New user growth is generally a good thing. Generally.
There are times when a growing user base is an indicator of strong startup performance, and there are times when a growing user base is misleading at best and detrimental at worst. For the most part, telling the two apart begins by understanding the relationship between retained users and newly acquired users.
Simply put, retention metrics indicate how often people return to your product. With a few exceptions, retention is one of the most important indicators and a great starting point for further research in understanding whether or not your product is addressing a particular market need.
The origin of this question is the following: if you had the resources today, would you know how to deploy them in order to drive growth for your startup? Chances are you said “yes” and yet, the truth is that the overwhelming majority of founders will end up engaged in completely arbitrary activities and “best practices” at some point, myself included.
There is, however, a simple way of thinking about this, which should save you some time and resources.
Growth sounds empowering and exciting and it is of little surprise that a lot of founders are often very eager to begin working on growth-related activities in the infantile stages of their company. Yet the time and resources spent on these activities are often disproportionate to the output they produce, causing all kinds of trouble. Hence, I thought I’d share three prerequisites to growth that I think an early-stage company ought to address before turning to growth.
Continue reading Three Prerequisites Before You Start Working on Growth
Imagine you’re one of the few lucky founders who brought on a stellar team to execute a pretty viable business idea.
Everyone can feel you’re onto something, just a few more iterations and you’ll nail it. You’ll have Product-Market-Fit!
