How do you market a product that's designed to be used less?
Here's a marketing problem no one prepares you for: what happens when your product's success means people stop using it?
At Murror, our best outcome is when someone works through what's been weighing on them and doesn't need to come back for a while. They journal, they process, they gain clarity — and then they go live their life. That's the whole point.
But try explaining that to a growth marketer. Or an investor. Or even your own team.
Every playbook we studied was built around maximizing daily active users, increasing session length, driving habit loops. The entire vocabulary of product growth assumes that more usage = more value. For social media, that might be true. For a wellness product? It's the opposite.
We had to throw out the playbook and start from scratch.
Here's what we've learned so far:
We stopped marketing what the product does and started marketing what it helps people become. Nobody shares "I used an AI journaling app today." But they do share "I finally understood why that conversation with my mom always goes sideways."
Our best acquisition channel turned out to be word-of-mouth from people who barely use the app anymore. They recommend Murror precisely because it helped them move forward — and that story is more compelling than any ad.
We had to redefine our north star metric. Instead of DAU, we track what we call "resolution moments" — instances where a user's journaling pattern around a specific issue shifts from repetitive to exploratory to resolved. That's our real growth number.
We learned to be honest in our marketing. We actually tell people: "We hope you won't need us forever." Counterintuitively, that honesty is what makes people trust us enough to start.
The hardest part? Patience. This kind of growth is slower. It doesn't spike in a launch week. But the users who come through word-of-mouth stay longer, engage more meaningfully, and genuinely get value from the product.
We're still figuring this out. Curious if anyone else is building something where success looks like less usage, not more. How are you telling that story?
Replies
'We hope you won't need us forever' is probably the strongest line in the whole post.
The example about finally understanding a pattern with your mom is actually more memorable than any feature description.
That shift from repetitive to exploratory thinking sounds like a small thing on paper, but it's probably a huge signal in practice.
The trust piece resonates. Saying you don't want people dependent on the product feels refreshing.
I think the "resolution moments" metric is really smart framing. Most wellness products just copy social app metrics because that's what investors understand, and then everyone ends up optimizing for the wrong thing. The word-of-mouth angle makes total sense to me. People don't talk about tools they use every day out of habit, they talk about tools that changed something.
A product that helped someone figure out a pattern in their relationships is way more shareable than one they opened 47 times this week. I'm curious though, when you're in those early conversations with investors, do you lead with the "resolution moments" metric upfront, or is there still a version of DAU you have to show alongside it to get them comfortable?
Murror
@nolan_vu Great question. Honestly, we do both. We lead with resolution moments because that's the story that makes people lean in — it's specific, it's measurable, and it shows we understand our users deeply. But we also show a version of engagement that maps to retention: how many users come back after their first resolution moment, and how quickly new users reach one. That gives investors something familiar to anchor on while we reframe what "healthy usage" looks like. The trick is framing DAU not as the goal, but as a trailing indicator of whether people trust the product enough to return when they need it.
@monatruong_murror Awesome, I think you guys are doing it the right way though.
That "trailing indicator of trust" reframing is really sharp. I think that's the part most founders struggle to articulate. Everyone knows DAU isn't the right metric for this kind of product, but nobody has a clean answer when an investor asks "so what do you track instead?"
The combo of resolution moments + return rate after first resolution gives them something concrete to hold onto without falling back into the daily usage trap. Appreciate you sharing that, genuinely useful framing I'll probably steal for our own conversations.
@monatruong_murror @nolan_vu Useful framing. I would measure whether the user reached a clear decision boundary, not whether they stayed longer: did they enter the minimum inputs, get a concrete range or checklist, and leave knowing what to measure or compare next? For tools like calculators/checklists, clarity after a short session is the product doing its job.
Murror
@nolan_vu Really appreciate that, Nolan. And please do steal it -- that framing took us months of awkward investor conversations to land on. The more founders normalizing non-DAU metrics for wellness/mental health products, the better it gets for all of us.
liked the framing, but I'd push back slightly. I don't think the goal is less usage, it's more intentional usage. a user who opens Murror three times a year during genuinely difficult moments is more valuable than one who journals daily out of habit without getting anywhere. the metric shift from DAU to "resolution moments" captures this. you're not optimising for frequency, you're optimising for impact. that's not a harder story to tell. it's actually a more honest one than most consumer apps are willing to admit.
Murror
@riya_pariyar You're right, and I think "intentional usage" is actually the better framing. We've been saying "less" as shorthand, but what we really mean is: the product should serve you when you need it and get out of the way when you don't. The users who come back three times a year during real moments — those are the ones who tell their friends about us. That's the pattern we're designing for. Thanks for the pushback, it's sharpening how we talk about this.
Some of the most valuable products are ones that make themselves less necessary over time. Good teachers, therapists, and mentors create independence, not dependency. Maybe software should sometimes be judged the same way.
Murror
@conrad_n This is exactly how we think about it. The therapist analogy is one we use internally all the time — the goal is to help someone build the skills to eventually not need you. Software that measures success by how much time people spend in it is optimizing for dependency. We'd rather build something people are grateful they used, even if they move on.
Curious how you handle this with investors specifically. "Our power users barely use us" is a hard sentence to say in a pitch. Did you find a way to reframe that metric that landed, or did you have to filter for investors who already understood the category?
Murror
@shahana_rasheed Both, honestly. Early on we pitched to investors who already understood wellness or mental health — they got it immediately. But for generalist investors, we had to reframe. Instead of saying "our power users barely use us," we'd say: "Our users reach meaningful outcomes faster than any competitor, and the ones who do become our most reliable referral channel." Same data, different frame. We also show retention through the lens of "return rate after resolution" — do people come back when they hit a new challenge? That number is strong and tells a healthier story than raw DAU.
One framing that helps: market the outcome as “time to confident exit,” not engagement.
I'm working on WanhTY in a very different category (practical calculators/checklists), but the same principle applies: the best session is often short because the person got a clear answer and left with less uncertainty.
For Murror, “resolution moments” sounds much stronger than DAU because it names the value in the user's language instead of forcing a wellness product into a social-app metric.
Murror
@new_user___133202617a1838aaa823a24 "Time to confident exit" — that's a great way to put it. And it's interesting that WanhTY shares this pattern even in a totally different category. It makes me think this isn't just a wellness thing; it's a design philosophy for any tool that's supposed to help people make decisions or process something. The best session is the one where you leave with clarity. Would love to hear how you measure that on the calculators/checklists side.
The referral model here is actually stronger than typical word-of-mouth because the person recommending it has nothing to gain — they already got what they needed and moved on. That's a different trust signal than someone recommending a tool they use every day. The hard part is building an acquisition funnel that captures a recommendation that happens six months after someone stopped being a regular user.