10 years growing apps to 30M+ users — finally saying hi

Hey PH, I'm Zach! Long time lurker finally taking the time to introduce myself and connect with the other makers here.

Previously I built 0 - 1 products in the mobile gaming space. At Peoplefun, I built Wordscapes and took it to 150M+ downloads. I went on to build a few more titles that now sit in the top charts of their respective genres.

A lot of the heavy work came down to obsessing over user friction and improving retention. Asking myself, "what stands in the way of our users and their goals?" I learned many valuable lessons AB testing notification prompts, review prompts, first-time-user-experience (FTUE) sequences, and monetization levers.

These days I work independently with early-stage mobile apps to help them fix retention by surfacing these friction points and looking at early retention metrics.

I'm here because I want to be useful to this community, so feel free to reach out! If you're launching a mobile app and you have questions about why your users aren't sticking around, I'd love to share my experience.

Anyone here with a retention or onboarding problem? I'd love to know what's top of mind for the builders here.