What to Do After You Launch

Let’s say you just launched a product to a group of users for the first time. (I’m speaking purely hypothetically, of course 😉.) Launch went pretty well: good signups, hearty praise, and some promising early data. Or maybe you’re not sure how well it went.

Now what?

In the movies, what happens next is a montage where you work tirelessly day and night—on what, exactly, it’s not clear—and all the graphs go up and to the right, until you find yourself in the conference room of a law firm in Palo Alto with some partner telling you to that a $65 million settlement with the Winklevoss twins is just a “speeding ticket,” because that’s how rich you are.

In real life you have to do things to make the graph go up and to the right. Often it’s not exactly clear what to do.

You can think of the post-launch phase of a startup as one big optimization problem. You have a bunch of goals—engagement, retention, growth—and a lot of levers you can pull to achieve them. The challenge is figuring out which goals you should focus on, and which levers actually work.

The good news is that there are some frameworks you can use to think through this problem. Many founders before you have been in the same spot. I’m interested in this because it’s what I’m going currently through with Lex. But I hope it’s helpful for anyone else in a similar situation.

Retention: leaky until proven sticky

Most products do not retain users. Therefore, you should assume yours doesn’t, until the data conclusively proves otherwise.