[Lightbody]

This is a great article, but like others have said, difficult in practice to pull off. But doesn't mean we (the industry) shouldn't try.

My own personal experience: I have a calendar assistant startup (http://reclaim.ai if you're curious) that does a bunch of awesome things. And we designed it to work where you already are -- namely in Google Calendar.

But a lot of potential investors, for example, question our definition of "active user" when we tell them we consider the customer getting value if we blocked out and defended time for their lunch as their schedule filled up.

Conventional wisdom is that the user isn't getting value unless they are coming back to your UI and getting your notifications etc. But that's just not the case for us: we helped our customer manage their time better without ever requiring them to come back into our app.

Isn't that like... the best possible thing? Solving a problem with the least amount of friction? It's working for us and fortunately we found investors who agree, but there are a lot of people out there that think about "engagement" in fairly simplistic terms that I think holds back our industry and also hurts the customers.