I keep forgetting to use your app | Hacker News Reader

I keep forgetting to use your app

gabrielweinberg.com

64 pointsdriverdan17 comments

This is why almost everybody should be capturing email and getting in touch with folks regularly. (Of particular interest to business productivity SaaS startups: make the product design decision that you're going to send them, at the minimum, weekly "Here's how much value you're getting out of this" emails and, if they're not using it, use that scheduled opportunity to re-engage them.)

I filter 95% of such emails. I suspect people who don't use a lot of filters end up just reporting them as spam. Actually, I see quite a few showing up in my spam filter without any action on my part. Email is getting worse as a way to reach people. With ads invading the newsfeed, Facebook is likely to drop in utility as well.

I filter 95% of such emails.

You filter 95% of such emails sent to you, which is trivial but important. If you're accurately reporting your filtering behavior (it is no slight to say that people misremember things all the time), sending you email is stupendously profitable. It just means it (statistically speaking) costs about 20 cents to hit your inbox instead of 1 cent.

Your behavior is not normative, though. Even for very techy audiences, a lot of people actually enjoy getting email. We can know this with certainty because they will open the emails, they will click on things in them, and then they will buy when you tell them to buy. Insert NDAed anecdote from Client #1, NDAed anecdote from Client #2, and NDAed anecdote from Client #3.

The lady sitting 20 feet away from me in this coworking space runs a less lucrative business than most enterprise software companies, and individual emails have earned her more than BCC has earned me in the last year (at approximately the same number of people on the email list).

The focus of my work for WPEngine this week was designing a marketing product for them and making a drip mail channel to send eight emails in the month after someone uses that product. It should absolutely print money. (One penny to send an email, use your imagination as to what a $200 a month hosting account is worth.)

Hopefully, WPEngine will let me talk about it after we have good stats.

I think Patrick's experience running and consulting with businesses that do these things is probably more significant than any of our experience on the receiving end of these messages (because — say it with me, now — most people are not like Hacker News readers).

I agree with chc's response to your comment. What you've basically done is setup a survey with a sample size of one (yourself), and mistakenly assumed that you're representative of every other person on Earth.

I can speak volumes for this practice. Our app is inherently designed to be forgotten.

Shooting out a weekly or monthly email always brings an uptick in engagement which ultimately means more usage for the app and subsequent plan upgrades.

We wanted to be very conservative about our spamminess and decided to send one single email with explicit opt-in for more. We had links like this:

    * I'm a Beeminder groupie (email me daily if you want)
    * Keep me in the loop (email at most weekly)
    * Don't let me forget about you (at most monthly)
    * Tell me if you cure cancer or something (at most yearly)

13% of users clicked one of those (2% chose "yearly" with about 4% each for daily/weekly/monthly).

I'm thinking we should instead force a choice at sign-up.

The key is 'getting in touch with folks'. Frequency matters - weekly works great for some, it will sink others.

Make the appropriate decision for your products, your audiences, your channels - but the advice to regularly highlight benefits is sound. For example, Evernote did a great job when they were small* of highlighting clever ways folks used their product. It didn't require any extra product development on their part, just honest interest in and engagement with their customers. New and old customers were encouraged to explore, the brand was humanized, it helped build a community, they reminded past users that they existed, it provided a natural outlet for mentioning real product improvements - all at the low cost of sending an email now and again.

* I'm just a former-Evernote user, and not terribly familiar with how they talk to customers now.

edit: meant to respond to lukeschlather. oops.

I think Android as an OS has a major effect here, because its Intents system codifies that 'starting point for a task' concept. If I want to carry out a particular operation on some data, all of the apps capable of handling it can inform the OS that they are available as options, and I get a menu to select which app I want to use for the task. What you want, as an app developer, is to have your users become confident enough in your app to check the "set as default" option in that app choice menu.

This is kind of the equivalent of the fight over 'file associations' in Windows.

I have a wikipedia app for IOS that I never use, because I only get to wikipedia through Google in Safari. I wish there was some way to direct the URLs to the wikipedia app, since it really is better.

Reputation and karma systems are very good at reminding. They normally engage the users as if the site was some sort of "game" and persuading to have a high score.

See HN, Stack Exchange sites, forum's post counts, xbox live gamerpoints, etc.

It's less like a game.. and more like an ego boost. We want to feel popular and admired, and seeing our post/reply get a huge # of upvotes triggers lots of dopamine. It's nothing to do with games at all.

What a bizarre thing to think. I do not care about these devices other than as a way to keep interesting stuff visible.

Always thought the whole gamification thing was pointless too.

It's so pointless and irrelevant to most people that companies like Foursquare are conquering millions of users and fads like Zynga are making millions out of purple cows...

I see the same effect in HN. Everytime I login, I see if the number next to my username has increased. If not, I go somewhere else. I do this every few hours somedays. It's somewhat addicting.

Yeah, the key is establishing some sort of habit. The other thing you have to watch out for in this vein is weekends. If your product is work-related or school-related, you're more likely to forget about it over a weekend, and then never come back (unless someone tries to re-engage you). Path and other friend- or interest-based social sites suffer from this problem less, because weekends may even lead to higher rather than no use.

The fact that DDG is listed as a choice for search engines in Firefox is a huge boon for DDG. I never would use it until I took the step to make it the default search in Firefox. It is great 80% of the time and the other 20% I just prepend g! and it dumps me into Google.

Worth the tradeoff as I'm frustrated with Google lately.

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