Good morning, Riveters.
Most “growth” is just noise dressed up as momentum, and this week we’re calling it out. We’ll break down why the smartest companies obsess over Day 7 and Day 30, and how to design the exact moments that make customers come back on their own.
Plus, you’ll discover what’s actually moving in the U.S. economy, the practical AI shifts founders should pay attention to, and the startup signals worth copying before everyone else does.
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BUSINESS PULSE
Economy
Fed minutes (posted Dec 30, 2025) paint a “fine on the surface, fragile underneath” picture with officials seeing growth as moderate, but called out subdued hiring, hiring plans, and layoff risks that could spike unemployment. They also flagged a split economy: higher-income spending looks sturdier while lower-income households are increasingly price sensitive.
What this means to you: Run your 2026 plan with a “soft patch” scenario. Keep hiring modular, shorten payback on growth spend, and tighten your pricing and packaging so you can defend margin if demand wobbles.
Source: Federal Reserve
AI
A theme from OpenAI’s latest developer roundup was teams shifting from “prompting” to delegating work to agents. The practical shift is not philosophical, it’s agent building blocks (APIs/SDKs), multimodal inputs (PDFs, images, audio), and an explicit “measure → improve → ship” loop with evals and graders.
What this means to you: If you sell to businesses, your moat is not “we added AI.” Lean into reliability: personalize your agent, define success metrics, and ship narrow workflows that save time on a repeatable cadence.
Source: OpenAI
Startups
University and research spinouts are turning into a serious startup pipeline, even while overall VC stays down from 2021 highs. 76 European tech and life sciences spinouts reached $1B valuations, or $100M in revenue (or both) in 2025. New funds are forming specifically to back academic commercialization. The takeaway is simple: real IP plus technical defensibility is getting rewarded.
What this means to you: Real IP plus technical defensibility is getting rewarded. Treat labs as distribution, partner early, lock the licensing path down, and use non-dilutive programs to de-risk before you “go big” on capital.
Source: TechCrunch
PROOF OF RETURN
Stop worshipping signups, track day 7.
If your growth story starts and ends with “we’re driving more top of funnel,” you might be measuring enthusiasm, not progress.
Day 0 is easy to fake. Ads can do it. A slick landing page can do it. A founder with a big following can draw attention.
Day 7 is harder.
Day 7 asks: Did they come back after life happened? That is the first moment you can separate curiosity from value.
Why Day 7 matters more than your dashboard
Most customers do not leave because a competitor stole them. They leave because you never earned a slot in their week.
A week is a natural unit of work. Monday planning. Friday reporting. Payroll runs. Content calendars. Team check-ins. If your product cannot establish a weekly rhythm, retention becomes a constant uphill battle. But the Day 7 company does not obsess over time. It obsesses over the moment that predicts a return.
It’s a behavior that changes the odds.
Facebook pushed hard on “7 friends in 10 days” because users who built a real network early stuck around. It gave the team a concrete target tied to value, not activity.
Slack found a similar line in the sand: after a team exchanged 2,000 messages, 93% were still using Slack. That’s not a feature metric. It’s adoption.
Your version will be different, but the shape is the same.
Aha moment = the first outcome that makes a return likely.
Not “completed onboarding.”
Not “clicked around.”
An outcome. A delivered win.
People love to talk about habits like they form in a month.
In reality, research on habit formation shows it often takes much longer and varies a lot by person and behavior.
So what is Day 30 good for?
It tells you whether you have created a repeatable loop:
Return,
Get value,
Return again.
That loop is evidence you’re forming trust with your customers.
How to build your Day 7 and Day 30 path
Ask these, then answer them with data and interviews:
What does “return” mean in your business?
Login is weak. A value action is strong (send, publish, reconcile, ship, share).
What do Day 30 retainers do in Week 1 that churners don’t?
Look for a threshold (did X twice) or a sequence (A then B then C).
What is your Habit Action?
The smallest repeatable action that fits your cadence. Weekly review. Weekly send. Weekly payout run. Weekly report shared.
Then do the work:
Cut one setup step that does not move users to the Aha moment.
Add one default template that gets them to a real output fast.
Create one calendar-triggered reason to return that delivers value, not noise.
One last question to sit with:
If your product disappeared next week, what weekly problem would come roaring back?
RIVET RECOMMENDS
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GROWTH PLAY OF THE WEEK
Design one repeatable Week 1 outcome, then measure how many new customers hit it.
Most teams build a lead engine and hope retention follows. Flip it.
This week, define your single Day 7 outcome (the moment where a customer clearly got value, not just logged in). Examples: “sent first invoice,” “published first campaign,” “ran first payout,” “shared first report with a teammate.” Then engineer a straight path to it. Track three numbers daily:
% who reach the Day 7 outcome.
Median time-to-outcome.
% who repeat a value action by Day 30.
If those move, growth gets cheaper because you’re no longer pouring acquisition into a leaky bucket.