Was rereading Lenny’s How Duolingo Reignited User Growth and was hit by this assertion for driving growth:

Improving current user retention is more important than new user retention.

Excerpt:

We immediately saw that CURR (Current users retention rate**)** had a gigantic impact on DAU—5 times the impact of the second-best metric. In hindsight, the CURR finding made sense, because the Current User bucket has an interesting characteristic: current users who stay active return to the same bucket.

This produces a compounding effect, which means that CURR is much harder to move, but when it does, it will have a greater impact. Based on this analysis, we knew that CURR was the metric we had to move in order to get that strategic breakthrough we wanted. We decided to create a new team, the Retention Team, with CURR as its North Star metric.

One of the biggest benefits of focusing on CURR was deciding not to work on things that seemed paramount before, especially new-user retention. This was a huge mindset shift for a company that had tremendous success spending years running the bulk of its growth experiments on new users first.

After thinking about it, I strongly agree.

• We’ve gotten thousands of new users over the last few months, but that hasn’t led to growth.
  • The exception is bringing on the Destiny community. In a way, this was an upgrade to the core experience for those users (lots of destiny content & activity)
• Improving the product for current users has a giant multiplying effect because it plays out every day for them. New user experience improvements matter once.
• New users hitting barriers is temporary. If the product is good enough someone will remind them to try again.
• Sustained usage over long periods of time only comes from a valuable core experience. This is the one thing we must succeed at.

What does it mean to optimize current user retention?

Current user retention is mostly about people finding the app valuable and coming back.

• It’s the big things:
  • Content
    • Interesting, relevant, important markets
    • News through price changes or comments
  • Engaging mechanics
    • Feedback: unique bettor bonus, likes on your markets/comments
    • Going to the next ad in order to collect mana
  • Intrinsic user-goals
    • Answering your question by finding or creating a market
    • Getting to positive profit
  • Extrinsic user-goals
    • Keeping your streak going
    • Advancing to the next ranked league
    • Profit thresholds which we celebrate
• It’s not about:
  • Onboarding, teaching how to use the app
  • One-time dialogs, prompts
  • Investing in features that won’t be used much (E.g. API)
  • Polish & fixing paper-cuts in non-core areas

Today, users can open the Manifold app and see some updates in market probs and a handful of interesting markets in the feed. They aim to bet in one to keep their streak, then leave.

What more of value could Manifold be providing in each user-session?

Positive visions

• Scrolling the feed is really engaging with varied content including insightful or funny comments, relevant bets, relevant news articles. Leverages your followed users.
• Also in the feed as you scroll: Promoted markets which are targeted ads. If you view them for 10 seconds, they award you mana automatically.
  • This is a repeatable, fun mechanism which could dramatically increase feed usage. Users feel like they are getting paid and it surfaces interesting content.
  • Could extend to paid polls.
• Leagues — you are matched in a peer group with a similar activity level & weekly profit
  • You carefully bet in all league-eligible markets to try to progress from Silver to Gold level at the end of the week.