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Ask HN: How did you lose your first 100 users?

10 points by freehunter ↗ HN
Styled after "Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191161

We've gotten some good advice on how to get your first 100 customers, but for me the harder part is losing customers.

Every business is going to lose customers eventually. Let's hear your tips on how to deal with it, as well as stories of what you did that turned those customers away. How did you get feedback on why they left, and was that feedback reliable? If you were able to win them back, how did you accomplish that?

3 comments

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meagher
This a great question, but harder to answer than "How did you acquire your first 100 users?" and probably more important.

Besides an obvious pain (like many users saying X is bad), users usually become indifferent and just never come back. These users will likely never give feedback unless they've had an abnormally bad experience.

Whenever you lose users, it's painful. But could be a good thing if they weren't your target since you may waste time servicing them or building features they say they want.

codegeek
Running a SAAS business made me realize that no matter what, you will always lose customers. The goal is to ensure that you don't lose too many very quickly. You can never assume that once a customer joins you, they won't leave. We had some of our best customers leave because their circumstances changed. Things happen. Not because of us necessarily. Just that they didn't need to do that anymore.

Customer retention is probably THE hardest thing in running a business other than hiring and retaining talent.

SyneRyder
I sell products rather than a subscription service, so it's harder to measure when I've lost a customer.

I'm certain I've lost customers because I haven't had enough frequent updates / new products, and wasn't consistent with my email newsletter. I use a niche toolkit that wasn't ready when 64-bit went mainstream, so I missed being in the first wave of 64-bit ready products and got stuck with a lot of rewrites & retooling. So, just getting the basics right is important!

I did include an optional survey whenever someone uninstalls the trial version of my software. 90% of the feedback was useless (ie "id dint like it"), but occasionally a customer would take the time to write about a bug they'd encountered, or a compatibility problem, so I think it's still worthwhile to include.

Some of the uninstall feedback was a huge red herring - customers kept saying they didn't understand how to configure Photoshop to use my software, or had problems using Photoshop itself, or didn't even have Photoshop, so I thought I'd fix it by developing & including a stripped-back simple photo editor that was preconfigured to work with my software. Some customers loved it & said I'd knocked it out of the park... but it did not move the needle at all and was a colossal waste of time. If I'd looked more closely, I would've noticed those uninstall survey requests had mostly come from Brazil & India, countries I wouldn't have been able to monetize anyway.

I also tag incoming support requests so I can see which areas customers keep having trouble with, so I can measure what might be the biggest holes. For me, customers losing their unlocking serial code was the #1 issue & I solved that almost entirely with an online lost-my-code lookup.