Sticky Products: How the Stickiness Factor Boosts Company Profits

Being "sticky" can be a good thing when you are building a product. A new product on the market has one main job: attract users and keep them. Apps and platforms often succeed or fail on this, because loyal users buy more and bring in revenue.

Alibek Narimbay, CEO of Biometric.Vision and an entrepreneur with long experience in IT solutions and artificial intelligence, explains how to build products that users come back to, using real cases.

The Importance of User Experience

For the past five years, we’ve been developing facial recognition technology and integrating it into various business processes,” explains Narimbay. “While biometrics is commonly associated with cybersecurity, its potential goes far beyond fraud prevention. Our technology focuses on delivering a comfortable and seamless user experience. User experience has a profound impact on a company’s profitability, yet it is often underestimated. One critical metric for assessing a product’s performance in the SaaS (Software as a Service) sector is the Sticky Factor—a measure of how well a product retains its users and keeps them coming back

What Is the Sticky Factor?

The Sticky Factor represents the likelihood that users will return to a product because it provides convenience, safety, and value. A high Sticky Factor indicates strong user retention and loyalty, while a low Sticky Factor often points to usability issues or unmet customer needs.

“If solving customer problems is your guiding principle, you’ll spend less time trying to retain users and more time improving your product. On the other hand, if customers find your product difficult to use, they’ll quickly move on to competitors,” Narimbay warns. About 70% of users will leave a platform for simpler alternatives after a poor usability experience.

How to Create a Sticky Product

1. Offer High Value with Minimal Effort. A successful product solves the user’s problem fast and without fuss.

Case Study: OKAuto. In 2017, Biometric.Vision developed OKAuto, Kazakhstan’s first mobile app for checking and paying traffic fines with a single click. The app gained over a million users, a quarter of the country’s drivers, without any advertising. It turned a slow, tedious chore into a one-click task.

2. Remove Barriers to Use

During the COVID-19 pandemic, banks had to serve customers remotely. Biometric.Vision introduced a set of computer vision technologies that let users verify their identity online in banking apps. Customers no longer had to visit a branch, and they kept both security and convenience.

3. Create a “Hook” to Retain Users

A product needs features that make users unwilling to go back to the old way.

Example: Uber

“Uber optimized the taxi booking process,” says Narimbay. “With just two clicks, users know the driver’s rating, estimated arrival time, and trip cost. This convenience makes it hard for users to return to traditional methods like calling a dispatcher or hailing a cab.”

4. Simplify Processes for Maximum Convenience

Biometric technologies verify users quickly and safely, with no extra steps. With facial recognition, users skip logins and passwords and get into a service in seconds. Public service apps use the same technology widely to cut errors and save time.

5. Educate Users on Product Benefits

Innovative products sometimes need explaining before customers see their value.

Example: Custom IT Solutions

“When developing IT solutions, we dive into a company’s business processes to identify problems, often uncovering issues even the business owners are unaware of,” Narimbay explains. Biometric.Vision’s solutions address diverse challenges, from KYC (Know Your Customer) compliance for banks to automating HR processes for taxi services.

Currently Biometric.Vision provides four core computer vision-based technologies: Document Verification, Liveness Detection, Face 2 Face Detection and Face Search. By integrating these solutions, we address a variety of business challenges, including fraud prevention and reducing staff and office rental expenses.

Measuring the Sticky Factor

You need two metrics to calculate the Sticky Factor:

DAU (Daily Active Users): The number of unique users who engage with a product daily.

MAU (Monthly Active Users): The number of unique users who interact with the product at least once a month.

The Sticky Factor is calculated as:

Sticky Factor = (DAU / MAU) × 100%

If an app has 5,000 daily active users (DAU) and 150,000 monthly active users (MAU), its Sticky Factor is:

Sticky Factor = (5,000 / 150,000) × 100% = 3.33%

A figure this low means weak retention and engagement, and the product needs work. A good Sticky Factor is around 20% for most industries and 50% for social networks and messaging platforms.

The Bottom Line

The Sticky Factor measures user loyalty and activity, and both feed straight into revenue. A stable, engaged user base grows the audience and brings in more payments, so SaaS teams watch stickiness closely. It is not the only measure of success, though. In some industries, e-commerce for one, revenue tells you more than how often users come back.

How do you measure user retention for your products? Do you calculate the Sticky Factor or rely on other metrics? Tell us in the comments.