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Growth usually comes from the core
Growth from the core
Network-effect products want to grow on their own, so the lever is people already using or wanting to use the product for what it's for. Make it easier, faster, and more relevant for them. Almost every consumer product needs to optimize for daily use, because days are real: people live by the circadian rhythm, few things recur weekly, and few recur monthly, like paying bills.
Daily use arithmetic
The arithmetic is simple. A person who uses a product once a month is worth one thirtieth of a daily user, so it takes 30 of them to equal one. That is why the most effective consumer products have extremely high ratios of daily to monthly users, and why nudging that ratio up a few basis points can beat acquiring a pile of new monthly users and waiting to see whether they retain. The ratio is a form of retention: given you used the product today, what is the chance you use it tomorrow?
Snap's turnaround
Snap learned this after a disastrous redesign in 2018, the only time its overall daily users flattened quarter over quarter. The company then focused hard on performance, particularly on Android, making the app much faster for people already using it. That set off a growth renaissance that ran for multiple years.
Why does daily-to-monthly ratio measure stickiness?
The ratio divides the users who show up on a given day by the users who show up in a month, so it runs from 0 to 1. A ratio of 1 would mean every monthly user visits every day. Social companies popularized daily and monthly active users as headline metrics, and public ones such as Meta report both in earnings filings. A higher ratio means the product is part of a routine rather than an occasional errand.
Why does app speed affect usage?
A 2016 Google study of mobile web visits found that 53 percent were abandoned when a page took longer than three seconds to load. Slower responses interrupt the loop of tapping and seeing a result. On older and cheaper Android phones, the delay is larger because they have less memory and slower processors. That gap makes performance work especially valuable on low-end devices.
What went wrong in Snapchat's 2018 redesign?
The February 2018 redesign split friends' messages and Stories from publisher and creator content, which moved into a separate Discover section. Many users said the app became harder to use. A Change.org petition asking Snap to reverse the redesign gathered more than a million signatures. Snap later reworked the layout and the way it ordered Stories.
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