From Uncertainty to Conviction: How Reforge Inspired Pangea’s Pivot

Retention is Key

The first topic of the Growth Series emphasizes the importance of retention and definition of your retention metric, measurement and analysis, engagement, activation, and resurrection; it then pairs all of this with actionable templates to apply the learnings.

Adam mentioned that he had heard that retention is extremely important while in YC, but Reforge reinforced this and provided a way for him to apply this advice and map out Pangea’s retention.

This was a lightbulb moment for Adam. He said, “I thought the solution to our growth issue was more acquisition, but this made me reconsider this and understand what was happening with our retention.” Using the frameworks, templates, and community from Reforge as guidance, Adam went to work.

Defining and Measuring Pangea’s Retention

Once Adam had defined this metric, he wanted to get a high-level analysis of Pangea’s retention as a whole. He followed the process that Reforge recommended: start with your standard retention curves. These curves are created by taking the average value of retention for each time period, and plotting it as a line graph.

Once plotted, retention curves can take one of four shapes:

1. Slope towards X-axis, trending towards zero: This is an indication that, over time, you will lose 100% of the users that signed up in a time period. (Bad)
2. Flat-ish, slight downward slope: it will take a very long time for retention to reach the x-axis and zero and suggests that some engagement optimizations can help shift this curve to be perfectly flat.
3. Flat: implies that you will always retain a certain percentage of a starting cohort.
4. Smile Curve: recovering a certain percentage of the cohort, and retaining them later in their lifecycle. (Great)

After Adam plotted Pangea’s retention curves he noticed, “Ours was somewhere between Bad and Ok. After a period of 12-18 months, it was flattening out. So we asked ourselves, what can we change to improve this?”

Making Big Bets: Pivoting Pangea

Visualizing Pangea’s retention curve was a powerful moment of realization for Adam. But a live Growth Series event with Lenny Rachitsky, founder of Lenny’s Newsletter and former Head of Supply Growth at Airbnb, pushed him towards full conviction for a pivot

Rachitsky spoke about how sometimes when things aren’t working, you need to make a big bold bet instead of smaller iterations. To illustrate this, the event explored a case study of one of these times at Airbnb.

Citing the event as inspiration, Adam said, “Our retention was far enough off that we knew we needed to be open to dramatic changes. We needed to make a big bold bet.”

At that point, Adam and his team started talking with customers. They spoke with hundreds of teams and talent, conducted interviews with multitudes of users, met with recruiting and staffing experts, and even launched some decoy brands with real websites to test some of their new positioning and value propositions.

After all of this, plus closing some new customers with actual revenue on the new concept, Adam felt they had the conviction they needed to go for this pivot.