Hila Qu: recommendation

Transcript context

…Sure, let's do that here. Yeah, I know that I didn't talk about that in the post, and there are people asking, hey, do you plan to write another post on this specific topic? So the reason why I didn't cover too much retention expansion is, as you mentioned, it's not usually a first place to start. I call retention the messy middle. It's actually a messy part of the entire funnel. A quick activation, conversion, those are fast. Those are almost sometimes shorter time span, right? You have a lot of never, and you can test very quickly, and that acquisition is a very big leverage. You need to get more users, always. Retention is super important, but it's a little bit messy. It's over a very long period of time, and your customers can be, at any given moment, they can be retained or not, like if they just cancel or they just decided not to use anymore, you already lost them, so it's a very messy part. But how I think about retention, there are two steps. One is how to build a habit in their usage pattern, so that they are using this maybe every week, every day. The key to do that is, first of all, your product need to have a high enough frequency. If you are using this once per month, it's not likely you can build this into a habit. Before GitLab, I worked at Acorns. We started as an investment app, and the whole thing is passive investment, passive investing. You bought some ETFs, and then you basically don't even need to check, and you just keep adding money and it will grow, and after 10 years is awesome. It's actually the right investment philosophy, but when I worked as a head of growth, it made a big challenge for me, because think about set and forget it. They don't even need to go back to a product to be successful. And that make it very hard, as a head of growth, to drive engagement, drive retention. I don't even know whether they're retained or not, if they are not coming back, right? I can only gauge from other indicators. So I think one thing I would say about building habit is think about how to build those habit feature or collaboration feature into your workflow already, into the product already. That is the reason they can retain, fundamentally, if it's high frequency, if it involves collaboration with other people, if it's part of their workflow. So that's the first step. You can obviously use a lot of the looks to reinforce that. You can send them an email if they take certain action, and get them back, and to repeat that action, but fundamentally you need to build that into your product. And then the next part around retention is I actually think extension is part of retention. Basically you already have a steady usage flow. You are using this habitually every week, every day. What are the right moment to prompt you to think about maybe buying more? And there are three buckets of product-led extension. The first one is up upgrade to a higher tier. The second one is buying more seeds, buying more license. ompt you to think about maybe buying more? And there are three buckets of product-led extension. The first one is up upgrade to a higher tier. The second one is buying more seeds, buying more license. The third one is if you have some sort of a consumption add-on component, just consuming more, right? Like for GitLab, you can go from bronze tier to a silver tier, you can go to a higher tier, and then you can buy more seeds, and you can also buy more CSCD minutes to consume. Those are all the different moments. How you can do that is really understand data, understand usage, and trigger a lot of the right conversation at the right moment to the right person. And you can, again, a lot of similar tactics you use in activation conversion actually can be beautifully applied in expansion, because it's almost a combination of getting people to the aha of that feature, use that feature, try that feature, getting them to convert.…

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