[joelg87]

What an awesome question Adam.

Just had a look at our cohort analysis. Happy to let you know that 16% of the December 2010 cohort (those 100 people) are still using Buffer today (27 months later). It's actually fairly representative of what our retention stabilizes to after 4-5 months for almost every cohort, though 100 is not an ideal sample size!

We've certainly worked to improve retention over time, but in addition I think with Buffer I finally had hit upon a problem that was a real pain point. So, there was good retention right from the start.

[charliepark]

Joel, what are you using for your cohort analysis? An internally-built tool? A third-party service?

[joelg87]

Hey Charlie! We've been back and forth on this in the lifetime of the startup, but we're now doing all metrics ourselves, so it is internally built. I built an early version of the cohort analysis (which didn't scale, but that didn't matter) just a few months in and it was massively valuable. It's not too hard to knock something together.

[nanch]

Would be an interesting third party tool. Does anyone do this already? Something as simple as receiving a list of usernames over time.