How Recraft’s Data-Driven Design Decisions Helped 10x Its User Base

Insight/Action/Outcome: The team at Recraft, a generative AI art platform, uses Amplitude to discover new insights about activation and retention and then test out improvements—running up to 10 A/B tests at any given time. Data-driven optimizations have helped them reduce churn, increase adoption by 700%, and grow their user base 10x in the two years since they launched.

When designing a product for professional designers, form has to go hand-in-hand with function. Artists are particular about their tools, and as a product data analyst at Recraft, it’s my job to determine how even the smallest detail affects their customer journey. If our users can’t execute their creative vision with us, they’ll go somewhere else.

Recraft is a generative AI platform for designers, creatives, and teams to create and edit images. To make Recraft essential for everyday design workflows, we need a deep understanding of how our customers use our product in their creative process. That’s why we use Amplitude.

From sketch to scale at lightning speed

Eight months after launch, Recraft had 300,000 users. We've now reached 4 million users and have generated over 350 million images. Within just two years, our user base exploded over 10x, and we’ve seen a 700% increase in user adoption.

The biggest challenge alongside this growth has been balancing rapid product development with reliable analytics and insights. Amplitude makes this challenge easier, and it’s been central to helping me link product usage with business outcomes. While our brilliant designers manage our aesthetic, we rely on Amplitude Analytics and Feature Experimentation to help us make data-driven decisions about the elements that impact the user experience.

We’ve used Amplitude from the very first public release of Recraft. This has been a big difference compared to my previous roles, where I spent a lot of time building custom analytics from scratch, setting up funnels, and segmenting cohorts manually. Tracking retention rates for specific features took days or even weeks when building queries using SQL or something similar. Amplitude removed all of those steps, making it easier for our team to respond quickly to user behavior.

Recraft is constantly rolling out new features to meet user demand and reach new customers. With Amplitude, I can analyze how users interact with our features like art styles, palettes, mockups, and image editing tools. Without it, we wouldn’t have visibility into how new features impact customer journeys and the user experience. Amplitude gives me real-time insight into feature adoption and retention trends, and it’s essential for building a product that allows customers to create their best work.

Drawing conclusions with granular data

Our most important metrics include activation rate, which we measure as the percentage of users who progress from signing up to creating their first image, and retention rate, which has a direct impact on revenue.

In our case, the more features customers use, the higher the retention rate—so we have to make sure customers know about all of our features. Many users start with our raster generation and stop there instead of exploring vector generation or vectorization. Other users just use the platform’s background remover or upscale feature.

We use Pathfinder, a part of Amplitude’s Journeys feature, to get granular insight into every step users take from signup to creating. We also depend on funnel analysis and advanced cohort retention analysis to determine which workflows and design variations are most effective. These features help us determine:

1. Where to invest our resources
2. How to do a better job educating customers about Recraft’s features and capabilities

In one example, we learned that new customers who try at least three different art styles are significantly more likely to subscribe. Now we nudge users towards that workflow and encourage them to investigate a range of art styles when they’re getting started.

Designing beautiful user journeys through A/B testing

With Amplitude, we can scale confidently because we can see which features drive activation and retention. The A/B testing capabilities within Feature Experimentation are a big part of that, and it’s one of my favourite features because it consistently delivers results:

• We once used funnel analysis to discover that users were dropping off after creating a mockup, instead of applying a design on top of their mockup base. Amplitude helped us identify the friction point so we could redesign the mockup creation flow. Then, we ran an A/B test that validated our changes and demonstrated that they improved retention.
• We have also used A/B testing to guide improvements to the toolbar at the top of the user interface. We experimented with the order of the tools and their names to see how users would respond. The version we chose significantly boosted retention rates, which demonstrates how meaningful those details are to our customers.

At any given time, we’re running up to 10 tests simultaneously. Normally, just one or two out of 10 A/B tests actually create a meaningful change in user behaviour. With Amplitude, between five and eight out of 10 tests are successful. We owe this to the data and in-depth user insights that get us to better-informed hypotheses about which elements to test and change to increase engagement and conversion.

These examples sound small, but using Amplitude to iterate on our product enabled us to lower our subscription churn rate by 1.5 percentage points—which is a big number when you’re dealing with a total user base of millions. We’re currently improving professional workflows like enterprise-level brand style management and collaboration to further reduce churn. Amplitude is at the core of all our future plans, and we’re actively building our product based on Amplitude data.

Product insights turn user experiences into works of art

Because everyone at Recraft uses Amplitude, we have a shared source of truth across product, marketing, growth, engineering, and executive teams. We’re aligned on which features drive retention and which marketing decisions inspire action, so we can quickly get on the same page when making strategic decisions.

I’m really proud that we’ve built a product that professional designers use daily—and I know they do because Amplitude shows us that’s the case. It’s exciting to think about all the unique art and design projects customers have completed using Recraft. Their creativity challenges our team to match their skill and vision, and we couldn’t keep up without Amplitude.