Guides organized by user journey stage: from first touch to long-term retention.
Feature adoption metrics answer a question that ships-it culture loves to avoid: did anyone actually use the thing we built? Teams celebrate a launch, watch a release-day spike, and move on — never noticing that the feature flatlined a week…
North Star Metrics get picked in a hurry and regretted at leisure. A team needs “one number to rally around,” someone suggests signups or pageviews, everyone nods, and six months later the metric is going up while the business is…
By the time a SaaS user cancels, you’ve already lost. The cancellation is the announcement, not the decision — that decision was made weeks earlier, after a series of behavioral signals that almost nobody bothered to track. The good news…
Every product team I’ve worked with eventually starts looking at retention curves. And almost every team gets the same three things wrong on their first attempt: they pick the wrong cohort window, they confuse rolling retention with classic retention, and…
Most SaaS founders I talk to can name their conversion rate to the second decimal. Almost none can tell me what fraction of their signups become activated users — because they haven’t decided what activation means. That’s the gap this…
I’ve seen cohort grids used to justify bad investment decisions at least three times. Each time, the problem wasn’t the data — the grid was correct. The problem was misreading it: comparing incomplete cohorts, averaging paid and free users into…
Reading time: 8 min · Last updated: March 2026 Every product has a moment where a new user “gets it.” Slack’s was 2,000 messages. Dropbox’s was uploading the first file. Finding and tracking your aha moment is the single highest-leverage…
Standard ecommerce tracking gives you four events — view_item, add_to_cart, begin_checkout, purchase — and calls anything in between “abandonment.” For one DACH apparel client in 2024, those four events left us blind to 38% of the drop-off. The biggest losses…
Reading time: 9 min · Last updated: March 2026 Acquisition is the funnel stage that gets the most budget and the worst tracking. Teams spend thousands on ads but can’t tell you which channel actually brought their best customers. I’ve…
B2B products don’t convert in a single session. A buyer researches for weeks, loops in stakeholders, requests a demo, negotiates a contract, and finally signs — often months after the first touch. Standard e-commerce tracking can’t capture this. You need…