Retention is the share of users who keep coming back over time, usually read as cohort curves: of everyone who started in a given week, how many are still active one, four, twelve weeks later. It's the most honest measure a product has.
Every product's curve drops at first. The question is what happens next.
With small numbers, read retention as behavior plus conversation: who came back unprompted, and why? Ten returning users you understand beat a dashboard of strangers.
Practical answers
Match the product's natural frequency: daily for messaging, weekly for project tools, monthly for invoicing. The wrong interval makes any product look broken.
It's the closest single proxy. Flat curves on a meaningful cohort are hard to fake and hard to argue with — unlike signups or press.
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