I’ve stated a number of times that, within the context of the freemium model, retention is the most important metric a product manager must track; in the Minimum Viable Metrics methodology, retention is the top-most of the top-line metrics. Retention is not only a proxy measurement for customer delight, but it’s also the input for [...]
(Dashboard template can be found here; source code on GitHub here) In freemium mobile, my experience has been that the principles of the Minimum Viable Product as a product strategy are respected but sometimes necessarily abandoned because the concept isn’t perfectly transferable to mobile platforms. The MVP approach was designed for a platform (the web) that allows [...]
It’s interesting to see the debate around mobile vs. web first erupt again for the consumer web (see here and here), as this topic was mostly put to bed in gaming about a year ago when the largest developers transitioned from Facebook to mobile. Zynga appears to be the last holdout on that front, as even Wooga is [...]
I read this piece on GigaOM the other day about what VCs look for when investing in gaming start-ups, and this bit caught my eye: Hyatt’s number one metric for games that interest him as investment prospects: Day-one retention, i.e. whether new users come back the next day to play. This is an especially important way [...]
The most fundamental concept in paid user acquisition, the Lifetime Customer Value / Cost per Acquisition spread describes how much profit each acquired user produces (the “spread” being the difference between the two values). But while the concept may be fairly simple to grasp, the actual calculation of these values can be nuanced. Many things [...]
Lifetime Customer Value (abbreviated as LCV or LTV, depending on the organization) is defined simply as the present value of future revenues attributed to a user — basically, the present value of everything that a user will ever spend on a product or service. LCV is easy to calculate for some organizations — for instance, [...]
The term “growth hacker” has become ubiquitous on tech blogs and Quora over the past few months; it is meant to describe a marketer with coding skills who is singularly focused on userbase growth through testing-based iterative development.
Part Two I’ve written about how I think the business intelligence field is currently experiencing a bubble, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t value business intelligence; it simply means that I think that most companies fall down a technological rabbit hole when building out their business intelligence infrastructure, over-investing in systems that they don’t really [...]
Part Two Understanding how much money your customers spend is the core of marketing strategy: you can’t acquire users if you don’t know how much they’re worth. Lifetime Customer Value (LCV, although I’ve seen it represented as CLV and LTV) as a dashboard-level metric provides critical insight into how a service monetizes.
I like to think about mobile app metrics as a royal family: Retention is King, Conversion is Queen, and Virality is the Princess. Extending this metaphor, LCV (lifetime customer value) is the brooding, well-intentioned-but-misunderstood Lancelot-type knight: he’s absolutely integral to the success of the kingdom, but he’s completely inscrutable and enigmatic, and he’s often at [...]
