may be its just me....
The copy in both places (picplum and custora)is too confusing to understand the service they offer.
Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
41–50 of 66 posts
Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
#42It'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.
Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There 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.
Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
#44I'm sorry to be off topic, but are those slow cookers cooking PG's recipe in the first picture?
Yup! It was tuesday, so dinner was being prepared. Bigger picture: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/186198/Screenshots/vmeh.png
Amazing!
Was it PG's rice and bean Ramen Profitable recipe? I don't remember slow cookers used in that recipe.
Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There 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 attri…
Are your predictions visible in the web-interface so we can verify if they hold water?
Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
#46My 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.
Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
#47FWIW: 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.
so true. poor retention is far better than no retention
Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
#48I'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.
Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
#49I'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…
So 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.
Re: Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
#50Here is a follow up post and video response to Paul's article: 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.