Writing on product work that we keep coming back to, gathered from across the internet.
Every title opens the original on the publisher’s own site. We point at this writing and credit the people who wrote it. We do not host it.
Benchmarks for user retention and net revenue retention across consumer, small business and enterprise, gathered from twenty growth practitioners. Gives you a number to compare against instead of a debate about whether your curve looks flat enough yet.
Balfour's argument is that products get shaped to fit channels and never the other way round. The worked examples from gaming and dating apps show what happens to a company when the channel underneath it moves.
Opens a series on the fits a company needs beyond product and market, taking in channel, business model and the market again. The description of the product death cycle will land with anyone whose growth plan is really a list of features.
Definitions for the measures investors ask about, grouped into business, product engagement and presentation. The closing section on chart tricks is quietly the most useful, because it shows how a number can be technically true and still mislead the reader.
Why acquisition channels decay over time, and what that implies for growth plans built on a channel that is working today.
The origin of the 40% very-disappointed benchmark, and how to run the survey it comes from.
Pricing and packaging advice organised by market type, from consumers through undifferentiated small businesses to sophisticated buyers, each with a real case behind it. McKenzie treats pricing as the easiest lever in the company to move, then says how often to move it.
Ties what you can charge per user to the channels able to reach them profitably at that price. Bring it to a pricing conversation, because it makes visible which acquisition routes a given price point quietly closes off.
A guest post working through why retention outweighs virality for long run user growth, with the arithmetic written out rather than asserted. Pairs well with the retention benchmarks when you are deciding where a growth team spends a quarter.
Closes the loop by asking whether the market is large enough at the price the business model requires. Read the essays as a set and you have a diagnostic for a growth plan that keeps stalling for reasons nobody can name.
A long reference covering unit economics, cohort analysis and the cash flow trough that catches growing subscription businesses. Skok's rules of thumb on lifetime value against acquisition cost get quoted everywhere, and here you get the reasoning underneath them.
Reframes growth as a closed loop where the output of one cycle becomes the input to the next, rather than a funnel needing to be refilled from the top. The loop diagram is the part teams end up redrawing on their own wall.