Startup School

Currently Playing: See How Customers Actually Use Your Product

One of the biggest mistakes founders make is relying on aggregate user metrics instead of understanding how any individuals use their product. In this episode of Startup School, YC General Partner David Lieb walks through one of his favorite tools for better understanding your users, the dot plot. It’s a simple two-dimensional grid that maps individual user activity over time and it can help separate signal from the noise in the early days of a startup. He’ll cover why it gives founders a better sense of product health compared to aggregate metrics, what patterns to look for and real-world examples of how dot plots helped teams at Google Photos and PayPal. 00:00 — Stop Looking at Aggregate Metrics 00:52 — Why DAUs Lie to You 01:39 — What is a Dot Plot and How Does it Work? 02:50 — Picking the Right Event to Track 03:34 — Reading Patterns in the Dots 05:17 — Tracking User State & Attributes 06:16 — The PayPal Fraud Insight 07:59 — Dot Plot vs. DAU Graph 08:56 — Finding Features That Drive Retention 10:30 — Scaling Dot Plots to Billions of Users 11:13 — The $80K Contract That Churned 11:57 — Common Dot Plot Mistakes 12:41 — Dot Plots + Cohort Curves Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs