What is LUV? How Mixpanel used Mixpanel to define the behaviors that drive customer love
We started by asking, “What is it that Mixpanel offers that users can’t get elsewhere?” And further yet, “What makes them fall in love and want to keep coming back?”
After many whiteboard sessions, data dives within Mixpanel, and snacks both savory and sweet, we landed on a simple way to understand and measure user value that we call LUV. An acronym for “Learning User Verified”, LUV gets at the heart of what users set out to do when they login to Mixpanel.
More than just viewing a report or dashboard, users seek to understand how people are using their product with every query they build. They come to Mixpanel to learn.
We established a few parameters at the outset. Our new company focus metric ultimately needed to:
- Connect to a behavior that’s repeated on a regular basis (be focused on habit building)
- Translate to success for every user (be correlated to retention)
- Go hand-in-hand with user value (be deeper than surface-level activation metrics)
- Center on a common behavior that’s well understood (be easy to communicate)
- Mean everyone can get the answers they need in Mixpanel—not just power users (be representative of the greatest possible population of customers)
Much of our thinking was guided by Reforge’s teachings on retention and engagement, and in particular, their frameworks outlining how user engagement breeds habit formation.
We hypothesized that a weekly “habit zone” made sense for a SaaS business like ours (as opposed to daily for a social media platform, or monthly for, say, a health tracker app).
Our analysis in Mixpanel showed that segmentation performed 5 out of 7 days per week correlated to higher retention. But segmentation at a cadence of once per week was more common. Additionally, though performing segmentation 10 days in every 30 was connected to high retention and was common among users, it was ruled out because it meant we’d need to wait four times as long to measure success. We wanted a metric that could be both easily understood and quick to act on. So, where did we ultimately find LUV? (It wasn’t in a hopeless place).
A “Learning User Verified” defines their own query in Mixpanel 3 out of 7 days each week.
And while there are certainly power users who perform more advanced query segmentation in Mixpanel at various frequencies, we wanted to orient our metric around regular, habit-forming activities that drive value for product teams, and ultimately contribute to their success.
Demo experience
A product demo that lets prospective LUVs experience the value of Mixpanel firsthand is one of the most powerful tools in a product-led growth company’s toolkit.
That’s why our just-released demo experience allows would-be users to explore Mixpanel using sample data sets from a vertical of their choice.
Onboarding experience
Our quest for LUV deepened our understanding of what makes new signups stick, and what causes them to drop off. As a result, our onboarding experience will focus on giving users a straight-line path to activation by removing potential obstacles to value.