The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses · chapter 7 · id the-lean-startup-c7-04-cohort-analysis----tracking-me

“Cohort analysis -- tracking metrics for groups of customers who joined during the same time period -- is the foundation of actionable metrics and reveals patterns invisible in aggregate data.”

holdsconfidence: high⚠ extracted by pipeline, re-audit pending

Receipts

Fader & Hardie (2005), Customer-Base Analysis, Marketing ScienceDOI registry: valid

Cohort analysis and customer-base methods for tracking retention and lifetime value were well-established in quantitative marketing by the early 2000s.

Dave McClure, AARRR Startup Metrics (2007)source alive

McClure's AARRR framework explicitly used cohort-based retention and conversion analysis 4 years before The Lean Startup.

Andrew Chen -- Cohort Analysis for startupsFLAGGED: dead link (404)

Andrew Chen was writing about cohort analysis for startups in 2008-2009, years before Ries' book. The technique is standard in growth analytics.

This claim is a stable, citable object. If you can falsify a verdict, tell us — corrections are loud here.