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Sam Altman: “If your product has any retention at all, you’re actually in really good shape”

September 16, 2025

Sam reflects on the first group of users that tested ChatGPT:

“This was back when the model was really bad. Very few of the users actually stuck with it. Retention was atrocious. But for the users that did retain, their usage increased over time.”

He admits that OpenAI almost didn’t even launch ChatGPT because of how atrocious early retention was. But after reflection, he believes this is a really important learning for startup founders:

“If you have a product that has any retention at all, you’re actually in really good shape. If it’s 5%, that can be totally fine. The default is almost all the way down in a straight line to zero. But I didn’t quite understand that as intuitively at the time.”