What makes AARRR (Pirate Metrics) notable?

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AARRR (Pirate Metrics)

Activate when: user says 'our growth is stalling and we don't know why,' 'product and marketing are arguing about whose fault it is,' 'where is our funnel br... Skill: AARRR (Pirate Metrics) Owner: deciqai Summary: Activate when: user says 'our growth is stalling and we don't know why,' 'product and marketing are arguing about whose fault it is,' 'where is our funnel br... Tags: latest:1.0.6 Version history: v1.0.6 | 2026-07-16T17:51:05.759Z | user Description tail link + agents machine-readable metadata line (deciqai.com/s/aarrr-pirate-metrics.json) v1.0.5 | 2026-07-09T11:1

OpenClaw

View on ClawHub Homepage

Rank

Safety

Downloads

1.3k

Updated

Oct 10, 2026

Version

1.0.6

Source

CLAWHUB

About

What it does, and when to use it.

Capability contract not published. No trust telemetry is available yet. 1.3K downloads reported by the source. Last updated 10/10/2026.

Avoid when

Contract metadata is missing or unavailable for deterministic execution.

Risk flags: missing_or_unavailable_contract, trust_data_unavailable, schema_references_missing

Public facts

Every fact links back to the source it came from.

Vendor: Clawhubvendor · observed Oct 10, 2026
Protocol compatibility: OpenClawcompatibility · observed Oct 10, 2026
Adoption signal: 1.3K downloadsadoption · observed Oct 10, 2026
Latest release: 1.0.6release · observed Jul 16, 2026
Handshake status: UNKNOWNsecurity

Install and run

Setup complexity: low.

clawhub skill install s17a4mqcnk515kvaca5ze55d0x88pfpx:aarrr-pirate-metrics

Setup complexity is classified as HIGH. You must provision dedicated cloud infrastructure or an isolated VM. Do not run this directly on your local workstation.
Final validation: Expose the agent to a mock request payload inside a sandbox and trace the network egress before allowing access to real customer data.

Contract: missing

curl -s "https://www.xpersona.co/api/v1/agents/clawhub-deciqai-aarrr-pirate-metrics/snapshot"

Documentation

CLAWHUB

144,063 characters of source documentation, loaded on request.

Extracted files

5 files captured from the source.

SKILL.md

---
name: aarrr-pirate-metrics
description: "Activate when: user says 'our growth is stalling and we don't know why,' 'product and marketing are arguing about whose fault it is,' 'where is our funnel breaking,' 'pirate metrics,' or 'acquisition vs activation vs retention.' Also activate for: designing end-to-end metrics for a new product, building a shared instrumentation framework across teams.
  Do NOT activate when: the product has no users yet (use lean-startup instead), or the bottleneck is already obvious and obvious to fix. More: deciqai.com/c/aarrr-pirate-metrics"
---

# AARRR (Pirate Metrics)

## Overview

A startup's growth is a **sequential funnel** — each stage gates the next. Great Acquisition is worthless if Activation is broken; great Activation is worthless if Retention is zero. Optimizing the wrong stage produces work that looks like progress while the bottleneck stays.

The **AARRR framework** (Dave McClure, *Startup Metrics for Pirates*, 2007) names five stages: Acquisition (do they show up?), Activation (good first experience?), Retention (do they come back?), Referral (do they tell others?), Revenue (do they pay?). The bottleneck stage governs total growth — improving any other stage produces no system-level gain (Goldratt, *The Goal*, 1984).

**Compose with:** first-principles to identify your specific Activation event; pmf-crossing-the-chasm to recognize when Retention will always be the bottleneck pre-PMF; probabilistic-thinking to set base rates per stage.

## When to Use

- Growth is **stalling** and the cause is not obvious — multiple teams have plausible explanations
- Product, marketing, and sales are **arguing about whose problem it is**
- You need a **shared instrumentation framework** across teams
- Designing **end-to-end metrics for a new product**
- Someone says: *"AARRR," "pirate metrics," "growth funnel," "where is our funnel breaking?"*
- An **AI-native product has strong signups but weak activation/retention** — cheap AI-hype acquisition masks empty-state and post-novelty leaks; or you're facing AI-native competition on a commoditized model and need to find where your funnel actually loses users

**When NOT to use:** No users yet → use lean-startup. Signups still in the tens — AARRR rates need volume. Bottleneck already obvious → fix that first, then return.

## Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

- **Engine mode:** user has funnel data and wants the bottleneck named → run The Process directly.
- **Coach mode:** vague situation or unfamiliarity → guide step by step.

In Coach mode, respond one step at a time. Each [WAIT] is a hard stop — output only that step's question, then stop.

1. **One-line what-it-is.** AARRR is a five-stage funnel (Acquisition / Activation / Retention / Referral / Revenue) — the point is to find which stage is broken so you don't waste effort on the wrong one.
2. **Check fit.** No users / tiny base → redirect. Bottleneck already obvious → fix it first.
3. **Elicit their real case.

_meta.json

{
  "ownerId": "kn754b8sk22s8c6gjxt02bftbn88q7ye",
  "slug": "aarrr-pirate-metrics",
  "version": "1.0.6",
  "publishedAt": 1784224265759
}

references/sources.md

# Sources — aarrr-pirate-metrics

> *Primary sources for the [aarrr-pirate-metrics](../SKILL.md) skill.*

- **McClure, Dave.** *Startup Metrics for Pirates* (AARRR). The framework was first presented in 2007 (Ignite Seattle); the widely-circulated "long version" slide deck linked here is the Startonomics SF edition (October 2008). SlideShare: https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version **Canonical primary source for AARRR.**
- **Goldratt, Eliyahu M.** *The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement*. North River Press, 1984; rev. 3rd ed. 2014. **The Theory of Constraints** that underpins the bottleneck logic of AARRR.
- **Ellis, Sean & Brown, Morgan.** *Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success*. Crown Business, 2017. Growth-marketing case studies including the Dropbox referral case and Facebook's "7 friends in 10 days" activation metric.
- **Palihapitiya, Chamath.** "How We Put Facebook on the Path to 1 Billion Users" (public talk, c. 2012; widely circulated 2013). First-person account of Facebook's growth team and the "7 friends in 10 days" activation metric. Note: the "7 friends in 10 days" figure is a widely-repeated growth-team anecdote rather than a formally published metric; treat as illustrative.
- **Dropbox Inc., Form S-1 (SEC, 2018)** — primary-source user growth milestones: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467623/000119312518055809/d451946ds1.htm
- **Sequoia Capital case studies on Dropbox** — primary-source venture history: https://www.sequoiacap.com/
- **OpenAI.** "Introducing ChatGPT" (November 30, 2022): https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt — dates the acquisition-side inflection for the 2023–2026 AI SaaS funnel example (AI-hype traffic makes acquisition cheap).
- **Sequoia Capital / Cahn, David.** "AI's $600B Question" (2024): https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/ — widely-cited analysis of the gap between AI infrastructure/capex build-out and durable end-application revenue and retention; context for why activation/retention (not acquisition) is the AI-SaaS bottleneck.
- The popular framing "growth hacking" is **not** cited as a source — by this skill's own rule, an aphorism is not evidence. The framework is precisely "instrument the funnel, find the bottleneck stage relative to benchmark, concentrate effort there, re-measure."

examples/ai-saas-funnel-leaks-2023-2026.md

# Method in Action: Where AI SaaS Funnels Leak (2023–2026)

> *Example for the [aarrr-pirate-metrics](../SKILL.md) skill.*

A pattern-level worked example — not a single company, but the recurring funnel shape observed across the wave of AI-native SaaS products that launched after ChatGPT's release in November 2022. The generative-AI boom pushed a distinctive failure mode to the surface: acquisition became historically *easy* while activation and retention became the real leaks. This example applies the Funnel Audit to that pattern. Where a specific number would be fragile, it is qualified or omitted.

The context in one line (drawn from the 2023–2025 record; the pattern appears to persist but recent periods should be re-checked against current data): after the November 2022 ChatGPT launch, curiosity and press drove enormous top-of-funnel traffic to anything labeled "AI," and by early 2025 the AI-native SaaS category was crowded with near-identical wrapper products competing on the same underlying foundation models. In that environment, *showing up* is cheap and *staying* is hard — the inverse of the classic pre-AI SaaS funnel, where distribution was the scarce resource.

Walk the Funnel Audit (matching the SKILL.md Process steps):

**Step 1 — Define each stage for this specific product.** For a generic AI SaaS assistant:
- **Acquisition** = visitor lands on the site and creates an account (often driven by AI-hype PR, launch-day virality, or a viral demo).
- **Activation** = the user reaches first real value — i.e., they get past the **empty state** and complete one genuinely useful task with the AI (a good draft, a correct answer on *their own* data, a workflow actually finished), not merely "typed one prompt."
- **Retention** = the user returns and uses the product in a later week for real work, *after the novelty of trying an AI toy has worn off*.
- **Referral** = the user shares an output or invites a colleague.
- **Revenue** = the user converts from free trial to a paid subscription.

The single most common definitional error here is calling "signed up and sent one message" *Activation*. That is the end of Acquisition. AI products are unusually vulnerable to this because a first prompt is trivially easy, so the vanity signal looks great while no durable value has been delivered.

**Step 2 — Measure conversion at each stage.** The characteristic AI-SaaS reading:
- Acquisition→Activation: **leaky.** Many curiosity-driven signups hit a blank chat box or empty canvas, don't know what to type, get a generic or hallucinated first result, and never reach first value. This is the **empty-state / first-value** leak.
- Activation→Retention: **the deepest leak.** Even users who got one impressive result often don't come back, because the initial "wow" was novelty, not a solved recurring job. This is the **novelty-decay** leak.
- Retention→Referral and →Revenue: mostly downstream symptoms — thin because too few users retained.

**Step 3 — Compare agains

examples/dropbox-referral-program-2009.md

# Method in Action: Dropbox's Referral Program (2009)

> *Example for the [aarrr-pirate-metrics](../SKILL.md) skill.*

A worked example. Not a marketing legend — primary-source documented in Drew Houston's interviews and growth-marketing case studies.

By early 2009, **Dropbox** had achieved PMF (see [pmf-crossing-the-chasm](../pmf-crossing-the-chasm/SKILL.md)) and had ~100,000 users from the 2007 video MVP + 2008 launch. The team ran an AARRR audit on the funnel:

- **Acquisition**: Paid Google AdWords campaigns were running, with **customer acquisition cost (CAC) ~$200–$300 per user** — but Dropbox's price point was $99/year ($9.99/month), making **AdWords economically broken** as the dominant channel.
- **Activation**: Strong. Once users installed the desktop client and put a file in the Dropbox folder, the experience converted to "aha" cleanly (the *file appeared on another device* moment, the core delight from the 2007 video MVP).
- **Retention**: Strong. Users who activated tended to stay; Dropbox solved a real persistent need.
- **Referral**: Untapped. Users loved the product and told friends informally, but there was no built-in mechanism.
- **Revenue**: Decent at the free-to-paid conversion typical for freemium (a few percent).

The audit identified **Acquisition** as the load-bearing bottleneck — *not because Acquisition was bad in absolute terms, but because the acquisition channel that was working economically did not exist*. Spending more on AdWords would not solve it; only finding a sub-CAC channel would.

**The intervention (September 2008–April 2009):** Dropbox launched a **referral program**. The mechanic: **give 500 MB free storage to both the referrer and the referee** when an invited friend signed up and installed Dropbox. The reward was native to the product (storage), aligned with the product's value (more space), and free for Dropbox to give away (storage was Dropbox's marginal cost, not a cash outlay).

The result, documented by Drew Houston and reproduced in Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown's *Hacking Growth*: **signups grew 60% as a result of the referral program**, with **35% of daily signups coming through referrals by late 2009**. By April 2010, Dropbox had grown to **4 million users**, then **25 million** by 2011. The referral program effectively **converted a Retention strength into Acquisition output** — Goldratt's "exploit the constraint" move applied to a customer funnel.

Walk the audit on Dropbox 2009:

- **Stage definitions (Step 1):** Acquisition = ad click → landing page → signup; Activation = client installed + first file synced; Retention = active in day 7; Referral = invite sent → friend installs + syncs file; Revenue = upgrade from free to paid tier.
- **Conversions (Step 2):** Acquisition CAC vs LTV economically broken; Activation, Retention, Revenue all benchmarks-fine; Referral nominal.
- **Bottleneck (Step 4):** Acquisition channel economics — *specifically*, the cost-effective channel did not exist.
- **Ex

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