How VCs actually look at your user growth (spoiler: it's not just MAU)

Original: Diligence at Social Capital Part 1: Accounting for User Growth

Jonathan Hsu

May 29, 2025

8 min read

Framework

Intermediate

Business Understanding

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Diligence at Social Capital Part 1: Accounting for User Growth

Summary

Calculating the gross-margin contribution of a customer over their expected lifetime; including retention curves, discount rates, cohort LTV, probabilistic vs. deterministic models, and segment-level LTV comparison.

Who This Is For

Product Managers

Growth Marketers

Founders

Key Takeaways

Break down MAU growth into three components: new users, retained users, and resurrected users to understand growth quality
Use the accounting identity MAU(t) = new(t) + retained(t) + resurrected(t) to diagnose growth health
Calculate month-over-month retention rates to separate organic growth from acquisition-driven growth
Present user growth data using growth accounting charts that show positive and negative contributions to MAU changes

Tools & Technologies

MAU tracking systems User analytics platforms Cohort analysis tools Mobile application analytics

Topics Covered

customer-lifetime-value retention-modeling cohort-analysis revenue-forecasting

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