kikin · Product Manager · 2009–2013
kikin: from 300K to 2M+ monthly active users
Led user acquisition and growth for a contextual search product, scaling MAUs profitably with LTV/cohort analysis and building the analytics stack to prove it.
- Monthly active users
2M+
Monthly active users
- iPad installs on a $28K budget
50K+
iPad installs on a $28K budget
- App Store ranking
Top 10
App Store ranking
- Pre-launch email signups
5K+
Pre-launch email signups
Context
kikin was a New York contextual-search startup: a desktop browser plugin, and later kikin Browser for iPad, that let people look things up without leaving the page they were reading. I joined as a Product Manager in July 2009 and owned user acquisition and growth marketing.
The problem
Browser-plugin growth is expensive and leaky: installs are easy to buy, active users are not. The job was to grow monthly active users profitably, which meant knowing which installs turned into retained users and what they were worth.
What I did
- LTV and cohort analysis. Ran retention experiments and cohort analysis to see which channels and onboarding paths produced users who stuck around, then moved budget accordingly.
- Built the analytics infrastructure. Stood up growth tracking and automated reporting dashboards so decisions were made on data rather than install counts.
- Launched kikin Browser for iPad. Ran a targeted pre-launch campaign with SEO-optimized landing pages and narrative-driven messaging that produced 5K+ email signups before launch.
Results
- Grew the user base from roughly 300K to 2M+ monthly active users, profitably.
- kikin Browser for iPad reached top-25 and top-10 App Store rankings, with 50K+ installs on a $28K budget.
What I learned
This is where I learned that growth moves fastest when you build the thing yourself. Today that means building in React and React Native, and it’s been my operating model ever since.