Video · 20 min

How To Keep Your Users

Y Combinator Startup School (YouTube) Free Beginner

How To Keep Your Users

A plain-spoken talk on why retention, not the traffic spike, is the number that tells you if what you built is actually working. Good to watch right after a launch, while you still have a fresh cohort to track.

  • Retention is the metric that tells you if growth is real or just a leaky bucket
  • Talking to the users who left is as informative as talking to the ones who stayed
  • Small, fast product iterations based on retention data beat big redesigns
Watch on YouTube ↗

The question it answers

  1. How do I actually measure whether a launch worked, beyond the vanity upvotes and traffic spike?

Read with it

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  2. The reference primer on the metrics and market-sizing logic investors use, including bottom-up market sizing that keeps... a16z Article · ~15 min read 16 Startup Metrics Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
  3. The origin text for the modern MVP and validated-learning vocabulary every founder now uses. Read it for the mental model that... theleanstartup.com Book · ~330 pages The Lean Startup Eric Ries
  4. The definitive talk that reframes launching from a one-shot event into a repeatable tactic, exactly this category's thesis. YC... YC Startup Library Video · ~25 min How to Launch (Again and Again) Kat Manalac (Y Combinator)
  5. When there is no category report to point at, you have to build the number yourself, and this is the essay that teaches you... Andreessen Horowitz Essay · ~20 min read 16 More Startup Metrics Anu Hariharan, Frank Chen, Jeff Jordan
  6. PostHog gives you product analytics and session replay in one place, so you can see both what people did (events, funnels) and... posthog.com Tool PostHog PostHog
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