60% week-1 retention or you don't have product-market fit

Crystal is discussing weekly retention benchmarks - the percentage of users who return in their second week after signing up.

So assuming that the frequency is correct, so you have a weekly frequency, if users are coming back, if it's a free product, 60%. It has to be at least 60%. If it's a paid product, I usually look at that more as maybe 20 to 30%.

When you have your D one retention somewhere around the 30 or 40% mark, that's quite solid I think for a consumer app. If it's much lower than that, then sometimes I might question the intent of the user.

The "80%" refers to week-one user retention rates for early-stage startups testing their product with friends and family.

If you are much smaller, your friends and family that better be near close to 80% no matter what, because if you can't even convince the people who care about you to use the product, it probably isn't going to solve the job for anyone else.

The key to do that is, first of all, your product need to have a high enough frequency. If you are using this once per month, it's not likely you can build this into a habit... I worked at Acorns. We started as an investment app, and the whole thing is passive investment, passive investing. You bought some ETFs, and then you basically don't even need to check, and you just keep adding money and it will grow, and after 10 years is awesome. It's actually the right investment philosophy, but when I worked as a head of growth, it made a big challenge for me, because think about set and forget it. They don't even need to go back to a product to be successful.