One metric should capture retention, engagement and growth

We really focus on one key metric as it relates to tracking our growth or how we are doing. We call it D5, D7. A lot of other companies call it L5, L7. But the human explanation for that is how many people turn to Arc at least five days a week? That is all we obsess over from a metrics perspective, because for us it captures retention, engagement, and growth in a single metric.

There is no natural force that pulls companies towards thinking about the end user's enjoyment and success early in their journey. If there is nobody in the organization whose true incentive is to measure their end user success, their enjoyment, their happiness, their retention, their engagement early on, it will not happen.

"Made to Stick" is a book about making ideas memorable; the "sandbox" structure refers to adding constraints to make thinking more specific and concrete.

When you think about retention, that's just not specific enough. So there is this mental model that I use from made to stick where they'll tell you like, 'Lenny, think of everything in the world that is orange.' And you're like, 'An orange. What else?' And then if you change that structure with sandbox to think of everything orange that's in a construction site, then you really start to realize and grasp at concrete concepts.

Traditional marketing and sales models typically focus on customer acquisition metrics like conversion rates through sales funnels, rather than measuring what happens after purchase.

The vast, vast majority of these models don't take post-acquisition, retention, expansion, all of that into account. So yeah, in a nutshell, funnels are bad.