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Metrics

Our #1 company goal right now is to reach 5M Weekly Active Users as soon as possible. If we grow by 50% month on month, we can achieve this goal within 15 months. This is aggressive, but given there are ~50M terminal users, this should be very doable.

What is an "active user"? An active user is someone who actually gets value out of Fig. Getting value means Fig is actually helping the user. Fig could be making the person move faster, perform a specific workflow, provide information that user refers to.

We don't want "fake" users. A fake user is someone that has Fig installed, but doesn't interact with it or actually use it, even if it's Fig is visible. For instance, if someone has Fig's autocomplete app installed but never actually uses it or reads the text from it, should we consider them a "active user"? No, absolutely not.

Why? We want users to love our products. User love will mean they share it with their friends and in the future, use/buy our next products.

It's also a question of the type of product/company you want to build. Do you want to be the iPhone app that's installed on 100 people's phones and never used or the app that's on 10 people's phones but is used every day?

I (Brendan) do not want us to be some shitty extension that is just there. For us to consider someone an active user, they quite literally have to be actively using it, otherwise, we are just kidding ourselves.

Other important subgoals we track

  • Retention When someone signs up to Fig, are they still getting value out of it one week later? One month later? Six months later? Or have they churned? It doesn't matter how many new users we add a week, if they all disappear a few weeks later, then this is just like pouring water into a leaky bucket... Retention has to be strong, otherwise growth is pointless.
  • Activation: Activation is an event that we define a user has to do in order for us to consider them a user we want to retain. It is usually within the first day or two of using the product. It is different to retention. For instance, if a user downloads Fig, does a couple of autocompletes, realise they don't like it, then uninstalls it immediately, we don't consider this user "activated". Clearly they just don't like the product. This is actually okay. It's not their cup of tea and hopefully we will build something in the future that is. However, if a user uses Fig regualrly for several weeks then suddenly uninstalls then this is bad. We expect dropoff within the first few days, but after that, we expect Fig to be very sticky. Clearly something bad has happened for an activated user to churn. We want to find out what the hell happened.
  • Revenue: Obviously revenue is important, however, we are foregoing this as a priorty right now. If we have 5M people using Fig every week and who consider Fig part of their core infrastructure as a developer, do you think we will be able to monetise? Yes. Yes I do!