The beginning of something special :)
Product Development
In the next month, we’re working to finalize our product. This starts with fully scoping out product, designing with Figma, completing web engineering, and finishing legal documents.
This work is ~60% completed with authentication, authorization, profiles, account linking, and encryption done. The features that are left to finish are Oath creation, dispute moderation, and referral onboarding - the core of the engagement loop. These need to be created with lots of finesse and care.
We’re aiming for full engineering completion around February 1st.
Testing in initial communities
Once engineering is complete, we have the Lego Star Wars Buy Sell Trade Community to start in. This is a community of ~60k traders. We will pilot initially on an “invite-only” waitlist starting with high-volume traders and group admins of the community. As the initial users begin to use the product, we can receive feedback and slowly open up the gates to other users in the group.
During this time, we should keep a close monitor on engagement/retention metrics, community sentiment, and user feedback. As we roll out in Lego Star Wars, we can begin to onboard the surrounding Lego trading groups of which there are many.
Finding Product Market Fit
Product market fit means we’ve successfully made something that people actually want. It’s the point where users love our product so much they tell other people to use it out of the blue.
We are going to iterate the product in our initial pilot groups until we reach “product market fit”.
There are a few established ways to measure this. Keeping a close eye on all of these metrics will help us understand if we’ve reached this point.
Leading Indicator
Ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percent who answer very disappointed. Those who answer very disappointed are our power users. Asking power users their main benefits will help us identify our core strengths.
Ideally, we want the percentage of people who answer “very disappointed” to be 40% or greater. If we have not reached this, we need to continue to segment the market, talk to users, identify our strengths and areas of improvement, and keep iterating until we hit this.
Engagement
Our engagement can be measured with two different actions:
- Opening the application and viewing a page (profile, group, oath)
- Creating or agreeing to an Oath
The core engagement loop on Oath is creating and agreeing to an Oath. We can measure this action to understand whether users actually have a need for creating binding agreements.
On the other hand, opening the application to view profile reputation, group data, or monitor Oaths will let us know if the information our application is storing is relevant and useful to users.
To monitor engagement we will heavily rely on the “Power User Curve”. The power user curve works by looking at the number of days users engaged with Oath over the span of a month. On the y-axis is the percentage of users who engaged with Oath, and on the x-axis is the number of days the users engaged with Oath.
Most curves look like this, where usage drops off significantly as days used increases.
The most special, sticky, once-in-a-generation products look like this. They “smile”- meaning there are heavy power users that use the application more often and keep coming back. We want to aim to be as close as this as possible while also accepting that collectors don’t buy or sell items every day. At the very least, page visits and app opens can give a good signal on whether the information and content are intriguing to view.
Retention
The last thing that we want to measure is long-term retention: aka for users that sign up, how many of them return to use the app over time. Basically measure if users sign up and see value or leave.
We will plot the % of active users over time (for various cohorts of users) to create the retention curve. IF it flattens off at some point, you have probably found product market fit for some market or audience.
General retention goals:
- 60% retention after day 1
- 30% after day 7
- 15% at day 30
Rolling retention (percentage of users returning at least once after Day X) is crucial for transactional apps.
- Monthly Rolling Retention: 50-70% of users return at least once in a given month.
- Quarterly Retention: ~70% retention over three months reflects solid loyalty.
Stickiness
Apps like Oath are utility-driven, so users typically use them only when needed (e.g., buying/selling/trading, checking user reputation). A stickiness rate of 10-20% indicates good adoption and habitual use for transactions.
Stickiness is measured by dividing Daily Active Users (DAU) by Monthly Active Users (MAU)