Why you should make it easy for users to quit your product

http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/06/15/why-you-should-make-it-easy-for-users-to-quit-your-product/

by peter123 • 17 years ago

19 13 17 years ago

andrewchenblog.com

piers• 17 years ago

Link Fail

hellweaver666• 17 years ago

Is it the hacker news effect at work? Or just a crappy host? ;)

andrew_null• 17 years ago

way underspeced virtual server ;-) Should be working now.

billswift• 17 years ago

He missed an obvious reason to make it easy to quit - I am more likely to try something if I can back out painlessly if it doesn't work out.

johns• 17 years ago

Exactly. Barrier to exit is a barrier to entry.

russell• 17 years ago

You made an important point. I am interested in the enterprise space. The old way of making a sale is to send a salesman out and have him convince some executive committee to purchase your product. The sales cycle is 6 months or more and the price has to be somewhere north of $100K to pay for it all.

If you go with the easy in, easy out approach, the customer, most likely at the department or tech level, tries out your product as SaaS, with self-service If he likes it, he signs up with a subscription. The benefits are lower sales cost, a shorter sales cycle, and less time spent on tire kickers. You are probably getting revenue in 2 or 3 months.

akeefer• 17 years ago

One problem with that approach in the enterprise is that most of that $100k+ software is stuff that takes a long time to customize and integrate; there's just no low-cost way to try something out.

More peripheral services like instant messaging or collaboration tools are easier to do that with. Something like a CRM system is probably harder due to the volume of data you'd need to port and the large change in how people do their work, re-training required, etc. Something even more core like supply-chain management or an accounting system is even harder to try-before-you-buy, and the penalty for trying something that doesn't work is way, way higher. In order to get to the point where you know if it's going to fail or not, you have to take some big risks and sink in a huge amount of time and money.

ggchappell• 17 years ago

> I am more likely to try something if I can back out painlessly if it doesn't work out.

Yup.

I would like to see information about ease of exit included more often and more prominently in reviews of sign-up-based products. In fact, it would be interesting to have a site that gave only ease of exit information, for all kinds of products.

pchristensen• 17 years ago

Joel wrote about this a while ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html

mustpax• 17 years ago

I once signed up to XBox Live with my credit card. Soon afterwards, I realized that the online gaming "community" left much to be desired and that they didn't even provide dedicated servers for my games. So I decided to quit. But they purposefully do not provide an unsubscribe path through their user interface, you have to call them, wait on hold, and provide your whole credit card number + CCV to unsubscribe.

I have no doubt some MBA at Microsoft thought they could shave a couple percentage points off their attrition rates with this tactic. I sure as hell will think twice before I subscribe for any other Microsoft service again.

pyroman• 17 years ago

I just went through the whole xbox live cancel thing too. No place on the site or in the console to quit. Tech support e-mail would always say call them. The person on the phone was able to take care of everything and even mentioned billing.microsoft.com would allow you to stop the auto renew. I didn't try that out since I was already on the phone. I don't know why the e-mail support responses left that out. If that site works for someone, it would be nice to know.

adamc• 17 years ago

I did this and subsequently resubscribed, but only using the purchasable cards (which can often be bought at a discount). Not giving them my credit card again...

physcab• 17 years ago

Marc Andreessen's blog post on "only thing that matters" http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html

Why you should make it easy for users to quit your product

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