{"id":27820,"date":"2023-10-08T12:20:59","date_gmt":"2023-10-08T12:20:59","guid":{"rendered":"\/en\/?p=27820"},"modified":"2024-02-20T12:25:34","modified_gmt":"2024-02-20T12:25:34","slug":"you-might-be-choosing-the-wrong-unit-of-retention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/en\/you-might-be-choosing-the-wrong-unit-of-retention\/","title":{"rendered":"You might be choosing the wrong unit of retention"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I was meeting with a SaaS founder friend and she was frustrated with the potential churn in their product. She\u2019s spending a lot on gathering feedback, and the product team is working hard. But, she suspects most of what they\u2019re doing isn&#8217;t helping.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I also didn\u2019t know what they should be working on either, since I do not have the context of their situation. So, I asked her one question:&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;What\u2019s your measuring unit of retention? Is it revenue or product usage?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I almost always get an answer involving monthly\/yearly revenue retention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And this is a red flag for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p style=\"font-style:normal;font-weight:400\"><em><strong>Remember, revenue is an output while product usage is an input. You may earn a month or year\u2019s worth of revenue, but if the customers aren\u2019t using the product, they will churn when that period is up. And once a paying customer is churned. Winning them back is almost impossible.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-normal-font-size\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Maybe, you are measuring your retention perfectly. The percentage of users who are active in a given time period are increasing. But the real question would be: How deeply engaged are they during that time? For instance I measure my email \u2018opens per opener\u2019 as my true measure of engagement because the best emails tend to get opened many times and that act as a proxy for real value delivered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I hope it helps<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hey, startups! are you sure you\u2019re measuring retention right? Find out if you\u2019re missing the mark and how to fix it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29010,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1507],"tags":[1505],"class_list":["post-27820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsletter","tag-newsletter","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27820"}],"collection":[{"href":"\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27820"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29044,"href":"\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27820\/revisions\/29044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}