Your next user is an agent
I think a lot of SaaS companies are about to have a weird measurement problem.
For the last 10+ years, marketers @ productivity/infra companies cared a lot about DAU/MAU because the assumption was pretty simple:
if people keep opening your app, they’re getting value from it.
But now, our agents are doing the work for us.
Our team for example barely opens some of these tools, and most of our assistants handle this work for us. Like: updating Linear, write in Notion, pull things from HubSpot, work with GitHub, draft emails, move content into our CMS, etc.
So from the product’s perspective, I might look less active.
But in reality, I’m getting more value from the product than before.
So, if agents become the main “hands” using these tools, then a few things probably matter more than before:
- Can the agent do everything through your API that a human can do in the UI?
- Can it understand your docs without fighting through marketing pages?
- Can it get its own auth, permissions, limits, and audit trail?
- Can it test things safely before taking action?
And maybe the biggest one:
Should we still care about Daily Active Users, or should we start caring about Daily Active Agents?
And marketers will have their hands full on how to measure their activity. How many agents did useful work in your product today? How many actions did they complete? Did they come back?
I don’t think most companies are set up to measure this yet. But it feels like the direction things are moving (looking at how fast big companies like Notion/Stripe/Resend are publishing agent-native tools)
Curious how other people are thinking about this!