Jacqui Riggins

Everyone says build your personal brand first. For B2B I agree. With LifeLines (medical software) people want to know exactly who's behind it before they trust you with their practice.

But for a consumer app? Nobody downloaded their calorie tracker because they liked the founder. They downloaded it because a friend showed them or it looked fun. The product has to speak for itself.

Our automated exit survey asked only one multiple choice question. Options included missing features or pricing. Eighty percent of churned users chose the pricing option. This made us think we needed to change our price tiers. That was a mistake.

When we sent emails to a few of those churned users we learned that churned users left because the setup process was too slow not because of the cost. Churned users used the pricing answer as a cover to avoid explaining further.

We swapped the generic multiple choice form for a text box. We also gave a reward for a real explanation. The written feedback told us where the friction lay and we fixed it.

Never rely on cancellation checkboxes alone. Use qualitative follow up to discover why churned users really leave.

For a long time we looked at total daily page views and the number of registered accounts as our main signs of growth. Those easy to see numbers made us feel good each morning. Did not tell us if people were getting real value from the software.

We stopped looking at of-funnel traffic completely and started focusing on one retention measure: whether a new user finished our main setup process within their first ten minutes. If they completed that step their thirty-day retention rate went above sixty percent.

That single measure became our guide for every product change and every engineering project. If a new design caused fewer people to finish the setup process we changed it back away even if it looked nice.

What one user action do you follow to check involvement, with the product instead of just simple activity?