Retention Engagement

# Retention & Engagement - All Guest Insights

*29 guests, 47 mentions*

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## Albert Cheng
*Albert Cheng*

> "User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one."

**Insight:** Retention is the primary driver of success for consumer subscriptions, as it reduces the pressure for immediate monetization.

**Tactical advice:**
- Focus on retention before aggressive day-one upselling.

*Timestamp: 00:00:18*

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> "When you lose a game now as opposed to surfacing your blunders and your horrible stuff that you did, we flip it on its head and so we show you your brilliant moves, your best moves, and we have coach say something encouraging, 'Losing, just part of learning, keep it up.' That type of thing. That change alone was pretty dramatic for us. It grew game reviews by 25%, subscriptions by 20%, user retention by a lot as well."

**Insight:** Positive reinforcement after a failure (like losing a game) can significantly improve engagement and retention compared to highlighting mistakes.

**Tactical advice:**
- Audit product feedback loops to ensure they are encouraging rather than discouraging after a user failure.
- Surface 'brilliant moves' or successes even in a losing context.

*Timestamp: 00:12:04*

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> "I think when you have your D one retention somewhere around the 30 or 40% mark, that's quite solid I think for a consumer app. If it's much lower than that, then sometimes I might question the intent of the user or the ability for that, you to I guess acquire just mathematically acquire enough users such that you can grow a big enough daily active user base."

**Insight:** A 30-40% Day 1 retention rate is a healthy benchmark for consumer applications to sustain growth.

**Tactical advice:**
- Benchmark Day 1 retention at 30-40% to validate product-market fit and acquisition scalability.

*Timestamp: 00:29:42*

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> "It's actually worth spending some time making sure that that resurrected, for lack of a better word, experience inside the product is really excellent and that you find novel ways to try to bring them back."

**Insight:** For mature products, the pool of dormant users is often larger than new users, making resurrection a high-leverage growth lever.

**Tactical advice:**
- Create a specific 'resurrected user experience' that helps returning users catch up or re-onboard.
- Use social notifications (e.g., 'your friend joined') to trigger resurrection.

*Timestamp: 00:33:00*

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> "Jorge actually had this model of gamification patterns having essentially three pillars to it. You have the core loop, you have the metagame, and then you have the profile."

**Insight:** Effective gamification requires a tight core loop, a long-term metagame for motivation, and a profile that reflects user investment.

**Tactical advice:**
- Build a core loop that rewards daily habits.
- Implement a metagame (like leaderboards or paths) for long-term striving.
- Ensure the user profile reflects their accumulated progress and investment.

*Timestamp: 01:05:08*


## Alexander Embiricos
*Alexander Embiricos*

> "One of the things that I'm constantly reminding myself of is that a tool like Codex naturally is a tool that you would become a power user of... it's just critically important to go look at your D7 retention. Just go try the product, sign up from scratch again."

**Insight:** For AI tools, Day 7 retention is a critical health metric to ensure the product is providing immediate, repeatable value rather than just novelty.

**Tactical advice:**
- Prioritize D7 retention as a primary success metric
- Regularly dogfood the 'first-mile' experience by signing up from scratch to identify onboarding friction

*Timestamp: 00:55:51*


## Aishwarya Naresh Reganti + Kiriti Badam
*Aishwarya Naresh Reganti + Kiriti Badam*

> "In ChatGPT, if you are liking the answer, you can actually give a thumbs up. Or if you don't like the answer, someti