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title: Pirate Metrics
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Framework for thinking about how to onboard / get people to use your product or service. Originally conceived by [[Dave McClure]] at [[500 Startups]].

These are totally custom for every product, but can be useful in building hypotheses about what matters / what works in getting usage, and also what kind of [[Product Metrics]] you should be tracking.

Called "Pirate Metrics" because the abbreviation is A-A-R-R-R:

* **Acquisition**: this is initial sign up. You might want to say this is email sign up and verification – that someone came in, waited for a verification link, and then came back.
* **Activation**: this should be doing at least one core action of your product. eg. for a music streaming service, maybe it’s listen to one song. This is the one I like to be very strict about – so that an “activated” user really has engaged with your product.
* **Retention**: different products have different retention period. For an accounting or finance app, I might login and review one transaction per month. For others, it might be a daily action. So something like "We will consider a user retained if they (do some core thing) Y times over (X days/weeks/months). Otherwise, consider them to have “churned” and they need to be re-activated.
* **Referral**: do users care enough about your product to share it with others? This shouldn’t really be something like “invite your team” if having team mates is a core usage – that would be activation or retention. People are excitedly telling others that your product rocks.
* **Revenue**: your customer is paying you!

Useful article published in [[2017]] that covers this: [AARRR Framework- Metrics That Let Your StartUp Sound Like A Pirate Ship](https://medium.com/@ms.mbalke/aarrr-framework-metrics-that-let-your-startup-sound-like-a-pirate-ship-e91d4082994b) by Melanie Balke.

I also have [this article saved on the Fission forum](https://talk.fission.codes/t/aarrr-framework-metrics-that-let-your-startup-sound-like-a-pirate-ship/174).