Just met with an advisor and got a wakeup call. entrepreneur how earn by blogging blog

Hi friends,

I got a (very kind) lashing by an advisor today. The long and short of it is this:

Even though our product is insanely valuable and we have raving, paying customers... our retention is not good enough to spend time marketing.

I am sharing because I need to synthesize this meeting and because I know some of you will benefit from hearing this too.

As context, I am the founder of a productivity app startup that is very early stage (a few hundred users). The source of the advice is one of the world's pre-eminent product experts and an experienced startup advisor.

How did we go wrong?

If there is a villain in this story, it's the advice that we all hear constantly: Growth is everything.

Grow grow GROW!

And, that's not wrong. But it can be hard to apply in context.

In our case, we have a product with proven value, i.e. 95% of our users say that using it improves their productivity by at least 50%. We got so jazzed up thinking we had solved the problem. I suppose I didn't fully internalize that solving the problem doesn't matter unless your users keep using the product. That sounds obvious but I was still able to ignore bad retention numbers because (a) I use the product religiously, (b) I can list 20 others who use it religiously, (c) I get raving emails from users frequently. And we see everywhere, "it's better to have X users who love you than 100X who are lukewarm". So, I figured, heck, we're doing great! But, in aggregate, the numbers don't lie, and "love" really needs to translate into RETENTION!!! :)

Meanwhile, I had shifted a lot of my attention to marketing. Not all of it, but certainly a lot. Plus, some really cool marketing opportunities have started to crystallize, and I got increasingly excited, saw huge possibilities, and wanted to execute. (I just opened my todo list and lo and behold, I had ZERO todos in my Product bucket and like 5 in Marketing lol.)

This week I was taking a walk and noticed how viscerally I feel like we are not focusing enough, but I couldn't untangle that or figure out what to do about it. I even started writing out some OKRs, and I was literally writing about how we need to FOCUS but then I included like 7 objectives for the next few months. It was anything but focused, even if I claimed that as my goal.

The advice

So I sat down with my advisor today and he said, point blank: You should stop thinking about marketing until you've fixed your retention problem."

He cited early Snapchat investor Jeremy Liew, who lays out his criteria in this Recode article:

“If your app has hit at least 10k DAU with strong engagement (25%+ DAU/MAU, at least 3 sessions/day), retention (30%+ d30 retention — that’s d30, not month 1) and growth (30%+ month on month growth), I’d like to hear from you!”

But he also said, roughly, that if you can point to really exciting retention and engagement numbers, the raw DAU size/numbers are much less important. You can pour gas on that fire and it will blow up, and that's a story he can bring to Jeremy and have Jeremy ready to cut a multi-million dollar check.

I haven't fully digested all this yet but it's likely that we'll make d30 retention our north star and focus completely on improving that, until we hit the number we want.

A request

If you would be willing to use our app and provide feedback on how we can provide a better onboarding UX (in app, email) and suggestions on how to do a better job getting you to come back, I would love that: www.focusmate.com.

I recognize this is a big request and if you'd like I would be happy to do the same for you. Just post your feedback and ideas below and let me know your product link.

Thanks so much.

Best, Taylor

submitted by /u/taylorjacobson
[link] [comments]

from Entrepreneur http://ift.tt/2j3pFYX
via IFTTT
add adsense to blogger

how much money do bloggers make? can blogs make money? make money off ads how to get money from blogging? best websites to make money blog adsense income earn from blogging website ideas to make money how websites make money?