What it is
AARRR, better known as "pirate metrics," is a framework from investor Dave McClure that breaks the customer lifecycle into five measurable stages. The name is just the five initials said out loud. Its value is that it turns a fuzzy "grow the business" goal into a funnel you can instrument, diagnose, and fix stage by stage.
| Stage | Question |
|---|---|
| Acquisition | How do users find you? |
| Activation | Do they reach first value? |
| Retention | Do they come back? |
| Referral | Do they tell others? |
| Revenue | Do they pay? |
When to use it
- Mapping your funnel. AARRR gives you the five stages to instrument in analytics.
- Finding the leaky stage. It pinpoints where users drop out, which is where to focus.
- Aligning growth work. It stops teams from optimizing a stage that is not the constraint.
How to apply it
- Instrument all five stages. Measure each stage: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue. You cannot fix what you cannot see.
- Find your weakest stage. The lowest-performing stage is your constraint. It is where users leak out of the funnel fastest.
- Fix the constraint first. Pouring more into Acquisition while Retention leaks just fills a bucket with a hole. Fix the hole first.
- Watch Retention closely. Of the five, Retention is the one that reveals whether you have product-market fit. Treat it as the headline.
Example
A startup pours budget into ads and watches Acquisition soar, but revenue barely moves. AARRR shows why: Activation is fine, but Retention falls off a cliff after week one. No amount of new traffic fixes a product people do not come back to. The framework redirects the team from the stage that felt urgent to the stage that was actually broken.
Weak retention is a PMF problem
If AARRR shows retention leaking, the cause is usually fit. Run the Sean Ellis survey to find out whether users would even miss you.
Measure your PMF score free → 14-day free trial · No credit cardCommon mistakes
- Obsessing over Acquisition while Retention leaks. The most common and most expensive mistake in the funnel.
- Skipping Activation. Users who never reach first value cannot retain, refer, or pay.
- Chasing vanity at the top of the funnel. Big traffic numbers feel good and mean little if the lower stages leak.
How it connects to your PMF score
Retention is where product-market fit shows up in behavior, a retention curve that flattens instead of decaying to zero. But retention only tells you that users leave, not why. The Sean Ellis survey answers the why: weak retention plus a low PMF score is the classic no-market-need pattern. Activation, meanwhile, ties directly to your activation rate, only activated users should be surveyed for PMF at all.
Find out why retention leaks
PMFtracker runs the Sean Ellis survey and tracks your PMF score, so when AARRR shows a retention problem, you know whether the real issue is fit.
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