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How To Keep Your Users | Startup School
7 segments available
At YC our motto is make something people want. But how do you actually know if you’ve accomplished that in the early days? One of the best ways to measure successful growth is a concept called cohort retention, which tracks the fraction of new users that come back time and time again to use your product. In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner David Lieb explains how to define cohorts, track active users and determine the appropriate time frame for measuring successful retention rates. Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:43 - Cohort Retention 02:31 - Key Insight 05:21 - Best action to pick. 10:29 - What is good? 14:49 - Ways to fool yourself 21:27 - Ways to improve the curve 26:43 - Conclusion 29:05 - Outro
Segments Timeline
Understanding Cohort Retention
David Lieb introduces the concept of cohort retention, emphasizing its importance in determining whether a startup has created something people want. He shares his personal experience of misunderstanding cohort retention during a pitch, highlighting the need for a quantitative approach to measure user engagement over time.
"[Music] hi everyone I'm David Lee I am a group partner here at YC YC has a famously simple motto make something people want I think it's the purest statement of the job of startup Founders and we talk..."
Defining User Cohorts
In this segment, David explains how to define user cohorts for tracking retention. He discusses grouping new users based on their first interaction with the product, and how to slice these cohorts by various dimensions such as time, region, or acquisition method to gain deeper insights into user behavior.
"okay so the key insight and the reason it's called cohort retention um is that we're going to track individual groups of new users or cohorts over time instead of trying to look at the user base or al..."
Identifying Active Users
David discusses the importance of defining what constitutes an 'active user' for measuring cohort retention. He suggests selecting specific actions that correlate with user engagement, using examples from popular apps like Instagram and Uber to illustrate how to effectively track user activity.
"one that is really correlated with the user getting real value from your product and you want to try to filter away things where a user might be touching your product in some way but not getting real ..."
Choosing the Right Time Frame
This segment focuses on selecting the appropriate time frame for measuring user retention. David explains how the frequency of user interaction with a product should dictate the granularity of the time period used for tracking, providing examples for different types of applications.
"I know you're thinking what is good how do I know if my cohort retention curves are good or if they're really bad so before I tell you the answer let's walk through an exaggerated example and maybe yo..."
Measuring Cohort Retention: The Triangle Chart
David introduces the triangle chart as a method for visualizing cohort retention over time. He explains how to track users from different cohorts month by month, emphasizing the importance of counting each user only once per time period to accurately assess retention trends.
"this is something to be consciously aware of and also realize that your unconscious brain is going to push you to widen your cohorts even though you probably shouldn't at bump This was um a mistake I ..."
Analyzing Retention Trends
In this segment, David discusses how to analyze retention trends by normalizing cohort data to percentages. He explains the significance of understanding user engagement relative to the initial cohort size, which helps in evaluating the effectiveness of retention strategies.
"the most obvious way is to improve your product come up with new use cases maybe it should do something completely different maybe you need to speed up your product or reduce latency somewhere make th..."
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
David wraps up the discussion on cohort retention, summarizing the key insights shared throughout the video. He emphasizes the importance of understanding user behavior and retention metrics for startup success, encouraging founders to apply these concepts in their own ventures.
"good okay so hopefully now you have a pretty good idea of actually how to measure cohort retention curves and how to decide if what you see in those curves is good or bad to conclude I kind of want to..."