Festive weeks are not churn

Hari Raya, Chinese New Year, and Deepavali move when people open apps in Malaysia. Treating those weeks as ordinary drop-off makes a product look sicker than it is.

A grocery cohort that first arrived two weeks before Chinese New Year will look quiet in the holiday week. So will a news app on the first days of Hari Raya, when families are not opening phones for the same jobs. If you average those weeks into a bland monthly return rate, you will brief a board on a decline that was a calendar.

We keep a paper calendar on the studio wall: federal holidays, state holidays that affect Kuala Lumpur, and school term breaks that change when parents order. During a Retention Study we shade those columns before anyone talks about “losing users.”

The opposite error is also common: blaming the calendar for a drop that started in week one, among people who never completed a first order. Festive shading is not an excuse. It is a way to stop mixing two stories. Once the holiday columns are marked, the remaining cliffs are usually a substitution, a language gap, or a permission prompt that never finished.