Improving your core ranking isn't an isolated feature. It's the engine of a powerful growth loop I call the "Discovery Flywheel." When you invest in moving from a generic sort (like "trending") to a truly personalized one, you kickstart a compounding cycle that lifts every core metric.

Here’s how the flywheel works:

Phase 1: Better Ranking → Higher Engagement When a user opens your app and the first few items they see are perfectly relevant to their tastes and current intent, they are dramatically more likely to engage. They click more, they scroll deeper, and they stay longer. This is the first, most immediate impact: session duration and CTR go up.

Phase 2: Higher Engagement → More Data This is the fuel. Every additional click, save, and swipe from those longer sessions is a rich signal that tells you more about the user's preferences. A user who was previously a data ghost now generates a wealth of information about their latent tastes. Your dataset becomes exponentially more powerful.

Phase 3: More Data → Smarter Models A modern ranking engine, like Shaped, is designed to learn from this real-time stream of data. The more signals it gets, the more accurate its predictions become. The model that was 80% confident about a user's taste is now 95% confident. It discovers new affinities and refines its understanding of the user.

Phase 4: Smarter Models → Higher Conversion & Retention This is the payoff. The smarter model now surfaces even better, more surprising, and more delightful products. The user not only engages, they convert. And because the experience is consistently rewarding, they build a habit. They come back tomorrow, because they trust your app to show them great new things. Conversion rates and long-term retention go up.

This flywheel is the most capital-efficient growth strategy a marketplace can pursue. You're not paying more for acquisition; you're getting more value from the users you already have. Stop thinking about your roadmap as a series of isolated projects. Invest in the engine at the center of it all.

‍Ready to spin up your own Discovery Flywheel? Contact our team to see what a better ranking engine could do for your core metrics.