500 users, 100 come back. then we talk

Someone pitched me with 250,000 users. I wasn’t interested. Someone else had 500 users and 100 of them came back every week. Very interested.

This is the only unbiased signal I’ve found. Retention. You can’t fake Google Analytics. You can’t fake Dune. You can inflate signups with incentives, you can buy a launch spike, you can get 100,000 wallets from a points program. None of it tells me anything. 100 people who return without being paid tells me everything.

The whole industry made the same mistake for four years: growth without retention. A foundation sends you 10,000 users, a month later there are zero. Waste of everyone’s money. So now the rule inside Monad is simple. Bring retention and we’ll 10x you. No retention, and all we’re doing is retweeting you. Simple maths.

The bar is lower than you think. 2,000 users with 30 percent weekly retention beats 100,000 with 3 percent. You don’t need audited contracts or a finished app. Just 500 people, and 100 of them coming back, and a core loop they’re coming back for. The action they repeat. That’s the product. Everything else is decoration.

How I coach early teams is a game of ping pong. Go get 100 users this week. DM them personally. Come back Friday. Okay, now can those 100 do one repeatable action? That’s your core loop. Next week, again. I’m pushing sludge through a pipe. I’m the bottleneck on purpose, so you can’t skip the unglamorous step.

And measure it from day one. Install PostHog or Google Analytics before you launch. Put UTM tags on everything. You’d be shocked how many funded teams run ad campaigns with no attribution and call it intuition. If you look at one number every week, your subconscious starts optimising for it. Make that number retention.

the call where i said it best

A well-funded consumer app sent me their analytics expecting praise. Good sessions, average duration 33 minutes. Retention floor was zero. Then what the fuck are you doing? Forget the funnel, forget the next feature. Fix the leaky bucket. Once it holds water, I’ll fill it.

do this this week

Pull last month’s cohort. Count how many came back in week two. If it’s under 10 percent, cancel the launch and talk to the ones who did.

the line to remember

someone who has 100,000 users but 3 percent retention is actually less interesting than someone who has 2,000 users with 30 percent retention.