Andrew Chen wrote a blog post titled The Next Feature Fallacy: The fallacy that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product (2015).
« For people who love to build product, when something’s not working, it’s tempting to simply build more product. It leads to the launch-fail-relaunch cycle that I alluded to in a previous essay, Mobile app startups are failing like it’s 1999. However, this rarely works, and when you look at the metrics, it’s obvious why. »
« the precipitous drop-off between initially attracting a user versus the difficulty of retaining them over the first month. »
« Two mistakes are often made when designing features meant to bend this engagement curve:
- Too few people will use the feature. In particular, that the features target engaged/retained users rather than non-users and new users
- Too little impact is made when they do engage…
These mistakes are made because there’s often the well-intentioned instinct to focus on features that drive deep engagement. Of course you need a strong baseline of engagement, but at its extreme, this turns misguided because features that aren’t often used can’t bend the curve. A “day 7 feature” will automatically be used less than an experience tied to onboarding, since the tragic curve above shows that fewer than 4% of visitors will end up seeing it. »
« Picking the features that bend the curve requires a strong understanding of your user lifecycle.
First and foremost is maximizing the reach of your feature, so it impacts the most people. It’s a good rule of thumb that the best features often focus mostly on non-users and casual users, with the reason that there’s simply many more of them… This means the landing page, onboarding sequence, and the initial out-of-box product experience are critical, and usually don’t get enough attention.
Similarly, it’s important to have deep insights on what users need to do to become activated, so that their first visit is set up properly. For social networks, getting them to follow/add friends is key, because that kicks off a number of loops that will bring them back later on. For a SaaS metrics app, it might be getting a JS tag onto the right pages. For a blog, it might be for them to pick a name, theme, and write the first post so they get invested. »
Andrew Chen is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Previously, he led Rider Growth at Uber. He is the author of The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects (2021).
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