Season 5, Episode 19: The power of cohort compounding (with Nilay Patel)

Mobile Dev Memo Podcast

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Nilay Patel, the head of product at Kohort, a cohort analytics platform (full disclosure: I'm an advisor to the company). In our conversation, we discuss the profound power of cohort analysis in decision-making, not just related to marketing spend but across all disciplines within a digital-first company. Among other topics, we cover:

• The aspects of LTV estimation that companies most often get wrong;
• Why cohorts represent the most appropriate atomic unit to use in assessing a product's unit economics;
• How cohort monetization can be used as an input to a user acquisition cash flow model;
• How to handle outliers in cohort analysis;
• How companies can approach this type of prediction / forecasting if they don't spending significant amounts of money on user acquisition;
• How companies should think about monetization improvements over time when they project cohort performance;
• How the user acquisition channel mix contributes to cohort performance over time.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• ContextSDK. ContextSDK uses over 200 smartphone signals to detect a user’s real-world context, allowing apps to deliver perfectly timed push notifications and in-app offers.
• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

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