Retention and Engagement - everybody wants your time

Including, me.

There’s no question the world has experienced significant change, over just the past 10 years.

You’ve got standard concerns like AI; questions around whether tech is helping or hurting us - but I want to present another side to the story: one that I’ve got direct experience in.

In a new “series” I’ll be rolling out, I’ll be deep diving into my prior experience as a software engineer in this new world where everything is a metric to be improved.

Laying out the problem

Not to be vague, I’ve referenced the problem in the title. Companies, and by proxy, engineers at the companies, are being driven (by shareholders), to ensure you maximise the time spent on their platforms.

Perhaps, that much is apparent and obvious. But, have you stopped to think recently how vehement and aggressive these practices are getting? How many services do you use or rely on that are (subtly or not), making decisions purely just to increase the time customers spend with the software open?

I’m a big believer that software can make lives better. I’ll be quick to announce, though, that as of 2025, there’s a lot of secrecy behind the scenes around why companies are striving harder to hit engagement metrics.

It’s a race to the bottom, and as we continue seeing software take up more and more of our time spent, it’s worth exploring just how bad things can get when you’re laser focused on app engagement.

Making something good, isn’t good enough

I worked at Flux Finance for 3 and a half years, before unfortunately being made redundant. Flux went on, only months later, to be bought out by Netwealth. Not terrible; acquisition complete, and everybody’s clapping.

As a refresher, Flux was an app designed to make your money journey easier, and make you more financially literate, in fun ways. The motto: “helping 400k+ Aussies win at money” - with gamification being a major aspect.

For Australians, it features:

• a way to check your credit score
• articles released regularly to learn about money news
• a budgeting feature that allows you to connect your bank account, via Open Banking
• “Flux Academy” - monthly mini-courses for bite-sized structured learning (lessons locked behind a membership)

It has other “tiny” features too, like being able to see offers on different credit products.

There were thousands of monthly active users, and successful user growth over many months (5-10 thousand users per month).

I genuinely loved working at Flux for the first 3 years. It was a small team, only the CTO and myself for a while.

For the first little bit, we were truly a bootstrapped start-up. Not many users, not many stand-out features. We spent a fair amount of time prototyping and “feeling the waters”. We launched “Win the Week” - a “lottery” type game where you can win money by depositing money in your nominated savings account.

We were very much developing features towards our goal - “helping Aussies win at money”, and potentially even win some real cash, for promoting healthy financial habits!

In late 2022, we launched the custom “Flux Academy”, which was specially crafted and built on top of an existing course provider to offer a unique experience. The vision was clear - we’re here to provide learnings about money to improve financial literacy and empower people to take control of their cash flow.

What happened at Flux?

It was a gradual shift internally. At first, we wanted to double down the analytics we were tracking. Hmm, fair enough. It’s not bad to be data-driven.

Then, we were tasked to create more notifications, and the intent was clear. This wasn’t designed to help people, but rather just to pull them back into the app and see what else we’ve got around. Hmm, okay. Not inherently against notifications.

Then, our KPIs changed. Engineers were tasked to try to think about how we can improve stickiness (that is, how frequently weekly users return daily). Flux essentially became hell-bent on ensuring that we were not just making new changes and features, but that those directly correlated into better app open statistics, more time with the app actually opened, etc.

Initially, I didn’t have a problem with improving engagement in the app. In fact, it was pretty well known that Flux had, “shit” engagement, for what we were trying to target. We weren’t just a “finance” app, it was trying to be a portal where you can browse, learn, interact. Ideally, having fun.

“Flux Pro”, our monthly subscription, was launched in early 2023. We gained a couple of hundred subscriptions within the first few months, but things slowly tailed off. We were kind of scrambling to “gate” certain features behind Pro that were previously free, or desperately trying to offer “Pro” content, like “pro-only articles”.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that pretty much all companies need to branch out, and attempt new products or avenues to increase their revenue.

For Flux, the ultimate demise ended up being their bold move to focus on business-to-business sales; inherently focusing on the customer, less.

Focusing less on the customer sounds maybe like the best outcome here, but it is a complete 180 compared to how Flux started just years prior, and this is what I think we’re going to see a lot more of in the next few years. Specifically, focusing time where it’s most lucrative; more towards business sales and less on making core customers happy.

What the story of Flux tells us, and a warning about the future

I look back on my time at Flux as nothing but a blessing.

From 18 to 21, I gained unfathomable experience in running a business. With 3 co-founders and at most 2 engineers (myself and one of my best mates!), whether I liked it or not, I was at the fore-front of growing Flux, building the feature set, and subsequently, seeing how it should be monetised or changed to ensure maximum usage, and revenue.

But, like a lot of things, it was not sunshine and rainbows. There’s a darker side to this which cleanly alludes to worsening practices in software as a whole, whether it’s games, productivity apps, social media, etc.

Everybody wants your time, more.

• Nearly all apps, like YouTube or TikTok, are tracking your retention scores (and handing that to creators).
• Lots of games have “daily rewards”, or only reward you if you’ve spent enough time in-game.

Engagement & retention has basically become the protein-infused products you know make no sense. You don’t really need to worry about it so much, and companies shoving it down our throat might only be causing more harm.

Lots of companies these days are not looking to make software in exchange for a sale, as we used to see a lot.

Everything is a subscription, everything is “freemium”. There’s always something lurking in the corner, specifically there to make sure you can upgrade.

I can sympathise with this a little bit: everybody loves a dollar! On top of that, software is genuinely hard to make. I don’t believe AI is going to magically fix this problem; despite abundance, we need more real thinking around what problems need to be solved.

My main point is that companies need to worry less about the “weekly active users (WAU)”, “churn rates”, or “frequency of use”.

We need to focus on making the actual features and software more useful. The people using these applications are not stupid, and we shouldn’t act at all like they don’t have other options.

“Good enough” isn’t good enough anymore - as an engineer, I can feel the weight of people asking for better solutions.

I want to finalise by saying that I’m worried for the future, as people get sucked into engagement traps, and as developers are swayed to try and make said traps.

Worrying itself won’t do anything. That’s why I’m determined to make content that isn’t focused on retention & engagement. I want to make things that people enjoy, regardless of whether you come back or not.

To me, I’d rather have 1 person reading something with soul, rather than “retain” a thousand people who just don’t care.

That being said, my blog posts are written from the heart without the use of AI.

If you enjoy my work, I’m not asking for more of your time. But, I am passionate about continuing to deliver authentic experiences to people which matter. For more of that, join us on Discord for updates on what I’m working on; something different. https://discord.gg/ghDQN3fq7K

Importantly, thank you for reading, and for your retention on this article.