“Once we learned to actually be like 'no — why are you here, what are your aspirations?' and view things through that lens, that's been one of the biggest unlocks.”

Segment by user aspiration, not just behaviour — blended metrics hide your best persona

For years Rapchat looked at retention and engagement across their entire user base without distinguishing between someone who opened the app for fun and a serious aspiring artist. Once Seth Miller's team started asking 'why are you here?' at onboarding and segmenting by declared aspiration, they discovered their core monetisable persona had retention metrics far above the blended average. That clarity focused the whole product roadmap.