Carrying Capacity

호숫가의 물이 어디까지 올라올 수 있을까

한계수용능력, inflow와 churn이 중요

들어오는 것과 나가는 것 외에는 아무 상관 없다.

질문

Q1. You noticed that your power users all have taken some action (e.g. filled out their profile) so you try to encourage all users to fill out their profile to get them more hooked on your product. Does this actually help?

Without this model it’s easy to mislead yourself into thinking it helps. You will probably be able to increase the metric but it may just weaken the correction with power users. However, with this model you just watch your loss % each day and if it doesn’t change then you haven’t had any net impact on retention.

Q2. You have 24 hours of downtime, the next day you come back up your traffic id down. Will this have a long-term effect you need to worry about?

Even if your traffic is lowered for a few days, all you have to do is measure your new visitors per day & lost customers per day and you’ll see if your carrying capacity has changed. If it has not changed then you don’t have to worry, you know your traffic will rise back up to your carrying capacity.

Q3. You have 100K uniques per day and so does your competitor, but are these 100K people who come back everyday or 700K people who each come once per week? Does it matter?

If you’re incorrectly caught up in # of unique visitors per day then this does seem like an important thing. And in fact, if you realize your visitors are not returning as often as your competitors you may even be tempted to spam them regularly because this will increase # of unique visitors each day and can give you the illusion of improving things. In reality, a move like this would probably increase your % of lost each day and hurt your carrying capacity but you wouldn’t notice this for a while because the increased # of uniques each day would mask the harm. However, with the model your emphasis is on # of customers not # of visitors. You’ll quickly realize that you don’t care how frequently people visit as a primary factor; if it doesn’t impact # of new customers per day or % of lost per day then you haven’t actually helped your product.

Q4. You turn on a new advertising campaign and see your # of unique visitors per day start to increase, you assume that this will continue increasing so long as you keep the ads running, right?

Nope, you’ll level off once you’ve reached your new carrying capacity.

Q5. You start having email deliverability problems (or Facebook turns off notifications) so you can’t notify users of new activity on the site. The # of unique visitors decreases slightly but you’re not too worried, should you be?

This is similar to question 3, it may or may not be important but you’ll quickly be able to tell by focusing on the core numbers. Increasing # of unique visitors per day does not necessarily lead to more total customers.

Data growth modeling

Carrying Capacity = # of new daily customers / % of customer you lost each day

input이 줄면 Carrying Capacity가 줄어듦

Carrying Capacity는 product의 순수한 유저를 모으는 능력에 대한 지표, 본질적 체력이라고 볼 수 있음

number of new daily customers는 제품을 런칭하면 바로 알 수 있음

광고는 평생 태울 수 없으므로, 제품을 런칭하자마자 알 수 있는 이 value와, MAU 대비 몇%가 날아가는지 계산하면 된다.

Carrying Capacity가 최종 MAU

이 두 숫자를 바꾸지 않는 이상 MAU는 변하지 않는다.

광고를 통해 input이 발생하는 경우

number를 다 발라내서 계산
광고를 꺼보는 것이 좋음 (2달 정도)

마케팅 활동을 통해 일시적으로 inflow boosting은 가능하지만, 결국 광고를 끄면 그대로 다시 주저않게 됨. Carrying Capacity가 증가하지 않았기 때문.

결국 근본적인 Carrying Capacity의 향상은 제품 개선을 통한 inflow와 retention 향상, churn 감소 외에는 방법이 없고, 이것은 마케팅 활동으로는 바뀔 수 없음. → product의 개선이 필요

Carrying Capacity는 ‘내 서비스가 도달할 최종적인 유저수’

이 값은 서비스를 운영하고 3-6개월 안에 알 수 있기 때문에, 제품의 성장을 미리 예측할 수 있다는 점에서 매우 중요

결국 CC에 영향을 주는 것은 inflow(=New User + resurrection)과 Churn rate 두 가지에 의해서 결정된다.

여기서 또 고려해야 할 점은

서비스의 organic inflow는 서비스의 특성에 따라 결정되며 일정한 숫자로 유지된다.
Churn rate (1 - retention rate)은 전체 유저에 대해 일정한 비율로 유지된다.

entirely new product를 런칭하면 new CC를 얹을 수 있음.