About Customer Investment and Stickyness
A key ingredient in any SaaS should be an acute awareness of customer investment. Find a way to provide more value for every piece of information or content a customer creates while using your SaaS.
There are many ways to provide value directly as a result of that sort of investment. If can be very simple, too. An upvote is an investment. Reward the customer by counting their upvotes and show achievement badges. An uploaded image is an investment. Reward them by offering sharable gallery views of their photos.
Make sure the investment gives them something meaningful and immediate that makes further investments more likely and more useful.
The more they invest, the more valuable your product is to them. A flywheel effect is very rewarding - for the customer and for the business.
This is totally true but I never thought about it in terms of user investment. Achievements are a huge way to drive engagement.
It seems to work better for some industries than others, it seems to be coupled to the level of acceptable playfulness or seriousness of the business. But even for the more serious ones, reframing achievements as "milestones" or "skill levels" does a great job.