Ask HN: What was the startup that got customers with failed payments back?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8464145

by amitu • 12 years ago

36 10 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I remember seeing it here. I am looking for a service that mailed customers on my startup's behalf after they have failed to make the payment on time and has stopped using my startup.

patio11• 12 years ago

There are two: BeStunning.net and ChurnBuster.io. I use CB, though integration is only half complete. I know both guys and they're "good people" in Chicago parlance -- would recommend either. (They have slightly different takes on the problem/solution.)

rfelix21212• 12 years ago

Thanks, Patrick!

Major_Grooves2• 12 years ago

Interesting. We do the same for "regular invoices" - i.e. chase customers who fail to pay invoices. http://www.satago.com

We've had a few queries for whether we could do this for SaaS companies paying via credit card too, as a Stripe integration. I'm still not sure if there is a real/big problem to be solved here that makes it worth entering.

colinramsay2• 12 years ago

How does Satago improve on Freshbooks? It offers automatic payment reminder emails and a breakdown of debtors, and the like.

Major_Grooves2• 12 years ago

To be honest, I don't know Freshbooks that well and since we've started off in the UK, we haven't had much demand for it yet. That said, one of our developers started integration with their API, but it is on hold.

Where we typically improve on whatever the accounting system has, is acting more like a CRM system for credit control. We typically have a lot more customisation and control over who gets chased with what message, we enable you to automatically send hard-copy payment demand letters. Also you can connect your accountant or bookkeeper to us (or rather they connect to your account) if they are doing credit control on your behalf.

Lastly we enable users to anonymously report when they get paid vs agreed terms to see if they are getting paid faster or slower than other suppliers.

nathanpowell• 12 years ago

We currently have our eyes on Churn Buster. It looks to be solid and we've heard very good things.

rfelix21212• 12 years ago

I'm Richard, founder of Stunning (bestunning.net). We've been dealing with handling failed payments on Stripe longer than anyone else out there (and I've been running successful SaaS apps since 2009).

I'm happy to freely share what I've learned, if anyone has questions about cutting churn and retaining SaaS customers. You can catch me on Twitter, where I'm @rfelix.

aculver• 12 years ago

Hey Amit! I run Churn Buster at http://churnbuster.io/ . We had a blog post hit #1 here recently, so it may have been us you were thinking about. We send emails and have a real human make phone calls to customers who have repeatedly failed a charge.

On the email side, we've got a lot of optimizations and reporting baked into our service that most folks would find too difficult or time consuming to implement and maintain if they were doing this on their own. As a result, even folks who already had a standard "email customer when payment fails" webhooks implementation get much better results using Churn Buster. (For example, https://twitter.com/citadelgrad/status/499015554209185792 .) They also completely eliminate their administrative overhead and relating to failed payments. :-)

I hope you'll take us for a spin! Email me at andrew@churnbuster.io if you've got any questions or if you'd like to schedule a Skype call to talk about it.

logn• 12 years ago

Looks like OP got the answers needed. However, are there similar services that use actual lawyers, work on contingency basis, and have a global reach? This is probably something my local law firm would do, but I'm curious if there's a SaaS out there to initiate litigation.

Ask HN: What was the startup that got customers with failed payments back?

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