times of day are they using it? Are they concentrating all the usage in like one 10-minute block because that's like when they're like, okay, I got to get this out of the way, or are they like spreading it out throughout the day? Are they using it at all on weekends or something? Like you can, you can try to say, um, how do I actually know that people like this thing? And, and look at the retention. Now there's lots of other metrics like NPS.
Sorry if I interrupt you on occasion. When you say something like that, that's super important because I don't think there is a silver bullet. It's really, if you build a product, your product and its love is something that you need to think about what to track, right? Because to the point that brought up about the enterprise product by Kryll, if you know If someone uses it throughout the day, if it's like a certain type of product that could be used throughout the day, but no one is using it throughout the day, it's probably a sign they don't love it, right? So it's really product dependent. And you need to say to yourself, let me paraphrase that, what are the metrics for this particular product in this particular industry that would show they love it?
