Most product teams track acquisition, activation, retention. The usual funnel. We track all of that at Murror too.
But there's one metric we started paying attention to that changed how we think about growth entirely: how often users talk about themselves differently after using the product.
There's a pattern I keep noticing across the AI products that actually stick with people vs. the ones that get tried once and forgotten.
The forgettable ones try to be impressive. They show off what the model can do -- generate faster, automate more, produce output at scale. And they're genuinely cool for about 15 minutes.
Everyone tells you to ship fast. Move fast and break things. Get to market before someone else does.
I believed this for a long time. When we were building Murror, speed was everything. We pushed features weekly, sometimes daily. We celebrated every deploy like a small victory.
For months, our most requested feature at Murror was a chat function. Users wanted to talk to the AI the way they talk to a friend. It seemed obvious. Every competitor had it. Every feedback form mentioned it.
Most software wants you to come back every day. The business model depends on it. More sessions, more engagement, more opportunities to monetize.
But what happens when your product's purpose is to help someone understand themselves better? At Murror, we've been wrestling with a paradox: if we do our job well, users should eventually need us less not more.
For the first year of building Murror, we optimized for the same metrics every other app optimizes for: daily active users, session length, screens per visit. The dashboard looked healthy. Usage was growing. We felt good about it.
But something was off. Our most engaged users were not our happiest users. People who spent the most time in the app were often the ones who left the harshest feedback. Meanwhile, users who opened the app twice a week for five minutes were writing us emails about how it changed how they handle difficult conversations.
Most product teams run surveys. We did too. We'd ask things like "What features would you like to see?" or "How would you rate your experience?" And we'd get perfectly reasonable, perfectly useless answers.
The turning point for Murror came when we stopped designing around what people said they wanted and started paying attention to what they were avoiding.
There's a pattern in AI products right now that worries me: the goal is to make AI the relationship.
AI friends. AI therapists. AI partners. The pitch is always the same humans are complicated, AI is easy. No judgment, available 24/7, infinitely patient.
There is a moment that separates products people use once from products people come back to every day. It is not a feature. It is not a notification. It is the feeling that the product remembers who you are.
I have been thinking about this a lot while building Murror. We spent so much time on acquisition, onboarding funnels, and activation metrics. But the thing that actually moved our retention numbers was something much simpler: continuity.
