Retention Mastery
8 concepts · ~35 min · Intermediate
Master the full retention stack: from first-touch onboarding to long-term health monitoring. Learn why the fastest-growing companies obsess over keeping customers, not just acquiring them.
What You'll Learn
- ✓Measure Time to Value and reduce it below 10 minutes for self-serve products
- ✓Redesign onboarding using the 'value-before-setup' pattern that doubles activation rates
- ✓Build a DAU/MAU dashboard and define meaningful engagement tiers for your product
- ✓Construct a weighted health score model that predicts churn 60-90 days in advance
- ✓Calculate the revenue impact of a 5% improvement in monthly retention rate
Time to Value
Retention
💡 The Concept
Time to Value (TTV) measures how long it takes a new user to experience the core benefit of your product — their 'aha moment.' Slack's TTV is minutes: send one message, get an instant reply. Enterprise software TTV can stretch to 90+ days, during which 40-60% of users abandon. Research by Totango shows that products achieving TTV under 5 minutes retain 2.5x more users in month 1 than those with TTV over 1 hour.
⚠️ The Trap
The trap is confusing 'account created' with 'value received.' Most analytics dashboards track signups, not activations. A SaaS tool might report 10,000 new users this month while only 2,000 ever completed setup. Those 8,000 incomplete setups aren't lost leads — they're users who experienced zero value and will never return. Measuring signups instead of TTV hides an 80% failure rate.
🎯 The Action
Map your activation steps: what specific action proves a user 'got it'? For Calendly, it's booking your first meeting. For Figma, it's designing your first frame. Measure TTV as median time from signup to that action. Target: under 10 minutes for self-serve products, under 7 days for B2B tools. Reduce TTV by removing every setup step that doesn't directly lead to the aha moment — Dropbox cut onboarding from 14 steps to 4 and saw a 60% increase in activation.
Knowledge Check
Challenge coming soon for this concept.