Thanks for the feedback. We're working on some potential solutions to this and in the meantime we refund everybody who requests one.
A proper solution is to not charge in the meantime. I know its an aggressive stance, but the dissonance with the exploit and pricing model is strong. You should feel wrong exploiting people claiming you'll fix it later.
Wanna get paid? Find a way to do that without exploit. You'll find a potential solution a lot faster if the money stops rolling in until you do.
Either way, this is a terrible sign for your focus and compassion as business that toes the line with claiming to be a therapy or treatment for a medical condition. How can anyone believe you truly do the right thing and care? I don't think apps care about me, but an app like this that presents itself as an alternative to therapy I expect to be an exception.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here? An exit strategy isn't, like, a particular type of business model that some businesses use. It's just a word for the founders' strategy with respect to exiting the business.
Real therapists operate without an exit strategy. A good therapist isn't building dependence in their clients.
It seems like you're suggesting that the only way to run a company responsibly is to intend to personally be at the helm until you drop dead, like Zuckerberg. That just feels unrealistic, and like a totally bizarre and excessive criticism, when there's lots of other legitimate stuff to criticise about this company.
> but there's no reason why you can't exit a company and leave it in good hands, with a viable long-term plan. In fact, most founders will be incentivised to do exactly that.
That's not what "exit" means in startup vernacular. An "exit" is the part where you and your investors get rich. This is usually achieved through the company going public, or getting acquired by another one. Both cases are almost inevitably bad for existing users/customers. Going public usually means the company is subject to the whims of stock market players. Acquires usually means the company gets scrapped for parts (usually for people, knowhow, patents, and/or user data). Either way, the founders and investors got their reward - so they don't really have a reason to care about what happens with the business afterwards.
Now the problem is, getting to an exit isn't a sure thing - but it's something that can be optimized for. Optimizing for it eventually puts the company in a situation, where they have to diminish or even offer negative value to users - through e.g. bait&switch payment models, dropping useful features, vendor lock-in, UX dark patterns - in order to improve the main metric that increases the chance of successful exit: growth.
So when you see founders explicitly talking about and planning for an exit, what this means is that they already demonstrate they'll put making the company attractive to would-be acquirers ahead of offering actual value to the users/customers. And to be clear, it's worth reminding: marketing has a better marginal ROI than providing value, so just because customers seem to be flocking to a company, doesn't mean the company is offering a good deal. They may be just good at "growth hacking".
The worst case is obvious fraud (Theranos, uBeam), but the second worst case is what I referred to in another comment as "legal pump&dump" - companies who focus almost entirely on growth hacking while providing minimal value, in hopes they'll get acquired before everyone figures out the whole thing is bullshit.
> the only way to run a company responsibly is to intend to personally be at the helm until you drop dead
Of course not :). Another way would be to not take VC funding, focus on providing a good service for as long as you feel like, and eventually pass the business on, sell it, or shut down.
The way I see it, just taking VC funding - taking the Faustian bargain - makes you an "exit risk". One way to assuage the fears of users would be to make some legally-binding promises about the future of the company, but nobody ever does that. In time, as more non-tech people finally figure out how startups work, maybe that'll change.
> An "exit" is the part where you and your investors get rich.
This is normally a consequence of an exit, but - as is really my main point here - it's not the meaning of the word. An exit is just you as a founder freeing yourself of the company, in terms of leaving your management role and/or converting your equity to cash (in some kind of buyout or IPO).
"Having an exit strategy" may be conflated with "intending to get rich by selling all your equity, and therefore being short-termist in your management", but that's not remotely part of the meaning of the words. And, again, every founder has an exit strategy of some sort. (Either that, or they are floating blindly through their life in some kind of protracted acid trip.)
> Another way would be to not take VC funding, focus on providing a good service for as long as you feel like, and eventually pass the business on, sell it, or shut down.
To wit, the "eventually pass the business on, sell it, or shut down" part is an exit strategy.
In addition to these we also send email and notification reminders before the free trial ends and refund everybody who requests one.
I don't know of any services that do this though. So I assume they are all dishonest.
From my understanding, the profitability of gyms is actually dependent upon some sizable percentage of people paying for a membership and not using it. If that cohort didn't exist, membership fees would have to be much higher.
Software subscriptions are different though, as the variable costs are negligible: the cost associated with providing service to each new user is next to nothing.
Personally, I'd be way more likely to sign up for a paid subscription if I knew they would automatically stop charging me if/when I stop using the service.
Depends on the service. Many boast about their large or unlimited storage for user's data, but this part of their marketing relies on the assumption that almost nobody will actually use a noticeable amount of the offer.
It's similar to the dishonest, but sadly normalized practice of ISPs, where the bandwidth offered would be impossible to provide if a significant number of customers tried to use it at once.
And of course every cloud provider works this way, but that's not a "subscription model" anymore.
even with a monthly subscription, it's really easy to completely forget about a service and move on from it entirely without cancelling it
I mean: someone signs up - regardless of whether you want to call it a subscription - and every month on renewal, they get a notice to confirm renewal (or have to re-enter payment, though I suspect that's probably _too_ much friction).
Is that a great way to retain revenue? Probably not. But it's way better for press than what I saw when I opened this thread and was immediately turned off. It's definitely the kind of consumer-first model that I'd love to see more of, certainly from a company/app whose target is helping people...