Showerthought: Founders chasing vanity metrics while ignoring churn has me scratching my head

I mean, I keep hearing about startups celebrating user acquisition numbers that look great on paper, but their actual engagement is plummeting. Maybe it's just me, but it feels like we're optimizing for the wrong signals. Idk, I saw a pitch deck recently that boasted millions of downloads, yet the retention graph was a straight nosedive after week one. It's confusing why so much emphasis is placed on growth at all costs, rather than building something people actually stick with. I'm genuinely curious if this is a symptom of current funding environments or something else entirely.

3 comments

3 Comments

ryanperez9d ago

Watched a friend's startup burn through a Series A celebrating "activated users" while their actual weekly active numbers were secretly collapsing. They'd plaster metrics like "10,000 signups this month" all over investor updates, but the product team knew 90% of those accounts never made it past the onboarding splash page. The founders were so busy hunting the next growth hack that they missed the screaming feedback in their support inbox about a broken core feature. By the time they finally looked at cohort retention, the runway was too short to fix it.

xenarobinson4d ago

My old team had the same problem with vanity metrics. We forced ourselves to ignore signups and only talk about weekly actives in meetings, which hurt at first but finally got us to fix the broken onboarding flow.

faithyoung8d ago

Is that actually a fatal mistake though? Look, maybe in the very early days you need those flashy numbers just to get the attention and funding to even have a shot at fixing the product. If you don't show some kind of growth spike, you're dead in the water before you can even address retention. Sure, it's messy and maybe a bit dishonest, but the whole system feels set up to reward that theater. They're probably just buying time to figure things out before the music stops.