Find Your App’s Super Users and Hack Your Growth

Find your app’s Super Users and hack your growth! App usage for any app follows some fairly normal patterns. Some users will use it a lot; others just open it once and then never again. While every app is different, if you could graph your users by usage, you’ll probably end up with something like this: A standard deviation bell curve breaks down your users into tiers of usage, based on the overall average use. The greatest part of app users end up there in the middle––your core users. The 15% on the left barely used it; the 15% on the right are your Super Users. Using normal analytic tools, like Flurry or Google Analytics will give you data on open rates, clicks, and even some demographic info. But what they don’t do is give you tools to move users from left to right on the bell curve. The second way to look at the usage of your app is a regression chart: Tracking sessions by users on the Y axis and the amount of time per each session on the X axis can give you visual clues as to your app usage and either problem areas or successful areas to concentrate on. When I was selling comic books in Midtown Sacramento in the 1990s, we wanted to segment our customers to encourage them to shop with us more often. In the comic industry (and many retail environments), one of the easiest customer segmentation systems was measuring our customers by average time between visits and how much they spent each visit on average. And, because we were a comic store, Super was a good term for our best customers. In retail, the two key metrics are how often they shopped at the store and how much they spent. To measure that, we needed to know our averages, which just involved a lot of counting. Modern technology makes this so much easier. (What do comic books have to do with growth hacking your app? Answer coming up!) For our store, our average customer came in every two weeks and spent $14.00 each time. Our Super Customers were those who visited weekly and spent more than $15 each time. With these two metrics, we now had four groups of customers, and we could create marketing plans for each group. Group 1 – Here are our Super Customers –the ones who keep the doors open and the lights on

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