Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-user-retention-lifecycle-email

by PStamatiou • 15 years ago

203 62 15 years ago

AznHisoka• 15 years ago

Sounds like an useful service. Though, I'm not sure whether email bombarding is a good idea. You used the example of AppSumo but I unsubscribed after 3 emails sent too close together. Most people don't unsubscribe but rather just ignore the email.

I don't need an email every time a small feature is released, or pushing me to come back... there's a reason I don't revisit, and it's not because I forgot. What I like are emails that give me something of value whether it's free content, a story, a free tip, etc. Teach me something new.

PStamatiou7• 15 years ago

It definitely sounds like a lot of emails in my article. But let's say you never engage with the service. You might receive 2 in 2 months and then never hear again. Smart, not abusive.

While I mentioned reminders often as it's easiest to describe, "Teach me something new." is exactly right. Engaging mailers should offer help, tips and such.

ay2• 15 years ago

I would agree with AznHisoka. Periodic mails are like shouting in the room to gain attention. When everyone else is quiet, it works like a charm. The others pick up this trick. Soon no-one can hear anything, and those who do not want to be disturbed, wear earplugs ;-)

That's precisely what I did with my Gmail account when it became near-unusable after I used for several signups for startup services which I eventually was not interested in - just signed up to try out. Someone send me an email that does not pay me back with something useful for the minute of the attention I spend reading it - I create a filter to send it to 'adware' folder, which rarely, if ever, gets read.

This is of course my personal behavior, which may or may not be more typical.

jamesjyu• 15 years ago

Someone needs to build this. Now.

PStamatiou7• 15 years ago

Happy birthday James! You're the reason I blogged about this. Your email asking me to blog about the email template stuff got me thinking about this too haha.

matthewnourse• 15 years ago

So James & Paul, are your needs covered by Custora or one of the other services? Or is there something more that one or both of you need?

jot• 15 years ago

What would you say to someone that refuses to email users at all and even rejects the idea of collecting email addresses at signup? They think asking for email addresses and using them for anything is only for spammers. Sadly they also have a retention problem.

pospischil2• 15 years ago

We (Custora, YC W11) are hard at work on exactly what you're asking for:

https://www.custora.com/home/tour_lifecycle

noelwelsh3• 15 years ago

How does it work? "the latest algorithms being discovered at leading academic institutions" reads like marketing fluff to me.

pospischil2• 15 years ago

Whoops! Thanks for the feedback! That's an old page that was supposed to be replaced on our latest redesign.

The simplest explanation is pattern matching: we analyze customer and transactional data to understand how different customers behave. Using this understanding we can make predictions for how each user will behave in the future.

We use all of that analysis to power actions - take actions on the right user at the right time, optimizing for CLV.

Here's more: https://www.custora.com/home/customer_lifetime_value

Qworg• 15 years ago

This may seem like nitpicking, but I am always worried when I look at a website and the blog hasn't been updated for months. Even a short "Hey guys! We're working on stuff!" would assuage my fears that you've turned into a zombiecorp. =)

aaronjg3• 15 years ago

We're offering this service at Custora. You upload as many creatives as you would like, and then our product figures out who and when to send them.

Say you have emails suggesting TASK X, TASK Y. You upload the four creatives, and we can tell you that TASK X worked for new users and inactive users, and TASK Y worked for active users. We also close the loop and look at the effect of the email actual actions (sign-ins or purchases depending on the business) rather than just email opens.

The goal is to send fewer, but more relevant emails. Rather than emailing everybody every week, just send emails to the customers when the become inactive.

reinhardt2• 15 years ago

How does this compare with, say, Marketo?

ryanwaggoner• 15 years ago

So one YC startup (Picplum) is begging for a service that another YC startup (Custora) has evidently already built and is publicly promoting?

Maybe YC is too big :)

PStamatiou7• 15 years ago

Yeah I should have remembered about Custora... I bought their office chairs from them when they moved out!

omarchowdhury• 15 years ago

dat shit cray

paraschopra• 15 years ago

Or, maybe Custora are not doing eating their own dog food :)

freshlog2• 15 years ago

I'm sorry to be off topic, but are those slow cookers cooking PG's recipe in the first picture?

PStamatiou7• 15 years ago

Yup! It was tuesday, so dinner was being prepared. Bigger picture: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/186198/Screenshots/vmeh.png

freshlog2• 15 years ago

Amazing!

Was it PG's rice and bean Ramen Profitable recipe? I don't remember slow cookers used in that recipe.

moozeek• 15 years ago

To me this sounds - a litte - overengineered.

To do more than 99.9% of the companies out there it would be enough to just send generic follow up autoresponders based on sign up date. Email them on day 0, 1, 3, 7, 11, 14 ... etc.

You can do this with AWeber, Mailchimp, Getresponse and a dozen other services.

Just tell the customer what he can do with your service and ask a lot of questions: "Have you tried this?", "Did you know you can...", "How can we help?". Use the feedback you already have to come up with ideas for content. Point them to a lot of your help and learning resources. In each email tell them you are really interested in their feedback and give an easy option to contact you. Then read the feedback as it comes in - like manually reading, with your eyes ;-) - and respond promptly and indvidually.

Setting his up takes a day or two - and mostly consists of coming up with ideas for the content. After having this running for a few weeks you might come to the conclusion that you don't need a complicated machine learning, metrics based system :-)

I've written about this in another context earlier this year, basically about how we handle the trial period: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2979048

TL;DR: "Eighty percent of success is showing up." (Woody Allen)

twakefield• 15 years ago

Awesome post Paul. We've been thinking quite a bit about this at Mailgun.

As usual, we default to giving developers more tools to help build this. We are rolling out some exciting stuff early in the new year to make this a lot easier.

mapgrep3• 15 years ago

If you find yourself writing a "tl;dr", consider just writing a clean, full English sentence instead.

For example, INSTEAD OF....

"tl;dr Trying to draw attention to the importance of lifecycle marketing. I build up the case, talk about where lifecycle marketing makes sense, show an amateur first attempt at it, then proceed to layout a grand idea for a lifecycle email marketing service I want to see someone build. Please share this post."

...write THIS INSTEAD:

"I want this essay to draw attention to the underappreciated art of 'lifecycle marketing.' In the paragraphs below, I'll define the term, show an amateur first attempt at it, talk about where the practice makes sense, and then outline a comprehensive lifecycle marketing service I hope someone else will build."

A formally declared "tl;dr" with sentences that are super concise, to the point of being ungrammatical, is better than no summary at all. But good writers can gracefully communicate to readers the essence of material to come using nothing more than plain words. Doing so does far more to encourage the reading and sharing of your entire essay than an explicit "please share this post."

(Apologies for veering a bit off topic.)

asktell• 15 years ago

tl;dr Write well.

seiji2• 15 years ago

In the Real World™, a tl;dr is called an "Executive Summary." It's a nice way of saying "Here's what this writeup means if you don't have time to read it or aren't bright enough to understand it fully."

anamax• 15 years ago

> In the Real World™, a tl;dr is called an "Executive Summary."

Umm, no. "tl,dr" means "I didn't read it, don't think that you should, and now I'm going to tell you how smart I am."

Executive summaries are written by people who bothered to read {whatever}. Some are even written by folks who aren't tooting their own horn.

mapgrep3• 15 years ago

If you want to communicate your meaning to people who do not have time to read your entire text, the solution is to put a clear, short summary first within said text, in proper English.

A cryptically brief, ungrammatical special section is hugely suboptimal, and a labeled intro section is wholly unnecessary in a 10 page essay like this. Simply write. If you have not clearly communicated the essence of your article in the first few paragraphs, rewrite until you have.

brey• 15 years ago

or, as has been used in scientific papers since forever, an abstract.

PStamatiou7• 15 years ago

I use tl;dr more of for use of being a comedic instrument. It goes in hand very well the the meme pictures throughout my post. I could have written it much more adult like but that's the voice I decided to use in this post. :)

jamiequint• 15 years ago

Hubspot does this, they acquired Performable which was doing this before and its now integrated into the Hubspot product offering. Other companies do this stuff too but not so much selling to startups and more to the enterprise (e.g. Marketo)

PStamatiou7• 15 years ago

Yeah I want to see more companies do this that aren't enterprisey. I remember Performable and even went through some video tutorial they had long ago but it definitely seemed to be more oriented towards ecommerce/shopping cart applications?

reinhardt2• 15 years ago

I'm not familiar with any of the mentioned companies but I'm curious, what exactly does make products such as Marketo "enterprisey"? Just more features that you don't need right now?

betterlabs• 15 years ago

Great post and I couldn't agree more on how important retention is for web businesses. Our product, Nurture (http://www.nurturehq.com), addresses this need in a flexible fashion and is being used for exactly this requirement (User Lifecycle Marketing for improving engagement) by a few customers.

kmfrk• 15 years ago

Great article, but URAAS isn't exactly the best acronym. :)

With regards to your article, I remember an article - which was probably submitted to HN - whose author had a great method for engaging (loyal) early users. Instead of using scripts that sent the users tailored messages, he had scripts sending him alerts on important days like, say, birthdays or registration anniversaries.

This allowed him to give the first hundred users who had stuck with the site some personal e-mails that weren't computed by scripts, but himself.

This obviously is intended for early-stage start-ups, but it is important never to go full Google and use robots, AI, and whatnot to face the users instead of human beings, or what sounds like it.

I don't think Disqus would have got the traction and success it had, if Daniel Ha's insane user engagement weren't there to humanize the transition to a new comment system, especially for the people who don't know anything about programming and web services.

Perhaps ironically, it's obvious that Disqus use analytical tools now to alert them whenever someone is having problems with the service or saying bad things about them, and the automation and ambiguous motivation for the Twitter response tends to dehumanize the service, even though they may use the alerts with the best of intents. Daniel Ha also didn't do the best job of giving users a sense of participation in making feedback; he kept using a phrase along the lines of "it is on my list - we will get to it eventually", although many never came to fruition. This was back when Disqus had its own "forum" at disqus.disqus.com (as I recall), which created a small, tightly-knitted community that had to go, as the site picked up its pace.

There are some incredibly important good and bad things to be learnt about Disqus, but I honestly believe that the core business model of Disqus had more to do with the user engagement than it had to the service and its efficacy itself. People simple weren't allowed to be antsy about trying the service, if Daniel Ha could help it.

paulf• 15 years ago

Funny, I just did an "Ask HN" about something similar yesterday and didn't receive any feedback [0].

I recently launched LetterPush, a basic email newsletter service [1]. I've been thinking of focusing on adding lots of developer features (robust API, webhooks, etc) to help automate marketing and transactional email processes.

I think that most businesses stop at MailChimp email blasts and "Welcome" emails on user sign up. Having a service that marries MailGun to your CRM/CMS tools would be absolutely brilliant (and quite profitable, I imagine).

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3375802

[1] http://letterpush.com

badclient• 15 years ago

http://turbo.paulstamatiou.com/uploads/2011/08/picplum_step1...

Slightly OT but I find something very confusing about the styles of the 3 tabs in that screenshot.

Each tab seems sort of different when really you should just have an on style and an off style.

aparadja• 15 years ago

It looks like step 2 is already done, and the user is now doing step 1.

danhodgins2• 15 years ago

Your theory that the current state of a user's account and their past usage patterns should determine which mailers and communications the user receives essentially refers to the techniques outlined in Seth Godin's book "Permission Marketing". Check out Seth's book - I would imagine your readers and users could also use a summary or refresher of the principles behind "Permission Marketing" - it's powerful stuff!

patio11• 15 years ago

FWIW: Even the dumbest possible implementation of this, which is "Send someone an email 1 day after signup and 6 days after signup, with both goals just trying to use the service again" prints money in my experience.

maudlinmau5• 15 years ago

so true. poor retention is far better than no retention

TheFman• 15 years ago

may be its just me.... The copy in both places (picplum and custora)is too confusing to understand the service they offer.

r0dica• 15 years ago

It's a neat idea, but it sounds like what you're proposing is a subset of marketing automation, which has not been mentioned almost at all in this post.

I would recommend doing a bit more research about what marketing people are already using, what other products your product may interact with yours, and how it would fit in the arsenal of marketing tools.

karlwirth• 15 years ago

My startup, Apptegic, www.apptegic.com is building a "user retention as a service" service. On a per-user basis, we can track events, patterns of events, and business usage (like # of photo batches sent). We can combine these to score engagement and we can segment and filter groups of users based on these combinations.

There are lots of other ways our Beta customers are using this info already. But many have asked for the ability to do targeted emails based on usage and engagement. We don't have email system integration into MailChimp, Constant Contact, and others like Paul described yet but we are working toward it.

Do you have suggestions on what a a minimal viable email system integration would be? Let people script a download of the list of emails that fit a criteria and script upload that into their mail system of choice?

If you have suggestions please comment below or contact me at kwirth at apptegic dot com.

ams6110• 15 years ago

I'm not sure if I'm in the majority but I'd find this annoying. If I dropped out of your 12 step sign-up process at step 4, don't bug me with emails about it, make your damn process simpler.

Further, I basically don't even open unsolicited email unless it's from a person (person, not company) I know. It's like ads on a web page, it hardly even registers. If I get enough of it from one sender to take notice, it's more likely than not that I'm not going to be happy.

devmach• 15 years ago

So true. One more e-mail from the service which i don't care can turn my ignorance to "anger". And yes, there is something called bad marketing.

danhodgins2• 15 years ago

Here is a follow up post and video response to Paul's article: http://www.getspotta.com/user-retention-as-a-service-lifecyc...

I agree with Patio11 - even a super simple implementation with minimal business rules is still better than zero communication.

czcar• 15 years ago

Like a few others - we're working on a similar idea, and in fact applied for the last YC batch with it. But yeah there are a couple of companies already focusing on it... But could be alot better...

andygcook• 15 years ago

HubSpot has a lot of this functionality as well. You can send out automated "personalized" emails that are triggered on certain events. Their software is usually used for inbound marketing before the user activated (aarrr), but I'm sure you could use it for after a user is signed up.

Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

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