Retention is a key pillar of successful apps

User retention, in the simplest sense, is about keeping users sticking around, the true measure of a product's value. Trying to monetize an app without securing retention might work to a certain level in the short run, but it will never bring real continuous growth. The most fundamental way to build lasting retention is building a solid product that delivers value; various tricks around paywalls, A/B testing, and sign-up methods come after that.

Some of the knowledge shared by Andy Carvell

• On retention: "Why is retention important: this is really, for me, the measure of the value of the product. You really need to have users coming back over the long term. If they're coming back time and time again, it shows that they're getting some value out of the product. For me, it's a really key measure of product-market fit." "Things like push notifications, email marketing, mobile Internet messages, gamification, these kinds of things which are great boosters for retention."
• On onboarding: "The classic wisdom is to keep it short, cut out screens, get them through the onboarding as quickly as possible." "There's also a train of thought and data to back it up that the more that you show interest in the customer earlier on, you ask them a lot of questions, you get them to actually invest a little bit of themselves into that process, then they get the feeling that the subsequent experience is going to be more personal and more personalized to them."
• On data: "You're going to need to have some basic analytics in there right from the start. There's not really any point in waiting until later to get a good foundation of analytics set up." "You don't have so much data to play with when you are early on. But what you can do to bring to the table some data, which is still very valuable, even if not quantitative, and that's user testing, user interviews, getting that qualitative understanding of how users are using your product."

More about Andy Carvell

Andy has over 20 years of experience in the mobile industry. His company, Phiture, is a Berlin-based mobile growth consultancy and agency co-founded in 2016 with Moritz Daan, with over 110 employees. Prior to Phiture, Andy led the user retention team at SoundCloud in Berlin. Andy published the Mobile Growth Stack in 2015, widely adopted as an essential framework for mobile marketers, which he continues to develop.