Also called: Engagement stickiness
TL;DR
A qualitative term for how habitual a product is, often quantified as the DAU/MAU ratio or session frequency.
Stickiness is the property of a product that earns repeated, voluntary use. It's a function of habit formation, the user has a recurring trigger, the product reliably delivers the reward, and the cost of switching grows with continued use.
Quantitatively, stickiness is most often DAU/MAU, but session frequency, time between sessions, and feature breadth per user are also useful. Sticky products defend better, churn less, and command higher LTV.
Stickiness = (DAU ÷ MAU) × 100%
Stickiness is the single-number proxy for how often, on average, a monthly user returns within a month.
A consumer messaging app reports DAU 4.1M and MAU 7.6M → stickiness 54%, the average monthly user opens the app on roughly 16 of 30 days, a hallmark of habit-forming consumer products.
Stickiness is part of the Engagement narrative; the Defensibility slide may also reference it as a moat element.
The ratio of daily to monthly active users, a measure of how many days per month the average user shows up.
The financial, operational, or psychological cost a customer would pay to switch from one solution to a competing one.
A chart showing what fraction of a cohort is still active week-by-week or month-by-month after sign-up.
A structural advantage that protects a business from competition over time, network effects, switching costs, scale, brand, or proprietary technology.
The single metric that best captures the core value the product delivers and the long-term success of the business.
Long-form deep dives on the slides Stickiness most often shows up on.
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