AI Tourist
a16z's term: a user who signs up for an AI product, tries it for a couple of months and leaves.
AI and GrowthTerm 75 / 81
In practice
According to Rodriguez and Immerman (a16z, 2025), this wave makes early retention curves a less decisive indicator of long-term retention; their fix is to rebase retention and CAC from M0 to M3. In their words, M3 is the point where the hobbyists have mostly churned out and the users who found high-impact use cases remain. M3 is not a rule: look at where the curve flattens in your own cohort matrix (our reading). Instead of trying to hold on to tourists, find the job the stayers are doing and build activation around it (our reading).