The feature I almost shipped that would have killed retention
Sometimes the right product decision is the one that feels wrong in the moment.
Three weeks ago I was about to ship unlimited saves on the free tier. The logic seemed solid: remove friction, get more people in, convert later.
Then I asked myself a question I’d been avoiding: why do people open a read-later app and immediately close it?
The answer isn’t that they forgot about their saved articles. It’s that they have 200 of them, and opening the app feels like staring at a backlog they’ll never clear.
The constraint is the product
The 30-item monthly save cap I shipped instead is genuinely annoying to some people. But the people who stick around after hitting it read more than anyone else on the platform.
Constraints create intentionality. When you can save anything, you save everything.