Related: Our highest-maintenance users by far (SaaS) are the 'small fry' - companies with a handful of users. They are usually an order of magnitude more demanding than companies with 50+ users.
The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons
171–175 of 175 posts
Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
In your previous comment you said you wrote "about 1000 games" in your school years. I wonder if that was a lie too? :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235575
Why would making 1,000 games (that can be translated to many) that lead to a game startup and successful exit would call you to question if the parent was a millionaire. Successful exits usually are worth millions.
Another theory, reversing cause and effect, being a multimillionaire would give you enough free time to write 1000 tiny games.
Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it famously worked really well to create desire around Gmail, but it also famously didn't actually get anyone to use Google Plus or Google Wave. I was desperate for invites to both and then... never found a reason to use them? So it probably does better in terms of rate limiting than anything else. Maybe the right modern comparison would be Threads to BlueSky?
Everyone increasingly needed email at the time, people weren't especially wedded to their current email providers, and Gmail was arguably better than whatever they were using and free. Google Plus was a social network that never got widely used outside of certain circles and Wave was this new weird thing that never took off.
Don't forget gmail having 1GB of storage at a time when most email providers offered a few MB.
Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of your "analysts" seem like they can be net loss. I'm thinking someone who only ever buys the groceries that are at least 50% off, having no particular recipe in mind so no need to combine with regular-price items. Grabs them by the truckload when the sale comes, then lives off their freezer for months. I don't know if it's common to do it so perfectly though.
That's only true if you issue coupons that exceed your gross margins. Net margins in many industries are razor thin, a single digit percentage at best. Gross margins are much thicker, because the rest has to go to covering operating expenses like rent and utilities and salaries that don't really depend on how many sales you ring up. You can't allow your net margin to be below zero on average , but any sale that excee…
Thanks for the example. It got me thinking.
It's true that a sale at $0.20 profit margin is still a profitable sale, so if the alternative is to not make a sale at all, then better make it.
And... in the case of expirable things like food, even a negative-margin sale is not something to back out of, if again the alternative is to not make the sale at all. That nearly-expired porkchop was already stocked, no way to get back the purchase cost, but you can get something.
But you should not give out negative-profit coupons to begin with for perfectly fine non-expired goods. I hear that.
I guess you would also worry if a customer's behavior forestalls other customers' spending. Like if you have 50% off on bacon but you forgot to set a maximum amount of units, then one customer comes along and buys up the entire supply.
Re: The worst users come from referral programs, free trials, coupons
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's only true if you issue coupons that exceed your gross margins. Net margins in many industries are razor thin, a single digit percentage at best. Gross margins are much thicker, because the rest has to go to covering operating expenses like rent and utilities and salaries that don't really depend on how many sales you ring up. You can't allow your net margin to be below zero on average , but any sale that excee…
Thanks for the example. It got me thinking. It's true that a sale at $0.20 profit margin is still a profitable sale, so if the alternative is to not make a sale at all, then better make it. And... in the case of expirable things like food, even a negative-margin sale is not something to back out of, if again the alternative is to not make the sale at all. That nearly-expired porkchop was already stocked, no way to ge…
> I guess you would also worry if a customer's behavior forestalls other customers' spending. Like if you have 50% off on bacon but you forgot to set a maximum amount of units, then one customer comes along and buys up the entire supply.
Even that's not really the end of the world. Okay, so you've lost a higher margin sale from the customer who wouldn't have had a coupon, but you've still managed to clear out your stock of nearly expired bacon, and the other customer is still standing in your store looking for some breakfast food and might just buy some breakfast sausages instead, or come back and buy their bacon next week.
You might have done better to do things differently, but only a little bit, which is probably true of every reasonable decision anyone has ever made about anything. And maybe you wouldn't -- maybe a purchase limit would have meant you didn't sell out on nearly expired bacon and would have had to throw it out. Sometimes there's no way to know for sure what would have happened in the alternative and you're just happy if you're making money.