The Three Things For Curious Minds v4
Hi there,
Hope you’ve had a great week. I’m excited to share my 4th consecutive Saturday newsletter shaped by things I am curious about each week. This little newsletter has gone 97 to 114 people since the last edition so join me in welcoming the new readers :)
Keeping up with this habit of shipping a newsletter each week has done wonders for my curiosity. I’m naturally reading more essays, collecting more gems through the week, and overall producing more content as you’ll notice fro my recent tweets. Writing this also helped me to stumble upon another interesting newsletter idea which I’m so thrilled to pursue. It’s called Build In Public and I think you’ll like it.
Let’s get rolling with this edition:
📰 AN ESSAY WORTH SHARING:
When exploring products that have only been in market for a short amount of time, the behavior of power users is often more interesting and important than any aggregate metrics. If the goal is to “make something people want,” then continuously talking to and observing early power users is the only way to really understand what drives both user retention and non-user activation. Pay particular attention to the following three things:
1) Durable retention that proves users are here to stay:
Since the early adopters often carry the strongest intent to experiment with different products, what features will win them over for the long run? Even if there aren’t many of them, are the early users sticking around? Are they using your product every single day? For those who churn, do you know why? And for others who pop up but never convert into using the product at all, what explains their rationale? Do users who activate with a work email reflect a stronger intent to stay than personal email addresses perusing Product Hunt every morning? Are there specific activity thresholds in the product that suck users in so deeply that they’re more likely to stick around?
2) Engagement depth that maps to the natural user behavior:
How well user behavior maps to what you’d expect if they really loved the product reveals if you’ve actually made the right product for the right user. How well does the frequency of user engagement map to the natural cadence of the underlying activity? Though it depends on the product, this dynamic should show up empirically in user frequency (e.g. DAU/MAU, WAU/MAU, L7, L30, etc) and activity depth (e.g. average session length, aggregate time per day, etc). Seeing users only in a product for an hour each week could be great for a tool in use during a 1:1 with their manager, but underwhelming for a communication workflow that happens daily.
3) User testimony that evangelizes the value:
Does the qualitative feedback from users reflect that they are desperate for your product? Do they talk about it as if it’s changed their lives at work? Is it up to 10x better than the status quo? Rahul at Superhuman anchors around how many users would respond “very disappointed” if they lost access to the product as a powerful signal. The gap between “disappointed” and “very disappointed” could be the difference between users who churn within a week and users who will put up with all the bugs in early versions of the product.Source: Product-User Fit Comes Before Product-Market Fit by Peter Lauten and David Ulevitch
🐦 A TWEET WORTH SHARING
“Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.”
Source: @naval
🚀 A PRODUCT WORTH SHARING:
Screenshot Essays: All that's fit to print on a single iPhone screenshot.
