Don't use noreply@yourdomain.com on emails

It should be no surprise that if you’re using “noreply@myapp.com” as your email address, you’re leaving information on the table.

Here are a few ways you can benefit by using a real email address (and even encouraging people to respond).

Users don’t like monologues from machines

Sending email from noreply@megacorp.com signals to a user that you don’t care about them. It’s a one-way relationship that allows you to blast them with email and them to do nothing. At a previous startup, every email we sent was from helpfulpeople@ourapp.com. This made users happy - especially when they would write to us and one of the helpful people would respond.

Offer Help (and apologies) Along The Way

When you try to do something and fail, it’s the worst feeling. When users fail, they feel like they’ve done something wrong, or they’re too stupid to understand how to accomplish their task. One of the biggest opportunities for apps is to offer help to users as they’re using your site.

One of my best real-world examples of this executed well is Virgin Atlantic. I was flying from Heathrow to JFK and tried to check in online (it was just released) and the site had an issue. When I arrived at the check-in desk at the airport, the Virgin employee said:

“Mr. Nederkoorn, I see you tried to check in online, but it didn’t work for you? We’re very sorry about that. I’ve given you a complimentary upgrade to Upper Class”.

This turned Virgin Atlantic from a lackluster experience into my preferred airline.

This experience for a user can be replicated (and automated) online.

• Offer help when a user doesn’t finish setting up their profile
• Offer help if a user starts, but never finishes, uploading a video.
• Offer help if a user creates an account but never uses it.

All of these emails should reduce cancelations of your app. But if a user does cancel…

Find out why they left

When a user cancels, it’s a great opportunity to ask them what went wrong. We’ve had success in the past with an automatic email from the CEO asking for feedback like this:

from: Steve@microcorp.com

Hi Colin,

I’m Steve, CEO of Microcorp. We’ve deleted your account and are sorry to see you go. I wanted to reach out to you personally to ask for feedback about why you deleted. Did you have unmet expectations? What can we do to improve the site?

Thank you for taking the time to help us get better.

Sincerely,

Steve CEO, Microcorp

There are tremendous opportunities beyond monthly marketing emails. Start a dialogue with users by using an email address they can reply to. Reach out to them at key points in their experience on your site. Both alone and in concert, those two changes will improve activation and retention.

Legal, Healthcare, Accounting and Payroll

We’re about 1.5 months in to building Customer.io and we’ve had pain we’ve had to overcome with supporting services. Some we expected. Some we were surprised to find.

Here’s how I wish our supporting services were:

Healthcare

Think Hipmunk for Healthcare

You’re able to compare each plan apples to apples. Pick the one we want, and fill in a one page form. Then click submit, put in payment info and you’ll immediately have coverage for your company.

Legal

Standardization of documents

Industry accepted standard docs for everything an early stage company needs.

Like:

• Oh, you’re a startup delaware c-corp? Here’s your incorporation package, and 83(b) election that you need to file. You’ll want to authorize 10m shares at $0.001 par value.
• Want to do a convertible note financing? Here’s a doc you just need to fill in the blanks.

I love our lawyer, but it just seems to me that especially at the very early stages, every technology startup company is pretty much the same.

Accounting & Bookkeeping

Not quickbooks

Synced to the relevant bank accounts. All expenses are hooked in to Expensify and automatic. The only human interaction is to go through and double check things at the end of the month.

Payroll

Simple. Automatic

Sign up online for a few dollars a month per employee. Add the employees you need to pay and a zip code to calculate withholding. The employer gets a reminder to pay, goes online to do it. It hooks in to get the balance from your bank account to make sure you don’t overdraft. Employees can log in to see their payment history. There is no paper.

One of our biggest pains of starting a company are these supporting services. The people who help us through it all are wonderful, but the industries in which they operate are creating wasted time and crushing the spirits of everyone trying to start something new.

How to build a startup is a solved problem

Steve Blank (entrepreneur, author, teacher) gave a talk yesterday at American Express ¹ Steve said something along the lines of:

In the past five years, we’ve developed a repeatable process for building startups

That’s a big idea. I’m cynical about declarative statements like that. But what if he’s right? What if making a startup is like following a recipe to bake a cake? That can’t be right. It’s not that simple.

Building a startup is not like following a recipe to bake a cake.

It’s more like understanding the chemistry in baking ² . The baker knows why yeast makes bread rise. They know what happens when you add water to the dough, or egg whites to a cake.

Understanding the fundamentals of baking allows a baker to be faced with a situation of uncertainty and know what to do. This knowledge affords the baker the ability to invent new baked awesomeness from underlying principles.

Maybe that’s what Steve is saying we now know about startups.

Setting up a virtual pbx with Twilio, OpenVBX and PHP Fog

We’ve been reading that adding a phone number increases conversions. When people sign up and pay us, we give them our cell phone numbers. But, we wanted to have a way for people to get in touch with us pre-sales for us to answer any questions.

If you’re looking for the easiest option, you can exit here and go to Grasshopper.

We like experimenting with software (a lot). So we built our own Virtual PBX. It was insanely easy thanks to a few great tools:

• Twilio
• OpenVBX
• PHP Fog

Here’s how you can do it too:

Create a shared cloud app on PHP Fog

This is the free tier. It’s just two of us, and it seems to be working great after a day. Your mileage may vary. They have a slick interface for setting up new apps.

You can clone the repo that gets created and drop OpenVBX in there.

Download OpenVBX

Check it out on github, or download from the site.

One thing we needed to do is remove the config.php from OpenVBX/config/.gitignore. Because the deploy process for phpfog uses git, you can’t ignore the config file.

Copy the OpenVBX files into the directory containing your cloned PHPFog app repo.

a simple git push should deploy the app.

Set up your Twilio account

You’ll need a Twilio account and the Account SID and Auth Token to get set up with OpenVBX.

You may also want to get your 800 number at this point. It’s only $2 a month.

Connect everything together

Follow the instructions on OpenVBX and put in your database info from PHP Fog, and your Twilio info.

Then, the cool stuff happens.

You can set up a flow for what should happen when people call your number.

Here’s ours:

We’re looking forward to hacking around and seeing what magic we can make our phone system do - including using Customer.io to trigger phone calls and text messages.

Discuss on Hacker News

4 ways we learned we are building the right thing

After 40+ conversations with people, we know we’re building something of value. Here are some tactics we used to start customer development conversations:

Start conversations on twitter

I set monitoring for people tweeting “user retention”. I saw Rick Perreault, CEO of Unbounce (check them out) tweet “I’d pay for that!” and asked him if we could speak about what he wanted to pay for.

Respond to emails

Whenever I see something in my inbox that looks like a triggered email, I reach out to the company that sent it. The first time I did this this was with an email I got from Dropbox.

I ended up having a great email conversation with Naveen at Dropbox and learned more about how Dropbox is sending retention emails.

Reach out to bloggers

There are a couple examples of this I can cite:

1. Paul Stamatiou blogged about user retention as a service in December. We reached out to him and had a great chat with him about how he set up emails for Picplum.

2. I recently saw a post about Automated Emails from Allan at Lesseverything (makers of Lessaccounting). I reached out to Allan to ask how they set up automated emails and mentioned that we were working on a product. He responded with a something like “We would love to do X and also do Y”. X and Y were on the roadmap. We just got more validation that those features are important.

Tell everyone you know what you’re working on.

The best example so far is of a company who had posted on a forum asking if anyone knew of a product that automated marketing emails. The features they described where exactly what we had planned to build. A friend forwarded on the request saying: “This reminded me of what you’re up to”.

What we now know

We’ve spoken with ~ 40 people who have helped us establish:

• There’s a need for our product
• We know what’s critical to build first
• We now have people who want to pay us for it.

It’s a great feeling to know you’re building the right thing.