4 ms·

we built a lot of stuff for userfox over the past few months. and we were looking at it all, making sure the user interface was usable, and so on: and ultimatel

by pclark 14y ago

we built a lot of stuff for userfox over the past few months. and we were looking at it all, making sure the user interface was usable, and so on: and ultimately decided that actually: sending emails when a user signs up is one of the most valuable inflection points, because: a) it applies to every user (= highest ROI on copy written) b) first impressions matter! and c) its minimal work / thought for our customers. maximum value. so we decided screw it! lets ship something this week! this month! and here we are. lets do one thing really well. so userfox today allows you to send a drip sequence of emails to your new users. you can choose the days, the subjects, the content, we support your custom email theme, we even show you clicks and conversions, and so on. it's awesome because its so light and easy. we're going to roll out some awesome custom data features very shortly. dead simple things, like simply "send this welcome email unless a user is on a paid plan." et voila. when i look at products, i look at what they require me to do, and what they give me in return. i think that userfox can move the needle on your business, and to do that we ask for literally 15 or 30 minutes of your time. i'd bet you'll see more impact from userfox than your sophisticated SEO strategy in fact. i have been on hacker news for a long time: it maybe even helped me get into ycombinator! but these are all stories for another day: right now, i wanted to show hacker news our product, because i think if you're a bootstrapping business: userfox is a no brainer. "it just works."

diziet 14y ago
Nice, we built something similar internally (but without the nice frontend and relying on sendgrid for analytics etc). What's missing in the longer term are more detailed ways of bucketing your customers based on where they are with the product, ie: did they deploy/install/upload a picture/whatever other functionality you offer. But as you've said, shipping it is important. Another pain point you guys addressed was that making custom table based html templates for email is a pain. If you'd offer more templates in the future, that would be a nice thing to add.
- pclark 14y ago
  We'll offer bucketing. It just seems very hard to do right: now from a software nor even design point of view, but in a manner that makes it worthy of a time investment for young startups. welcome sequence felt like the low hanging fruit. but it is coming. We actually had custom themes. My co-founder will mock me for now removing them. ("simple is best!! these are UGLY!! People will want a clean simple theme or custom HTML. REMOVE THEM.") shoot me an email though and i'll get my designer to build you (or anyone else) a custom html theme. (surprise bjoern!) peter@userfox.com
kulkarnic 14y ago
I'd like to know why it works. Does "10x superior onboarding emails" mean 10x better retention/conversion numbers? Backstory: I've been trying to improve retention in a complex system with ~10^5 users, and email doesn't seem to add too much gain. Focusing effort on the website seems to have a larger effect. How are your emails 10x better? Is it the schedule (Day 1 ... day 4 ...day 7) of emails? The content ("Become a power user like Zach...")? Unless you say why it is better, it is hard to see if that it is a no-brainer.
- pclark 14y ago
  It's the increased frequency (5 "story emails" in first month trump 1 "transactional (welcome. login here…) email") and the fact these emails are a chapter in a story, specifically that someone has registered for your service: you can assume that you have piqued someones curiosity with your proposition: now push (well, drip) it down their throat with a sequence. (I would not have been so confident with my copywriting if i didn't know it.)
ayanb 14y ago
nice work ! are you looking to distribute a rubygem for this? It'd be quite cool to configure different triggers ( time based, event based) from a rails app. I see the potential, if done well, this can really help in better communication between a product and its customers/users.
- pclark 14y ago
  Yes. We think those should be configurable through userfox rather than your code, but we're going to offer both solutions shortly.

by pclark 14y ago

diziet 14y ago

Nice, we built something similar internally (but without the nice frontend and relying on sendgrid for analytics etc). What's missing in the longer term are more detailed ways of bucketing your customers based on where they are with the product, ie: did they deploy/install/upload a picture/whatever other functionality you offer. But as you've said, shipping it is important. Another pain point you guys addressed was that making custom table based html templates for email is a pain. If you'd offer more templates in the future, that would be a nice thing to add.

pclark 14y ago
We'll offer bucketing. It just seems very hard to do right: now from a software nor even design point of view, but in a manner that makes it worthy of a time investment for young startups. welcome sequence felt like the low hanging fruit. but it is coming. We actually had custom themes. My co-founder will mock me for now removing them. ("simple is best!! these are UGLY!! People will want a clean simple theme or custom HTML. REMOVE THEM.") shoot me an email though and i'll get my designer to build you (or anyone else) a custom html theme. (surprise bjoern!) peter@userfox.com

kulkarnic 14y ago

I'd like to know why it works. Does "10x superior onboarding emails" mean 10x better retention/conversion numbers? Backstory: I've been trying to improve retention in a complex system with ~10^5 users, and email doesn't seem to add too much gain. Focusing effort on the website seems to have a larger effect. How are your emails 10x better? Is it the schedule (Day 1 ... day 4 ...day 7) of emails? The content ("Become a power user like Zach...")? Unless you say why it is better, it is hard to see if that it is a no-brainer.

pclark 14y ago
It's the increased frequency (5 "story emails" in first month trump 1 "transactional (welcome. login here…) email") and the fact these emails are a chapter in a story, specifically that someone has registered for your service: you can assume that you have piqued someones curiosity with your proposition: now push (well, drip) it down their throat with a sequence. (I would not have been so confident with my copywriting if i didn't know it.)

ayanb 14y ago

nice work ! are you looking to distribute a rubygem for this? It'd be quite cool to configure different triggers ( time based, event based) from a rails app. I see the potential, if done well, this can really help in better communication between a product and its customers/users.

pclark 14y ago
Yes. We think those should be configurable through userfox rather than your code, but we're going to offer both solutions shortly.