mredbord

They're doing in-home coffee, merch, etc. and now a big chain of pure retail locations. Starbucks is really starting to open up alternative revenue streams. Good for them.

This is a good article. I have a few issues with price-reduction for existing customers, though, that I want to highlight. I think it's fantastic that OP got the desired results on customer churn, which was his goal - but I'd categorize pricing changes as "gray hat" retention improvement with regard to the overall health of his business and future revenue. Here's why:

On price specifically: In a subscription business like this one, you have to meet a minimum utility requirement in each month that a customer is able to cancel if you want to retain customers. Each customer's minimum utility is different and could even be comprised of different factors/features depending on the breadth of the product offering. But there is one factor that cuts across all of them: price. A significant element of churn is price because the initial purchase thrill may decrease over time and result in customer cancellation requests at a certain point in their lifecycle. So, cutting price is kind of an easy way to reduce churn in a subscription model...particularly because people bought in at X and are now paying fractional X. Boom - happy customers. Also, price-cutting is habit-forming, and the customers who received a reduced price will come back asking for more reductions in time.

On features: Multiple times, I've seen the "get more people using our product" as a good way to reduce churn. I won't comment on permission customer marketing and whether or not what OP did was legal, but the results of a feature like this are great, and seems like he added more than just this one. He added improved functionality and invested in his product at reduced prices - great deal!

On onboarding & cohort analysis: OP was right to focus on onboarding features and adoption to improve stickiness among new cohorts. He would have also been smart to raise the price for new customers if he materially improved the product (which it sounds like he did). Over the same time period, he could have had newer cohorts of higher paying customers, making the older ones less important to the financials of the business. By "hiring" higher priced customers to increasingly recent cohorts and continually "firing" older-lower-priced customers, the balance of his revenue would have shifted to these newer, more valuable customers over time, making the older-less-happy customers less important to his business. That's how you really turn the crank on a subscription business, and if your onboarding is good enough to continually improve retention in new cohorts, you've really nailed it.

Overall, I don't mean to be overly critical of OP's choices. I aim to highlight where optimizing for customer churn alone can harm the financials of the business, particularly around price-cutting for existing customers. He's doing lots and lots right with his cohort analyses, onboarding improvements, and assumptions about churn impact of new features. However, we're in business to make money, so these have to be balanced with the health of the business itself.

You can create a set of 301 redirects to make sure traffic that is sent directly to a given post finds the correct page. It will also let search engines re-index your content at the new address.

You can do this by dumping the relative paths of your previous blog posts and current ones into your .htaccess file. This won't get all of the old links (category/tag links, for instance) but at least direct links to a specific post will end up in the right place.

I think that's precisely what parent comment is referencing; the Music design scheme may be familiar to Android users, but non-Android users likely see it as a bit surprising/inconsistent. Two quick examples: button styling and top account-bar background.

This is also somewhat revealing of how Google wants this app perceived. I see it as leaning _heavily_ toward a native experience on Android devices, and a push from that mobile experience into the browser. It's interesting.

I'm not completely convinced that Bing lacks the user base to compete with Google. There are diminishing returns in user base volume after some point, and Bing has around 100mm US users[1]. I think any of us would be pleased as punch with that volume and it's not clear it's not enough to do something-social-with-search.

[1] http://blog.compete.com/2011/03/16/february-2011-search-mark...

Of course more market share is good. But Microsoft is not purely interested in growing share with Bing; non-differentiation with Google is a good thing in and of itself. The less differentiated Microsoft is from Google, the greater perception of their platform having feature parity with Google. That way consumers are not forced to choose based on features, just ecosystem.

This is a the reason that Microsoft is a fast copier of market leaders, so that everything consumers could want, on paper, is housed within their roof (and Google's). It seems counterintuitive that less differentiation would be useful, but I think it's what Microsoft is going for.

Disagree for the most part. There's always something that can be given away for free: blog posts, free trials that lack support and require a paid upgrade for it (e.g. Magento), ebooks, contest giveaways, etc. If you can't give something away for free as part of your marketing, you're probably not thinking creatively enough.

Not that this isn't a cool analysis, but seems as if there's selection bias to these data. Lots of psychographic segments will never start a search with "how can I...".

And the better the offer, the more a landing page can "get away" asking for. Offering a month of free software? Test and see if you can extract a company name and role from the visitor, or even a phone number. Offering just a short article or low-value offer? Stick to email and name. People are so used to filling our forms with their information online that if an offer is compelling, you can really push the limits and ask for an extra piece or two of important info.

Here's the 10,000,000,001st, if anyone's looking for a keepsake: http://twitter.com/SheSz_FUcINgBAD/status/10000000001

Which books did you find particularly influential?

Depends how well the ad was targeted and how well quotas were set and screened for. There's a few good ways to attract survey respondents through ads, and a whole lot of bad ways.