Dot Plots: How to Actually See What Your Users Are Doing

Y Combinator

Summary

This video introduces 'dot plots' as an essential visualization tool for founders and product teams to understand individual user behavior beyond aggregate metrics like DAUs or MAUs. By mapping specific user events on a two-dimensional grid, where rows represent users and columns represent time, teams can identify usage patterns, identify churn risks, and validate if their product delivers real value. The author explains how to build these plots, how they scale for large datasets through sampling, and why they serve as a powerful complement to cohort retention curves for driving product strategy.

Chapters

  1. 0:00Limitations of Aggregate User Metrics
  2. 2:04Introduction to Dot Plots
  3. 3:50Designing a Dot Plot
  4. 6:40Identifying Patterns and Behavior
  5. 12:10Dot Plots Versus DAU Graphs

Topics covered

  • Limitations of aggregate user metrics
  • How to construct a dot plot

+5 more topics (full content when you follow the channel)

Transcript excerpt

One of the biggest mistakes I see founders make is relying on aggregate user metrics instead of understanding how any individual users use their product. In my last video, I talked about cohort retention curves and how you can use those to separate groups of users and track what they do over time throughout using your product. And I think that's the best tool that you've got to figure out if people keep using your product. But what you don't know is how are they using your product? How are they interacting? What features are they using? What's the frequency of use? What's the the pacing of how they use the product? And most founders just like ignore this. But I think it's the most important signal to figure out if you've built something that people want. So you want to be able to look at what individual users are doing. But that's a lot, right? if you even have like 10 or 20 users, um it…