What is session duration and why do investors care?
Short Answer
Session duration measures how long users spend in your application per session, directly correlating with engagement, retention, and the stickiness of your product.
Full Explanation
For mobile apps, median session duration below 2 minutes typically indicates low engagement or friction-heavy onboarding. Apps like TikTok achieve 40+ minutes, messaging apps 15-30 minutes, productivity tools 20-45 minutes. For web SaaS, longer sessions can indicate heavy feature adoption or that users are doing meaningful work — but excessively long sessions might indicate confusing UX where users are lost. Cohort-based analysis is critical: new users typically have shorter sessions than power users, so comparing median session duration across signup cohorts reveals onboarding velocity. A 3x session duration gap between users in their first week and users in month three signals strong engagement slope. Session duration also correlates with retention: products with average session length above 5 minutes typically show sub-3% monthly churn, whilst sub-2-minute session length correlates with 5-10% churn. For investors, session duration indicates product moat — if users spend hours in your tool daily, switching costs are high.
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