Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

Yeah I should have remembered about Custora... I bought their office chairs from them when they moved out!

To 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

TL;DR: "Eighty percent of success is showing up." (Woody Allen)

If 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.)

Great post and I couldn't agree more on how important retention is for web businesses. Our product, Nurture (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.

Great 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.