7-day retention: where most new users disappear

In this episode of Datadrivet, Joni Lindgren and Jasmin Yaya look at 7-day retention: the share of new users still around a week after signup. It decides whether acquisition spend pays off at all.

A company Jasmin had contacted was losing 80% of its new registrations. People signed up and never came back.

The fix, they argue, usually comes from a better first-time experience rather than from more traffic or more features. Design the first 7 days so that a new user actually gets going.

They give three practical steps:

• Build the chart first. Plot signup day on the x-axis and retained users on the y-axis.
• Plan the first 7 days of the user experience before launch.
• Test fixes one at a time and iterate.

The hosts name products worth studying for a new user’s first week: Trello, Mentimeter, Blocket, Memmo, Shopify, and Havenly.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for the examples in detail. To see whether your own retention curve is normal for your model, run the benchmark tool: https://benchmark.scilla.studio