Serious problem with retention in app
I am a founder at a social site for dog owners. We have been doing marketing in Slovakia on all possible social sites. The numbers are great, we had about 1M organic views per month on all sites combined during summer. Even the cost per registration on paid ads is pretty good - 0.35 euro per user.
The problem is related to retention in our app.
Right now we have about 2000 users in total, but our D1 retention is only about 10%, D7 is about 7%, and coming back to the app at least once in 30 days is 29%.
We have tried anything - from making the app even cleaner, trying to show users the values we provide right after registration with a 4 screens onboarding (it improved just a little bit). Even analysed our features and tried switching a couple of features, but it seems nothing really works.
I have been thinking that it might be a network effect issue, but if that is the case, we have no chance of getting this solved because of a lacking budget. I know that focusing on certain areas, such as cities should improve it, but even with ad targeted to our target group and a certain city, with our budget (150 euros per month), it does not help.
Do you think there might be any other issues? Or how to solve this issue? We have taken a lot of feedback from our users, and the main thing they say is missing are enough users in their area.