“We specifically for our app wanted to solve the retention piece first. We chose the behavior in the app that would be associated with retention. Our whole app is like a water reminder app right now — we built that specific functionality before anything else.”

Ship the one retention-driving behavior first — water reminders

Instead of broad feature scope, Greg shipped one core retention behavior first — push-notification water reminders — because that was the behavior most likely to bring users back over six months. The team needed six months of retention data to fundraise, so they front-loaded the single feature that would generate that signal.