Leading indicators beat lagging outcomes

Retention is a terrible thing to goal on. It's almost impossible to drive in a meaningful way in a short term. Ultimately, you want to find a short-term metric you can measure that drives a long-term output.

The metric that I think is slightly more actionable is a little harder to define, but so much more helpful in my opinion. It's what I call a market health metric, and this is basically think of your proxy that is the best predictor of your liquidity.

There is no such thing as a long feedback loop. And the way you choose to shorten the feedback loop is to say, what are the things that are correlated with the outcome that I eventually desire?

Amazon's flywheel refers to their business model framework from "Good to Great" showing how lower prices lead to more customers, more sellers, lower costs, and back to lower prices.

We identified these things on our flywheel. And this identification of these things was such a critical moment for the company because then it realized, 'Okay. Well, what we need to do is spend our time focusing on how do I measure each one of those things, and then how do I improve each one of those things?'