Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service • Hacker News Board

Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

#31

Post by te_chris » Wed, Dec 21, 2011, 9:52 PM UTC

anamax wrote: post #24

seiji wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 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."

> 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.

They're also read by people who may not have time to read the article in depth but still want to be at least a little familiar with the substance....

Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

#32

Post by badclient » Wed, Dec 21, 2011, 9:55 PM UTC

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.

Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

#33

Post by mapgrep » Wed, Dec 21, 2011, 9:59 PM UTC

seiji wrote: post #22

mapgrep wrote: post #16

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. Ple…

In 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."

If you want to communicate your meaning to people who do not have time to read your entire text, the solution is to put a clear, short summary first within said text, in proper English.

A cryptically brief, ungrammatical special section is hugely suboptimal, and a labeled intro section is wholly unnecessary in a 10 page essay like this. Simply write. If you have not clearly communicated the essence of your article in the first few paragraphs, rewrite until you have.

Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

#34

Post by danhodgins » Wed, Dec 21, 2011, 10:04 PM UTC

Your 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!

Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

#35

Post by patio11 » Wed, Dec 21, 2011, 10:16 PM UTC

FWIW: 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.

Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

#36

Post by omarchowdhury » Wed, Dec 21, 2011, 10:29 PM UTC

PStamatiou wrote: post #12

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #10

So 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 :)

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

dat shit cray

Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

#37

Post by noelwelsh » Wed, Dec 21, 2011, 10:32 PM UTC

pospischil wrote: post #29

noelwelsh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it work? "the latest algorithms being discovered at leading academic institutions" reads like marketing fluff to me.

Whoops! 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 t…

That 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.

Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

#38

Post by reinhardt » Wed, Dec 21, 2011, 10:37 PM UTC

PStamatiou wrote: post #25

jamiequint wrote: post #17

Hubspot 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)

Yeah 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?

I'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?

Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

#39

Post by reinhardt » Wed, Dec 21, 2011, 10:40 PM UTC

aaronjg wrote: post #8

We'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 o…

How does this compare with, say, Marketo?

Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

#40

Post by PStamatiou » Wed, Dec 21, 2011, 10:41 PM UTC

reinhardt wrote: post #38

PStamatiou wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah 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?

I'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?

For 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.