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Sticky Product: ways in which the ‘stickiness’ factor makes Сompanies’ profits
Being "sticky" isn't always a bad thing, especially when it comes to creating a product. When a new product enters the market, its main task is to attract and keep hold of the new users. The income of the app depends on how well the product does this task, because the more loyal users are, the more likely they are to make payments.]
Alibek Narimbay, CEO of Biometric. Vision, a serial entrepreneur in the field of IT solutions and artificial intelligence, will tell us how to create products that are in demand by the audience, using real-life case studies.
For the last 5 years we have been developing our own facial recognition technology and implementing it in the business processes of various companies, and despite the common opinion that biometrics mainly solves cybersecurity problems, the benefits of its implementation are much greater, because our technology is not only about fraud protection, but first and foremost about a comfortable user experience. When we interact with different types of business, we are always convinced that many people underestimate the impact of user experience on the company's attributable profit, and one of the most important indicators when launching a product in the SaaS (Software as a Service) segment is so-called Sticky Factor
Alibek Narimbay, CEO of Biometric.Vision
Sticky Factor refers to product metrics and shows how well a product 'sticks' with your users and how likely they are to return to you. The higher the sticky factor, the more users will return to use the product because it makes their lives more comfortable, safer and easier, creating value for the customer.
If solving customer problems is your main guiding star, you can spend less time keeping users on the platform and more time improving your product.
The opposite is also true - if a Customer has difficulty getting to know a product, they are likely to go to a competitor. Research data shows that around 70% of users will move on to other websites in search of simpler and clearer information about the product and how to use it if their user experience was unsuccessful. User retention is an important issue that needs to be resolved otherwise the marketing budget spent on Customer acquisition will be wasted.
How do you make a sticky product?
To create a truly "sticky" product, you need to fulfil a number of conditions:
1. Create high value for the consumer by offering him/her a convenient way to solve his/her problems with a minimum of time, effort and money.
In 2017, we and the future Biometric. Vision created OKAuto – the Kazakhstan's first mobile application for checking and paying traffic fines with a single click. And we had great success - the app was downloaded and installed by more than a million users in a short time, which at the time represented a quarter of the country's driver market! We didn't spend a penny on advertising - people found and downloaded the app themselves, on the recommendation of friends. We solved a big problem for them, because before they had to go to a bank branch to pay their fines, but we offered them a solution at " a finger's length"
Alibek Narimbay, CEO of Biometric.Vision
2. Remove barriers preventing product use.
During the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent quarantine, financial institutions were faced with a problem - many people could not get to a bank branch, and banks were forced to find new solutions to the situation. They began to ask the question: "How can we serve a Customer online if we cannot identify him /her in person?”.
To solve this problem, we developed a set of computer vision-based technologies and implemented them in banking applications via APIs. Now, the Customer of the Bank no longer needs to be present at a Bank branch in order to confirm his/her identity, we have completely closed the process of identifying and verifying the user by reading the data from the ID card and comparing the user with the photo from the documents, thus maintaining the highest level of security in the transactions
Alibek Narimbay, CEO of Biometric.Vision
3. Create a "hook" that keeps your users hooked.
To keep users coming back to your product, it needs to have "hooks" that keep them from going back to the old way of solving their problems:
What has UBER done? It has optimized the business process and added intelligence. It knows where I am. I just choose a destination. And then the artificial intelligence works - it tells me how long the journey will take, takes into account any traffic jams, tells me when the nearest taxi driver will arrive, knows the driver's rating, selects a suitable car and sets the price. And all this in two clicks on your mobile phone. This business process has lost out to the old ways of calling a taxi - through an operator or by voting on the side of the road. Once a person has tried this business process, they will never go back to the previous ones again
Alibek Narimbay, CEO of Biometric.Vision
4. Make the product as easy and convenient as possible.
Biometric technologies are a much safer, faster and easier way of verifying users, as they do not require logins and passwords - the Customer gets access to the service in seconds with their face!
Currently, artificial intelligence-based facial recognition technologies are widely used in public service applications. Previously, a large number of errors occurred at the stage of manually entering data from documents into the database. The technology of document reading allows not only to avoid errors, but also to reduce the time of the Customer service, simplifying this process both for the employees of the Population Service Centre and for the end user of the service.
Alibek Narimbay, CEO of Biometric.Vision
5. Teaching users how to get the best results from your product.
Sometimes your potential customer may not know he/she needs your services, especially when it comes to an innovative product. The product creator's job is to find as many ways as possible to use the product to the customer's benefit.
When we develop an IT solution for any Company, we dip into the business processes to identify problems that often even the business owners are not aware of. In each case, these will be different problems that can be solved in different ways. If a Bank needs to carry out KYC (Know Your Customer) procedures for its Customers, not only from a marketing point of view but also because it is required by the government regulator; a taxi service has a different problem - their HR department hires and fires a huge number of drivers every month and automation is essential.
Currently Biometric.Vision offers 4 main computer vision-based technologies - Document Verification, Liveness Detection, Face2Face Detection and Face Search. By combining these technologies, we can solve a wide range of business challenges, from preventing fraud to minimizing staff and office rental costs
Alibek Narimbay, CEO of Biometric.Vision
How to Calculate Sticky Factor?
DAU (Daily Active Users) and MAU (Monthly Active Users) are the key indicators for analyzing consumer behavior in a product:
DAU (Daily Active Users) - shows the number of unique users of an app per day. Those who use the product every day (or regularly).
MAU (Monthly Active Users) - shows the number of unique users per month. Those who were active at least once a month, logged into the product and did something with it.
A high DAU indicator indicates a high level of interest in the product among new users, and a similar MAU indicator indicates that the product has a regularly active audience. Using these two metrics, you can calculate the Sticky Factor using a simple formula:
Sticky Factor = DAU / MAU * 100%
If 5000 unique users (DAU) enter the application every day, and each time they are different users, then MAU in this case is 30 * 5000 = 150000. Accordingly, we get the following calculation:
Sticky Factor = 5000 / 150 000 * 100% = 3.33%
By simple calculation, we got 3.33% - the minimum for this metric, indicating that users are not staying in the app, which means it has low retention and lacks the user base needed to generate revenue for the app. A good stickiness metric for most industries would be around 20%, and for social networks and messengers around 50%.
However, stickiness is not a panacea and doesn't work for all products. Sometimes stickiness is simply not the right metric for user engagement. For example, for e-commerce projects, revenue is a more important metric. If Customers only visit the site twice a year, but make expensive purchases, your stickiness score may be low, but a value exchange is still taking place. If Customers solve their problems faster, they will use the product less, but they will still be happy and pay for it.
Conclusions
Despite the fact that the Sticky Factor only characterizes the loyalty and activity of the audience, it has a strong impact on monetization and income, because the more stable and interested the user base is, the faster the product audience is formed or grows - the more payments are made by users. In addition, experience shows that there is a correlation between the stickiness factor and income (it is about 50-60%), which confirms the influence of this indicator on the financial metrics of the product. If you analyze the products of financially successful companies, it is easy to see a high Sticky Factor.
How often do you calculate the Sticky Factor when designing your products? Or do you use other metrics? Share in the comments.