Dan Hockenmaier

Uber and Lyft both guarantee high first-week earnings for drivers. Why? Some new drivers get unlucky — bad area, cancellations — and think the platform pays $3/hr and never return. Homogenizing that first experience pulls bad outliers to average and dramatically improves retention.

Share of wallet is the most underrated marketplace metric. It measures depth, not breadth. For Faire, it's what % of a retailer's shelf came from Faire vs. elsewhere. Depth always beats breadth — a deeper relationship predicts future retention and defensibility.

Working on resurrecting churned users is almost always a mistake. That pool is people who tried your product and decided they don't want it. It's much higher leverage to focus on new users. Don't spin up resurrection efforts until you've exhausted early-funnel work.

The biggest wins in retention come from the earliest user experience. At 3-6-12 months out, customers have already formed strong opinions. But in that first experience, you can prove your product's value and dramatically shift long-term retention curves.

One of the most common analytical failure modes: 'our best users do X, so let's make other users do X.' It almost never works. There's something unique about those customers driving that behavior. Correlational exercises are nearly worthless for improving retention.

When working on retention, rarely should you go straight to email or push notifications. Retention is the culmination of the entire product experience. Work on core product levers — especially depth of supply — not growth product levers.