Essay

The Power User Curve: The Best Way to Understand Your Most Engaged Users

Li Jin and Andrew Chen · Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Free Intermediate

This is the essay that reframes the whole question. Instead of asking whether your DAU/MAU is high enough, it tells you to look at the histogram of how many days per month people actually use the product, and it says plainly that not every product should have a daily-use curve. For a low-frequency product, that is the honest starting point: match the metric to the real shape of usage instead of forcing a daily lens that will always look like failure.

• DAU/MAU is a single blunt number that hides the variance in how often your users return; the power user curve shows the full distribution of active days per month.
• A flat or right-skewed curve is not automatically bad. Some product categories (professional, investment, and other infrequent-use tools) are healthy at low daily engagement.
• Pick a frequency lens that fits how people naturally get value, then track whether a real core segment keeps coming back at that cadence.