Each project arrives with its purpose, milestones and first tasks written out. Here is how the first three read.
Consumer app growth baseline audit
Most founders a few months after launch can quote downloads but not where those users came from, how many came back on day seven, or which step loses half of them. A two-week audit of installs, activation, retention, ratings and spend gives one honest starting picture that every later project is measured against.
First tasks
- Export the last 90 days of installs from App Store Connect and the Play Console
- Pull day 1, 7 and 30 retention for the last three monthly cohorts
- Find the step in the first session where the most users drop out
- Write the baseline on one page and share it with your co-founders
Analytics event plan for the core loop
Consumer apps often ship with dozens of auto-tracked events and none that answer the questions growth depends on. A short tracking plan that names the ten to twenty events of the core loop, with consistent names and user properties, means retention, funnels and experiments can be trusted rather than argued about.
First tasks
- Write the core loop of the app as one plain sentence
- List the ten to twenty events that describe that loop, with their properties
- Ask an engineer to implement the plan on iOS and Android with identical names
- Run a test session and tick off each event as it appears in analytics
Defining the activation moment
Retention usually hinges on whether a new user reaches one specific experience early, such as the first saved workout, the first message answered or three friends followed. Finding that moment from your own data, and agreeing a time window for it, gives onboarding, notifications and experiments a single target.
First tasks
- List five actions that retained users seem to take early
- Compare day 30 retention for users who did each action in week one
- Pick one definition with a count and a time window
- Add the activation rate to the weekly metrics log
