About the Author
Sabarinath Viji Selvam is a Product Lead at daily.dev, with extensive experience in product management across high-growth companies like Swiggy and Bumble. He has played a key role in driving growth and retention initiatives, having managed large-scale products impacting millions of users. Sabarinath is passionate about building strong developer communities and creating impactful product experiences.
We publish this article with the permission of Sabarinath Selvam.
Introduction
Having led hyper-growth across ed-tech, food-tech, and social media startups for the past couple of years, I’ve witnessed growth strategies evolve firsthand. I’ve had the privilege of working with humongous user bases over the years, as a lead to Swiggy’s delivery partner base of over 300,000 users, and I have realized that growth in itself is not just in acquisition numbers. It is about leveraging a smooth blend of traditional growth tools and Product-Led Growth practices where the product is the limelight of your growth driver.
The traditional marketing method was what we followed for decades. We depended on customer segmentation, marketing automation, CRM tools, and paid acquisition platforms to force user acquisition and conversion. But as I’ve grown products in various industries, I’ve come to see that this methodology is not enough to build sustainably, scalable businesses. The future belongs to those companies who are able to effectively combine these successful and proven methodologies into Product-Led Growth models, where the product is established as the principal driver of acquisition, conversion, and retention.
Understanding the Growth Equation
In short, sustainable business growth has a straightforward formula that I have refined over decades of experience: Business Growth = f(Acquisition, Retention, Reactivation, Monetization). What this formula illustrates is why so many growth strategies fail, they focus fanatically on the first term in the equation and neglect the multiplier effect of retention and monetization.
When I first started working in growth, as many do, I was fixated on acquisition metrics. We were ringing in new user sign-ups, tracking cost per acquisition on a religious frequency, and optimizing our funnels to squeeze every possible conversion out of them. But what I quickly came to understand was that this results in what I like to call “leaky bucket syndrome”, loading users into the top of the funnel while they drain out the bottom due to poor retention.
Hence it is important as a business to first fix the leaky bucket and identify who your users are, how to retain them before actually focusing on acquisition. New user acquisition brings new blood into your system, but retained users convert at higher rates because they have already tasted your product value. Retention is the growth multiplier that will make your growth serve you or keep you back. Monetization, if it is done right, should be second nature and additive and not take away from the user experience.
Why Retention Is the True Measure of Product-Market Fit
Working in multiple verticals, I’ve noticed that retention is the most genuine indicator of if you’ve achieved true product-market fit. Fluffy metrics like total sign-ups or monthly actives might look terrific, but retention curves tell the real story of value delivery.
When customers return to your product on their own, when retention curves level off rather than declining steadily, and when word-of-mouth referrals begin happening organically, those are the first indications that you have created something people actually need. Paul Graham’s advice that you should “make something people want” becomes measurable in terms of retention metrics, instead of acquisition metrics.
Companies spend tens of millions of dollars on marketing with abysmal retention rates, praying the next campaign will be the one to create that mythical sustainable growth. The cold hard reality is no amount of acquisition optimization can compensate for a product that does not create sustained value. As Brian Balfour emphasizes, retention is the foundation upon which all other efforts at growth are built.
The Natural Frequency of Usage
One of the most valuable things I’ve learned is how to understand the natural frequency of usage for your product. Every product inevitably has a pattern of usage which synchronizes with the core issue that it solves, and to battle against this natural rhythm is futile.
For example, in the case of food delivery apps, I noticed that the use case is on a day-to-day basis since people need to eat on multiple occasions a day. However, in the ed-tech space, requiring day-to-day engagement when students learn naturally on more spaced-out cycles might hurt the learning process. The key is ensuring that you match your growth expectations with the natural recurrence of the problem your product solves.
I’ve watched teams end up over-engineering their products to force daily use when their value proposition really is for weekly or monthly usage habits. This contradicts with compelled notification strategies that enrage users, gamification that feels forced, and feature creep that conceals the original value proposition. The most successful products I’ve worked on embrace their natural frequency of use and tune for more depth within the rhythm rather than fighting it.
Implementing Strategic Growth Tool Integration
The transition from classic growth marketing to Product-Led Growth does not imply leaving behind time-tested methodologies but rather embracing them judiciously. I have discovered that the best method is three-phase in nature, with each building on the last.
During the foundation stage, having a strong product analytics and user-tracking systems is mandatory. Without pristine data across user behavior, engagement patterns, and conversion paths, any growth plan is merely guesswork. I’ve found it’s crucial to invest heavily in this infrastructure upfront since it pays dividends on every single optimization effort thereafter.
Stage two is maximizing traditional growth tools with product intelligence. Customer segmentation becomes more powerful when driven by actual product behavior data rather than demographic assumptions. Marketing automation sequences can trigger off of certain actions within the product, resulting in more timely and relevant touchpoints. This is where I’ve seen the biggest near-term successes, with existing tools becoming much more effective when powered by product data.
Phase three brings Product-Led Growth mechanisms that make the product itself a driver of growth. Some examples include creating self-serve onboarding flows that guide users to the first value moment, adding freemium models that drive users to upgrade moments organically, and creating viral loops where good user outcomes result in sharing and word-of-mouth.
Case Study: Behavioral Segmentation at Scale
The best project that I led was introducing lifecycle management and behavioral segmentation for new hire onboarding of Swiggy’s delivery partners via Gamooga’s real-time engagement platform. The challenge was : we had high new delivery partner churn within their first 14 days, with most experiencing an acute learning curve that led to early exits.
Rather than addressing every new partner in exactly the same way, we mapped 50 to 100 micro-behavioral cues within their first month. They ranged from basic achievements such as reaching specific delivery zones to more nuanced suggestions such as frequency of app use, navigation errors, and off-hour periods during business hours. All of these became diagnostics and indicated where the partners could be stumbling.
For example, we learned that most new drivers didn’t realize the value of being placed in hotspot locations where orders would come in. Through the use of behavior tracking, we were able to detect when a driver tended to be placed in low-demand locations and send contextual reminders in the form of personalized push notifications or in-app messages, nudging them to move into higher-opportunity areas. If they didn’t react to the initial reminder, subsequent messages with brief instructional material plugged the knowledge gap.
This answer transformed our onboarding from a one-size-fits-all to a personalized journey that adapted to the individual behavior patterns of each user. The system prompted interventions at just the right moments, triggering a notable reduction in early-stage attrition and much more seamless onboarding experiences for thousands of drivers. Perhaps more significant still, though, it demonstrated the potential for using product data to power traditional marketing automation tools and building a hybrid methodology that integrated the strengths of both methods.
Measuring What Matters in B2C Growth
Traditional metrics like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), conversion rates, and average revenue per user (ARPU) still have their place—but when you’re building a consumer product, especially with a product-led approach, you need metrics that reflect how real users are experiencing value.
Usage-qualified users become a more powerful growth signal than just demographic targeting or click-throughs. If someone downloads your app and quickly completes a key action—whether it’s creating something, placing an order, or inviting a friend—that’s a much stronger signal than a high-intent ad click.
One of the most important B2C metrics is Time to Value (TTV): how quickly a user gets their first “aha” moment. If you can reduce the steps between sign-up and that meaningful first outcome, your retention goes up—and your CAC pays back faster.
Another key indicator is the viral coefficient—a measure of how naturally your users bring in others. Whether it’s sending invites, sharing content, or tagging friends, products that spread through networks grow far more efficiently than those reliant on paid marketing alone.
For long-term health, Net Revenue Retention (NRR) which is typically seen in SaaS can still apply to B2C models that have repeat usage or subscriptions. If your existing user base is spending more over time, through upgrades, referrals, or frequency of purchases, it’s a clear sign your product is delivering increasing value.
Ultimately, the best consumer growth teams track a balance of leading indicators (onboarding completion, repeat usage in the first week) and lagging indicators (retention at 30/60/90 days, LTV). This mix helps you focus on both fast loops and sustainable growth.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
With time, I’ve established a series of major pitfalls that will kill growth strategies. The most dangerous is over-reliance on a single strategy, whether performance marketing, viral mechanics, or product features. You require a differentiated strategy to drive long-term growth that can adapt to changing market conditions and user behaviors. That’s because channels always tend to get saturated and hit an upper ceiling.
Misalignment between features and growth objectives is another pitfall. I’ve seen teams invest a lot of work in building complex referral systems for products where users simply don’t want to refer others naturally, or building complex onboarding flows that confuse rather than clarify the underlying value proposition. The greatest growth features feel like natural extensions of the product experience and not like growth hacks added on top.
Perhaps most important of all, compromising user experience for optimization of metrics can destroy long-term growth potential. Any growth initiative ought to contribute to rather than detract from the core user experience, creating a virtuous circle in which better experiences create better metrics rather than competing with them.
Building for the Future
The companies that will dominate the next decade of growth are those that are able to blend data-driven optimization seamlessly with genuine user value creation. That is, designing products that naturally encourage sharing, retention, and growth while supporting these habits with sophisticated measurement and optimization frameworks.
The greatest realization I’ve had is that sustainable growth demands constant experimentation and iteration, developing an experiment-driven culture. It’s this holistic approach that transforms businesses from tactical growth hackers into strategic growth leaders, building lasting competitive moats that compound over time.