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Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
- pospischil 15y agoWe (Custora, YC W11) are hard at work on exactly what you're asking for: https://www.custora.com/home/tour_lifecycle https://www.custora.com/home/tour_lifecycle
- noelwelsh 15y agoHow does it work? "the latest algorithms being discovered at leading academic institutions" reads like marketing fluff to me.
- pospischil 15y agoWhoops! 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 https://www.custora.com/home/customer_lifetime_value
- noelwelsh 15y agoThat says a little bit more. Do you treat it as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem, or as a classification problem? It seems like a sequential decision making problem, so RL is appropriate but AFAIK there is no RL algorithm that generalises over states while still retaining some error bounds. I suppose you could brute-force a Bayesian solution via MCMC.
- aaronjg 15y agoThere are two big problems that we deal with. First is estimation of customer lifetime value. We use a latent attrition model, which is the 'pattern matching' The second is figuring out which promotions/emails go to which people. This is a supervised learning problem. We train the model with users past responses to discounts and their past behavioral states (which are the posterior probabilities from the latent attrition model). Then we use this to predict how users in those states will respond to similar promotions in the future.
- Qworg 15y agoThis 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. =)
- ams6110 15y agoI'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 15y agoSo 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.
- AznHisoka 15y agoSounds 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.
- PStamatiou 15y agoIt 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.
- ay 15y agoI 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 15y agoSomeone needs to build this. Now.
- PStamatiou 15y agoHappy 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 15y agoSo 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 15y agoWhat 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.
- aaronjg 15y agoWe'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.
- reinhardt 15y agoHow does this compare with, say, Marketo?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ryanwaggoner 15y agoSo 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 :)
- PStamatiou 15y agoYeah I should have remembered about Custora... I bought their office chairs from them when they moved out!
- omarchowdhury 15y agodat shit cray
- paraschopra 15y agoOr, maybe Custora are not doing eating their own dog food :)
- freshlog 15y agoI'm sorry to be off topic, but are those slow cookers cooking PG's recipe in the first picture?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- PStamatiou 15y agoYup! It was tuesday, so dinner was being prepared. Bigger picture: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/186198/Screenshots/vmeh.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/186198/Screenshots/vmeh.png
- freshlog 15y agoAmazing! Was it PG's rice and bean Ramen Profitable recipe? I don't remember slow cookers used in that recipe.
- moozeek 15y agoTo 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2979048 TL;DR: "Eighty percent of success is showing up." (Woody Allen)
- twakefield 15y agoAwesome 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.
- mapgrep 15y agoIf 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 15y agotl;dr Write well.
- seiji 15y agoIn 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 15y 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.
- seiji 15y ago
- jamiequint 15y agoHubspot 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)
- PStamatiou 15y agoYeah 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?
- reinhardt 15y agoI'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?
- PStamatiou 15y agoFor one, I can't even find out how to sign up for Marketo. I don't want to chat with a sales specialist, I want to start setting up and importing events, and making filters/campaign triggers. They have way too many products -- it makes me wonder if they even spent enough time working on the lifecycle marketing product of theirs. I want a company that just works on that one thing and does it amazingly well.
- betterlabs 15y agoGreat post and I couldn't agree more on how important retention is for web businesses. Our product, Nurture (http://www.nurturehq.com 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 15y agoGreat 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 15y agoFunny, 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3375802 [1] http://letterpush.com http://letterpush.com
- badclient 15y agohttp://turbo.paulstamatiou.com/uploads/2011/08/picplum_step1_drag.jpg 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 15y agoIt looks like step 2 is already done, and the user is now doing step 1.
- danhodgins 15y agoYour 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 15y agoFWIW: 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 15y agoso true. poor retention is far better than no retention
- TheFman 15y agomay be its just me.... The copy in both places (picplum and custora)is too confusing to understand the service they offer.
- r0dica 15y agoIt'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 15y agoMy 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.
- danhodgins 15y agoHere is a follow up post and video response to Paul's article: http://www.getspotta.com/user-retention-as-a-service-lifecycle-marketing/ 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 15y agoLike 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 15y agoHubSpot 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.
- tuckbuck 15y agowhy are you calling "User retention" ? Isnt customer loyalty a better ,more commonly used moniker? this is just another attempt to carve a new market segment,by changing the name. If you mean,trying to convert customers,who have not completed the signup,then "Lead conversion" is a better name.