Stop pouring traffic into a leaky bucket
If users don’t stick, more traffic just means more people leaving, so fix retention before buying traffic.
It’s tempting to treat every growth problem as a traffic problem. Run ads, chase a viral post, launch somewhere new. But if most new users quietly vanish after week one, you’re pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it. More water, same empty bucket.
Sam Altman’s Startup Playbook, distilled from YC’s advice to founders, names the trap: “The common mistake here is to focus on signups and ignore retention.” He argues retention matters as much to growth as acquiring new users, tells founders not to plan to grow by buying users, and notes that sales and marketing can speed up growth but won’t save you without a great product.
Before your next marketing push, check the bucket. Group users by the week they signed up and see what share are still active four and eight weeks later. If every group keeps sliding toward zero, spend the next sprint on onboarding and the core product, not on ads. When the curve flattens out, turn up the tap.
The example
- Instead of
- “Signups were flat, so we doubled the ad budget.”
- Try
- “Signups were flat, so we called 10 users who churned and fixed the top reason they left.”
Before you flush
Pull last month’s signups, count how many were active this week, and write that percentage at the top of your growth plan.