About
Hi, I’m Dan Wolchonok. This is my personal blog. Anything written here is my personal opinion, and does not reflect the opinion of anyone else.
Currently, I work at Reforge. Previously, I started a company called PrepWork that was acquired by HubSpot while I was an MBA student at the Yale School of Management. I worked at HubSpot for 5 years, leaving as the Director of Product Analytics. Most importantly, I’m married to a wonderful doctor who is a physician at the Indian Health Service at Shiprock, NM. Check me out on Twitter or on LinkedIn.
I was an enterprise search expert at Microsoft, where I was a technical lead on an enterprise search system with hundreds of millions of documents and millions of queries per day. Before that, I worked at PwC as a consultant in their Advisory practice making technology tools for financial services clients.
I graduated from Tufts University in 2005 with a degree in Computer Science. I ran cross country, track and field, and the Naked Quad Run twice.
August 13, 2016 at 9:26 pm
Thanks lots for your work.
Just subscribed to the blog.
Can i pls ask questions; please help.
For the post “how to quickly format retention data in less than …” and for the table computed with percentages in blue can i pls ask questions about the first row.
week cohort size week 0 week 1
1/5/15 2660 54% 49%
1) does week 0 mean Jan 5 thru Jan 11
2) does week 1 mean jan 12 thru jan 18
3) can i say – 54% of 2660 came back to the app between jan 5 and jan 11
4) definition of retention – is the 54% only users who came back to the app with a session duration of > 2 mins or only users who created any of the events that have a causal relationship to users becoming core users or only users who did the activity that contributes to omtm
5) considering the app should be used at least once a week, wouldn’t it make sense to follow the metric – what percentage of the retained had used the app the previous week.
August 14, 2016 at 4:49 pm
1, 2, and 3: http://www.danwolch.com/2015/04/the-hard-secret-about-optimzing-week-1-retention/
4: It depends what you’re using as the retention criteria: http://www.danwolch.com/2016/07/the-retention-questions-you-should-be-asking-in-a-job-interview/
5: If the app should be used once a week, I’d look at a weekly metric that shows that they’re actively using the product or experience value from it.
August 20, 2016 at 9:53 pm
thanks Dan lots.
btw i didn’t get the notification of new posts.
February 1, 2017 at 5:20 am
Hi Dan,
I am part of an alpha stage startup building a B2C mobile app. I was trying to decide which mobile analytics platform to use.
I was trying to decide between Clevertap & Firebase analytics. Did you get a chance to explore Clevertap?
I’d love to hear which tool would be best for basic analytics and push notifications according to you.
February 2, 2017 at 1:53 am
I didn’t get a chance to try out Clevertap, and I’ve never used Firebase. Let me know what you think! I would seriously consider the free tiers of companies like Mixpanel.