In India, digital fascinations often sweep the nation into overnight obsession. A viral app hits the charts, downloads surge, and suddenly everyone’s talking about it, from college canteens to boardrooms. The energy is electric, the growth graph exponential, and the founder’s story irresistible. But scroll forward a few quarters, and the noise begins to fade. The daily habit turns into a once-in-a-while click, and the curve that once climbed like a rocket starts to flatten like a sigh.

That’s the paradox every investor in consumer technology must confront: in a market where attention is the new oil, most wells dry up faster than they fill.

The question, then, isn’t how fast a product can grow, but how long it can last.

Because in this category, success isn’t about funding the next download spike. It’s about spotting the next behavioural habit.

The Habit Premium: What Investors Should Seek

A consumer product earns its true value not when it’s downloaded, but when it’s remembered.

Spotify doesn’t need to remind users it exists; silence does. Swiggy doesn’t advertise every meal; hunger does.

Duolingo doesn’t rely on push notifications; the streak does that job.
This recurring rhythm between the user and the product is known as the “habit premium.” For investors, it’s the single strongest signal of long-term durability, the invisible moat that outlasts marketing budgets and hype cycles.

Data backs this up. According to Pushwoosh (2025), average Day-7 retention across consumer apps sits at ~6% on iOS and ~5% on Android, collapsing to nearly half by Day-30. Amplitude’s 2025 Product Report shows that top consumer apps, however, retain over 40% of users after 90 days. Below 20%, sustainability depends entirely on ad spend, not loyalty.

For investors, this is the first line of distinction: growth driven by attention burns cash; growth driven by habit compounds it.

The Investor’s Crucible: Assessing Payback, Not Popularity

Founders love to pitch virality and growth curves. But investors must read the quieter variable – payback. 

The fundamental question isn’t how many users arrive; it’s how quickly the money spent to acquire them comes back. In consumer tech, CAC payback within 12–18 months is a healthy sign of capital efficiency. Beyond 24 months, the business isn’t scaling; it’s borrowing from the future.

Metric Healthy Range Red Flag Zone
CAC Payback Period 12–18 months > 24 months
90-Day Retention > 35% < 20%
LTV / CAC Ratio > 3× < 2×
Organic Acquisition Share > 40% < 25%

For investors, these aren’t static figures; they’re interlinked levers. Better retention shortens payback. Higher margins lift LTV. Strong organic growth lowers CAC. The art lies in spotting founders who understand these couplings, not those chasing each metric in isolation.

Virality Is the Spark, Habit Is the Furnace

Virality gets you initial lift; habit keeps you aloft. But many founders, and even many investors, treat them as interchangeable. They’re not. Investors must learn to separate the two.

Recall Notion. It never exploded through conventional virality. It grew laterally through creators, templates, and network effects in productivity workflows—slow, intentional, sticky. In contrast, BeReal soared rapidly but lacked the reinforcement loops to sustain usage beyond its novelty.

Or look at the Indian context: Blinkit didn’t just promise speed, it internalised urgency into user expectations. Cult.fit doesn’t simply offer classes; it builds a habit ecosystem of daily routines and cues. These are not marketing tricks; they are behavioural scaffolding.

The investor’s eye must look for these subtle reinforcements: is the product solving a fleeting impulse or embedding a lasting cue? Does its usage curve plateau gently or fall off a cliff?

Because only one of those graphs compounds capital.

The Quiet Test: When the Ads Go Silent

Every consumer app looks strong during its first marketing cycle. The real test begins when the ad budgets taper off. That’s when power users matter more than first-time downloaders. Strong retention loops reduce reacquisition costs, lengthen lifetime value, and turn the brand into its own growth engine.

Duolingo does this through micro-nudges like streaks and progression. Blinkit refines its experience by shaving seconds off delivery times. These aren’t surface updates; they’re compounding mechanisms that make investors’ returns more predictable and less dependent on external capital.

In an environment of rising CAC and falling novelty, that’s what true resilience looks like. And for investors, this is where the real diligence begins, not in the headline numbers, but in the quiet signals that reveal if a product can sustain itself when the marketing stops.

What Smart Investors Watch

At Rukam Sitara, we evaluate consumer tech through quiet signals that often escape the pitch decks:

  • Recursive usage loops that don’t rely on paid reminders.
  • Transparent payback models, tested against potential CAC inflation.
  • Cohort retention curves that age gracefully, rather than collapsing.
  • Progressive user journeys where engagement deepens, not just repeats.

These indicators may not create immediate excitement, but they reveal the difference between a product that grows and one that endures. They may not make for flashy headlines, but they’re what make a business truly investable. In short, investors don’t get excited. They side with consistency.

Through the Lens of Rukam Sitara

Consumer technology is filled with meteors, products that blaze brightly, then disappear. The ones that endure convert friction into habit, novelty into routine, and engagement into quiet dependence.

Investors should resist the lure of short-lived virality and instead seek products that become a behavioural constant in people’s lives. The focus must shift from chasing the next headline maker to identifying the next daily default, the app that integrates seamlessly into routines, creating repeat behaviour and measurable longevity.

For discerning investors, the real value lies not in fuelling dopamine but in funding durability. Attention may ignite the spark, but habit sustains the flame, and only the flame compounds return.

At Rukam Sitara, we align with this philosophy, backing businesses built on endurance, not excitement.