Building a SaaS product presents three early challenges:
- developing the product you envisioned
- generating attention from the right users (i.e. getting users to sign up)
- keeping hard-won signups engaged over time (i.e. getting users to come back)
Most startup advice focuses on the first two. Founders obsess over shipping features, raising capital, and crafting the perfect launch.
They pour energy into marketing funnels, content strategies, and growth hacks to drive signups.
These are real problems that deserve attention—but they're also the problems everyone talks about.
User retention gets far less airtime. That's a shame, because retention is as difficult as product development and marketing combined.
You can build something impressive and attract thousands of signups, but if users quietly drift away after a week or a month, none of that effort compounds. The leaky bucket just keeps leaking.
This is where most products ultimately die—not from a failure to launch or a lack of initial interest, but from the slow bleed of users who signed up, poked around, and never came back.
Retention is the quiet killer that founders notice too late, after they've already spent their cash acquiring users who didn't stick around.
— Ry