Article

How to measure cohort retention

Olga Berezovsky · Lenny's Newsletter Freemium Intermediate

Retention on the exact flow you shipped is one of the signals your short answer names, and this is the hands-on guide to measuring it. It explains cohorts, retention curves, and the difference between a curve that flattens (people keep using it) and one that decays to zero. This is how you tell a launch from a working feature.

  • Group users by when they started, then track how many come back each period
  • A curve that flattens means real retention, a curve that hits zero means you have nothing
  • Look at the flow the feature touches, not just overall app retention
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The question it answers

  1. How do I know when something we shipped is actually working versus just launched?

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