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Comment by steveridout | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the advice. Churn is higher than I'd like and that's going to be a big focus for me this year. There's a lot to do to make the product more sticky.

Rough figures at the moment are:

Monthly churn of monthly subscribers is about 20%.

Yearly churn of yearly subscribers is about 50%.

When I ask why people leave, virtually everyone has the same story - they really liked the product, but they didn't have the time to devote to their language studies right now.

I'll dig into some of the other metrics you suggested in a future post.

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> they really liked the product, but they didn't have the time to devote to their language studies right now.

It sounds like you've fallen into the trap of an aspirational product, like gym memberships. People want to need it, but often they don't.

Yep, you hit the nail on the head. It's likely that this product will always have a highish churn rate because of that.

But with low running costs, and a large enough supply of new users, it could still be a good business. Also, there are hard-core users who really do use it all the time, for whom the churn rate will be much lower.

I'm a language learner myself, and I also frequent various reddit language subreddits and read all the stories of other people.

My belief is that "don't have time" usually means "I've lost motivation after the initial high". A huge problem with language learning is that unless you have moved to another country or otherwise in an immersive environment then it becomes quite difficult to keep motivation and discipline high. The reward of "I can read/write/speak/listen a little better than last month" starts to pale and people realize they actually don't use their new skill on a regular basis. And like many things, getting to the next proficiency level takes increasing amounts of work. The flip side being that for X weeks of study less and less progress seems to be made.

What I'm getting at is that this churn is not a problem with your product, but a broad problem with language learning. Anything you can do to solve (or lessen) these problem is a big, uncertain task. But it's probably the only way to reduce churn. The upside is that if you do manage to make headway then you've done something major. Really major.

You might also want to look at the techniques which gyms use to extract maximum revenue from aspirational users. In particular, heavily encouraging/discounting annual memberships.

(Then again, extracting a year of revenue from someone who only uses it a month or two might not be your cup of tea.)

You might want to look at structuring your pricing in a similar manner to gym memberships given that the product has a similar usage pattern. There was an interesting Planet Money[1] podcast recently that noted that many gym memberships are structured to be yearly contracts ... because people like that idea of putting money down so that they feel committed. You might be able to tap into some of the same psychology.

1 http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/12/17/371463435/episo...

Another approach I saw a gym take recently was having a relatively high price but then you "earned" back a portion of the fee every month by meeting a certain activity goal.

It seems like it might be complicated to administer, but I think the psychology works well for an aspirational product because people will like the idea of making a commitment to a personal improvement but will probably over-estimate their future activity.

Sounds like your product is a poor fit for a subscription. If the majority of your revenue is from new customers, why not switch to a paid-up-front product? With a 20% churn rate, your average revenue per user should be around 25$, so why not just charge $25 up front?

learning languages is one of those things where people will come back to it again over their lifetimes when they perceive they have time or when they create some sort of new year resolution or something. If you have the current pricing they will sign up again, if you have an up-front pricing they can come back for free forever, which in the long run I don't think is as profitable.

If at all I would do something like, if you have been a previous paid subscriber, and your subscription has lapsed, you can come back at 50% of the subscription for 50% of the time you were subscribed for (so if you were there for 6 months you would have 3 months at 50% off), this way you would encourage people to come back without completely losing out on additional income

A better approach might be to offer an annual subscription plan with a discount in addition to a monthly plan. That way you will appeal to customers who want to just trial the product and customers who want to pay for the commitment upfront.

This gets into psychology, eh?

I suggest reading through alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/

He has excellent tips. For example, to paraphrase, "just open up a lesson, don't aim to finish one, because that'll feel like too much work, and you won't find the time".

I have a language learning site, and we changed our suggested method to its users because of that better approach.

That comes down to communicating how to use your product to your users. I have to do more of that too.

True, agree completely. I designed Readlang's Activity Monitor with this in mind: http://blog.readlang.com/2015/09/10/new-learning-activity-st...

It's meant to encourage people to translate or recall just 10 words per day, which is a very small amount which should be doable every day. If they do this they'll build up an "X day streak" - similar to what Github or Duolingo do.

Hey Steve, just hopping on a random comment to tell you - this is fucking cool, man. I really enjoy your approach to building this tool. It is apparent that you've put a ton of time into thinking about the structure of learning - and that is much appreciated.

With such a high monthly churn, you should consider testing out a discounted 1-year pricing plan.

Oh and read everything by Patrick. Here are a few worth reading in your situation [0,1].

[0] https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/free_book...

[1] https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pric...

With figures like those I think you need an annual subscription option ($50/y, two months free for ex.)

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