What is session duration and why do investors care?

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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