Grow an App
Retention-first app growth
Takes you from an app people sign up for and then quietly abandon to a sealed retention engine with a habit loop, an activated first run, and one metric the whole team trusts. It orchestrates its eight skills phase by phase, asking you the decision questions at every step and recording every result in your project's docs/ folder so the journey resumes across sessions.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/grow-app --global - 01
Why do users come back without us paying?
Hooked UX → docs/PRODUCT.md - 02
Why don't new users reach the loop?
Improve Retention → docs/PRODUCT.md - 03
What do our own users actually need?
Continuous Discovery → docs/PRODUCT.md + docs/CUSTOMER.md - 04
Which bet is worth building?
Lean UX → docs/EXPERIMENTS.md - 05
Is the team building the right things?
Inspired → docs/PRODUCT.md - 06
Which single number tells the truth?
Lean Analytics → docs/METRICS.md - 07
Does it feel alive in the hand?
Microinteractions → docs/DESIGN.md - 08
Will engagement last, or curdle?
Drive Motivation → docs/PRODUCT.md
Each phase asks the question, then writes the answer before the next one starts.
The long read behind the phases: How to Grow an Existing App with AI Skills
02 What it is
What is the Grow an App journey?
Retention comes before acquisition here — buying users into a leaky app only costs more. Eight phases audit the habit loop, fix activation, install weekly discovery, choose which bets to build, settle on one honest metric and keep engagement intrinsic, recording each decision in docs/ so the journey resumes later.
03 In practice
Grow an App Retention-First
Users sign up, poke around, and vanish.Buying more of them won't help.
Our app's retention is too low — users sign up, poke around, and vanish. Run the grow-app journey — habit loops, activation, weekly discovery, and the One Metric That Matters — before any acquisition spend.
Use grow-app skill.
Written to your repo
- docs/PRODUCT.md
- docs/CUSTOMER.md
- docs/EXPERIMENTS.md
- docs/METRICS.md
- docs/DESIGN.md
- docs/GROW-APP-PLAN.md journey tracker
Stop anytime. The tracker records which phases are done and which decision is next, so a new session opens at the unanswered question.
04 Prompts
Say it like this.
Name the journey at the end of a prompt and it takes over from phase one. Say it again in a later session and it resumes at the unanswered question.
Users sign up and vanish — grow this app the retention-first way. using grow-app skill
Run the grow-app journey; start with the habit-loop audit. using grow-app skill
Continue our app growth journey from the tracker. using grow-app skill
05 Fit
One prompt runs it.
Every phase asks before it acts, and every decision lands in your project's docs/ folder as a living document.
Reach for it when
Grow an app whose retention can't yet support acquisition
Design ethical habit loops and fix activation friction
Replace opinion-driven roadmaps with weekly discovery
Choose the One Metric That Matters for your stage
Sustain engagement with intrinsic motivation, not gimmicks
Reach for something else when
You want only a habit-loop teardown. Hooked UX gives you trigger, action, reward and investment on its own.
The app frustrates users in ways they can point at. Improve an App fixes usability, hierarchy and copy first.
Retention already holds and demand is the gap. Grow a Business builds the acquisition engine instead.
There is no shipped app yet to retain anyone. Create an App validates and builds one first.
07 Questions
Before you install.
How do I install the Grow an App journey?
Run npx skills add wondelai/skills/grow-app --global. It takes about 30 seconds and needs no account. The Grow an App skill then works in Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent — anything that reads the open agentskills.io format — and your agent loads it on its own when a task calls for it. It is free and MIT-licensed, and the source is at https://github.com/wondelai/skills.
Which skills does the Grow an App journey run, and what does it produce?
It orchestrates 8 skills across 8 phases — Hooked UX, Improve Retention, Continuous Discovery, Lean UX, Inspired, Lean Analytics, Microinteractions, Drive Motivation — asking you one decision question per phase. Each answer is written to your project's docs/ folder (docs/PRODUCT.md, docs/CUSTOMER.md, docs/EXPERIMENTS.md, docs/METRICS.md, docs/DESIGN.md, docs/GROW-APP-PLAN.md), so the journey survives across sessions and you keep the reasoning, not just the output.
Why does acquisition never appear in this journey?
Deliberately. Eight phases in you have a habit loop, an activated first run, a discovery cadence and one metric — the conditions under which paid acquisition stops being a leaky bucket. Spending before that buys users who leave and hides the retention problem behind a rising signup chart. The journey’s position is that acquisition is a decision for after these eight phases, not during them.
Hooked and Drive both write to docs/PRODUCT.md and seem to disagree.
They are the check and the balance. Hooked UX designs the trigger-action-reward-investment loop that brings people back; Drive Motivation asks, in the final phase, whether that engagement will last or curdle into something users resent. Running them at opposite ends is the point — the last phase reviews what the first one built, and docs/PRODUCT.md carries both the loop and the honest verdict on it.
We already do user research. Is the discovery phase redundant?
Probably not, but say so and it will be short. Continuous Discovery is about cadence more than technique — weekly touchpoints with users, opportunity mapping, and assumption tests small enough to finish inside a sprint. If you already interview weekly, the phase confirms it and moves on to Lean UX. If research happens quarterly in one big burst, this is the phase that changes the most.
Does this work for a B2B tool people are told to use?
Yes, with one adjustment. The habit loop still applies — the trigger is often a colleague’s message rather than a notification — but the Drive Motivation phase carries more weight, because mandated software is exactly where extrinsic motivation runs out. Expect Continuous Discovery to be the hardest phase to staff: reaching users weekly is harder when they are someone else’s employees.
Eight skills, one deliberate order.
Run the whole journey with one prompt.
npx skills add wondelai/skills/grow-app --global MIT licensed · Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes · No account