Retention (User retention rate)
Retention is the share of users from a given start period who are still using, or still paying for, your product after a set amount of time.
Worked example (made-up numbers)
50 people sign up in the first week of March. One week later, 20 of them use the product again. Four weeks later, 12 still do. Eight weeks later, 11 still do.
Week-1 retention is 20 ÷ 50 = 40%, week-4 is 24%, week-8 is 22%. The line drops fast, then flattens. That flat part is the good news: a group of people keeps using it.
Retention and churn
They look at the same thing from opposite sides. Churn counts who left in a period; retention counts who’s still there. For paying customers, say monthly churn is 5%: monthly retention is then 95%.
The difference in practice: retention is usually measured on users (are they still using it?), and churn on paying customers (are they still paying?). A product can keep its paying customers and still lose most free users, or the reverse.
Why it matters when you’re starting out
Retention is the clearest early sign that you built something people need. Growth without retention is filling a bucket with a hole in it: every new user replaces one who left.
What matters most is whether the curve flattens. A line that keeps falling towards zero means nobody sticks, however many sign up. A line that flattens, even at a low level, means some group of people found real value, and your job is to find more people like them.
How to measure it
- Pick what “still using” means: came back and did the main thing, not just opened a page.
- Group users by the week or month they signed up.
- For each group, count how many are still active one, four and eight weeks later.
- Compare groups: are newer groups retaining better than older ones?
With fewer than a few dozen users per group, read it as a direction, not a precise number.
In Nordva Launch
Launch doesn’t draw retention curves. It gives you the parts: returning visitors in analytics (when visits may carry a visitor id), goals for the action that means “still using it”, and, with Stripe connected (read-only, every plan), paying customers, cancellations and monthly customer churn. For full retention curves of product usage, a product analytics tool fits better.