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Facebook VP of Growth Alex Schultz: “Retention is the single-most important thing for growth”

January 12, 2024

In the clip below, Alex walks through how to calculate a retention curve for your startup. Basically you want to graph the percentage of monthly active users (y-axis) versus the number of days from acquisition (x-axis).

And as he explains:

“If you end up with a retention curve that asymptotes to a line parallel to the x-axis, you have a viable business, and you have product/market fit for some subset of market.”

If you do not have a retention curve that flattens out, you do not have product/market fit and none of the growth hacking or virality tactics that people love to talk about will work.

“Focus on getting to product market/fit… If you don’t have a great product, there’s no point executing well on growing it, because it won’t grow. The #1 problem I’ve seen inside Facebook for new products and the #1 problem I’ve seen for the startups I’ve advised has been that they don’t actually have product/market fit when they think they do.”