On Product, Growth and Analytics: NextBigWhat AMA with Deepak Abbot

NextBigWhat has relaunched its community (https://we.nextbigwhat.com) with a very well defined focus:

Enable entrepreneurs and product/growth teams to collaborate, engage and learn from each other.

As part of the community efforts, NextBigWhat has also relaunched its AMA feature, bringing global growth and product leaders for a knowledge sharing sessions.

These are weekly AMA, which happens every Wednesday (India time evening, typically 8–9 PM) — hence we call them WW-AMAs :)

The first AMA was on Product, growth and analytics with Deepak Abbot , Sr VP @ Paytm.

Here are the top highlights of the AMA session (you can check the conversation here)

Qn (by Neeraj) : Can you share anything on the growth angle to the thought process behind the content drive on Paytm via ‘inbox’?

Deepak Abbot: Paytm gets 25mn daily visitors and almost 150mn monthly visitors. Not all of them transact clearly. Paytm today covers 100s of payment usecases and we believe every user may encounter at least 1–2 use cases daily. Having said, with so many offerings comes the challenge of discovery. We can’t force users to spend time on App and discover all use cases. So we decided to create hooks for users to use our App beyond payments and while they are engaged, display them some of the use cases that we have in a native way while they are consuming content in Inbox. We acquire 10% of our new transacting users now from visitors who first spend time in Inbox.

Inbox users are the most engaged users and they are also spreading our content/offering through their social channels — we want to leverage this community to drive organic installs further

QN: Do you follow North Star metrics philosophy (i.e. have 1 key metric and everything else is a derivative of it) ?

Deepak Abbot: We at Paytm follow this.

Get more unique transacting users month on month.

This will ensure you focus on conversion, retention, engagement. One single metric drives the company, every feature or product we launch is seen from that lens. Once you achieve this metric, you can assume that number of txns & revenues will grow.

Qn (by Siddharth Jaiswal) I know it’s difficult to benchmark but what range have these metrics been in consumer mobile products that you worked on helped build?
What is the baseline you recommend to growth managers?

• App Install Retention
• DAU/MAU Ratio
• D1 Retention

Deepak Abbot: Retention benchmark one should aim for is minimum 40% by Month 3 DAU/MAU ratio can change dramatically based on App type — content apps can have as high as 40%, chat as we know is almost 99%, social apps are in the range of 50%.

Transactional Apps & general apps would aim for 20%
D1 retention of 60% is bare minimum for App to be a big success. It should not drop below 40% in 3 months

And lots of useful questions followed by great insights from Deepak (checkout all the conversations here).

The next AMA is scheduled for Wednesday — go ahead and join the community of DOERs and stay pluggdin.

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