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Comment by cooperadymas | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like the freemium experiment was a success (11% conversion rate), and the failure was your lack of preparedness to scale to support the extra load it brought with it.

The 60 customers that were lost during that time period - were they pre-existing customers from before the freemium switch, or new customers? Did they leave because the technical issues or because they saw the freemium version and decided they didn't want to pay any more?

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Agree: 11% is a enviable conversion rate! Very impressed with this!! They were emailing Nk users and tweeting Nk more. So let's say you reached (Nk + Nk) + .25 users. Consider a response rate of .3 and you come up with a few thousand more users. Can your process handle a few thousand more? You can test for that. You can also calculate the cost of that increase overall to your company. Seems pretty straightforward.

Pre-existing and they left because of tech/service issues. We interview all outgoing customers.

And I agree our lack of preparedness to scale was part of this, but it's shortsighted to only look at a simple conversation rate for determining success.

"Success" is relative and we define it on a higher level than just conversion. The fact is, software isn't infinitely scalable...or rather it takes orders of magnitude more resources for it to approach that level.

There's a certain inflection point where the time spent "getting prepared" simply outweighs the potential benefits. We could have spent years "getting prepared" but there was a point where we just had to say "ship it"...and that's what we did.

Can you share your experience on getting this feedback during a cancelation? We have mixed success getting users to share. It's about 50/50 for us. We have even lower response rates from users who have finished their trial without conversion.

At the crux of it is not allowing self-serve cancellation. I know, boo, hiss, burn us at the stake. ;) We wrote a little bit about that here: https://baremetrics.com/blog/how-we-reduced-churn

But ultimately we exchange at least a few emails with every cancellation and try to understand exactly why we were no longer addressing their need. 99% of people are extremely willing to help out here.

Also, Exit Interviews: http://www.extendslogic.com/business/jobs-to-be-done-cancel-...

Thank you. We're on the same page wrt emailing us to cancel. A quarter of our churn is actually users who have their cc declined and do not fix it, despite nag emails, in two weeks. I don't think we've ever heard back from a single one of these users. For the other 75% I guess we should just be asking more questions before servicing their request.

For the cc declined customers, you may want to look into http://churnbuster.io/

Hey, I used to run a SaaS product that solved the failed payment problem very specifically (http://churnbuster.io) and I'd recommend you extend that 2 week period out to something like 4 to 6 weeks. Some of our most successful customers were sending out 7-8 emails over a 6 week period. Every business is different, so YMMV, but it might help. A bunch of other thoughts on the subject that may be helpful to you here: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-industry-average-rates-fo... .

While we're throwing out ways to solve CC declines with other solutions, Baremetrics actually has this very thing built in. :) https://baremetrics.com/dunning

Big surprise: doing a scummy business practice straight out of the Comcast playbook helps you to hold on to users.

Any service which lets me sign up online but not cancel online is incredibly distasteful.

You can cancel online, just send an email. Comparing this to Comcast's service is hyperbole.

So can you cancel without being hassled excessively or not? The founder of the business just stated right up the thread there that there's no self-service cancellation and they always exchange a few e-mails with someone who is cancelling.

Personally, I am usually happy to give feedback to fellow business folks, and I wouldn't be offended if someone politely asked for it from a service I was cancelling. However, if a single reasonable action to cancel and no further contact resulted in my card being charged because I didn't play along, that service should not expect a happy outcome.

We don't hassle. You send an email saying "Hey, I want to cancel!"

We respond with: "Bummer to hear, but happy to take care of that for you. Anything we could have done better?"

Then that usually sparks a longer conversation, but if we don't hear back within 24-48 hours, we just go ahead with the cancellation.

We're also very generous with refunds and certainly wouldn't keep someone's money just because we delayed the cancellation a day or two. That's just silly.

That all seems pretty reasonable to me, then.

@morgante Big surprise: Someone who's never tried it from a business perspective complains about it on Hacker News. :)

My company has spent weeks agonizing over price changes and different features for different subscription levels (including a free level). We run all kinds of numbers and projections but at the end of the day you don't always know for sure until you flip the switch. You can do all kinds of surveys and talk to your customers. But you just don't know exactly how may people are going downgrade, upgrade, sign up, or even care about your changes.

The author was certainly a victim of their own success, as their conversion rates are pretty good. They just need to find limitations for the free account that doesn't consumer more resources than they can support.

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