The 5 Stages of a User's Journey (AARRR)

Why this matters

AARRR gives you a shared vocabulary for diagnosing where your product is leaking. Without it, teams argue about tactics when they should be diagnosing the stage that's actually broken. Every growth conversation becomes more productive once everyone can point to the specific pirate metric that's off.

Demo

Map a SaaS product's current week to each AARRR stage and calculate the conversion rate between stages.

Try it yourself

1. Change acquisition to 6000 and observe which conversion rate drops — confirm it's acqToAct, not actToRet.
2. Set retention to 200 and recalculate retToRev — note how revenue falls even though the activation rate is unchanged.
3. Identify which single stage drop has the largest downstream revenue impact by halving each value one at a time.
4. Add a step5 'referral-to-revenue' rate and verify it equals revenue divided by referral count.

References

• Dave McClure — Startup Metrics for Pirates (original slide deck)
• Reforge — AARRR vs. Growth Accounting