Meeting Andy Carvell — TGW #1
Hi, and welcome to The Growth Weekly.
In this weekly newsletter I’ll be talking about anything related to digital product growth, both drawn from my own experiences in the field and interesting articles around the web.
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Meeting Andy Carvell
Two weeks ago, I had the honor to meet Andy Carvell. Andy is one of the founding fathers of mobile growth. He developed the Mobile Growth Stack, which is a great overview of all competencies and activities within the field:
He spoke about running Retention audits for digital products. An often overlooked area of product growth. Did you know that losing 80% of your users in the first week is considered normal? Acquiring a lot of new users for your digital product is useless if your product fails to retain them for longer than a few days.
Determining what’s keeping your users coming back to your product is essential. Using tactics like marketing automation, new user experience and habit-forming can help you deliver this core value to your users early and often.
Growth = Retention curves, all day every day.
The goal with working on retention is twofold:
- Make the first drop in retained users less deep.
- Flat out the curve after the first drop, keeping it steady.
So the first thing is to onboard your users well, make them perform the critical action that kept other users coming back. Second thing is running the marathon and delivering this core value time after time.
Andy is a real master in using messaging strategies to increase retention rates. He has done so for products like Soundcloud and Headspace. Want to know how he works? It’s in the link below.
What’s next?
I hope you enjoyed this first newsletter on product growth and can now see why focusing on retention is important. But to accurately measure retention, you have to set up the right product analytics tools, so let’s get into this next week.
After that, we will get into growth accounting and modeling. This will enable you to make some predictions and show you what you should focus on next.
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