Managing email design and content is extremely important to our customers. From day one, we wanted to give our customers full control over the look and feel of their email. Here are our first iterations of email editing in Customer.io. The naive approach We started with a big old text box using A…

I had the pleasure of seeing Aziz Ansari, (an extremely talented comedian) sharpening his tools at the Comedy Cellar. Comedy Cellar is a small comedy club in Greenwich Village, New York City. It fits ~80 people per show in a long, narrow basement venue. The comedians have a narrow, elevated red p…

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 fro…

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…

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…

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) t…

I like to write and respond to emails at 1:00 am. However, you don’t want to receive an email from me at 1:00 am. If you do receive an email from me, there’s a higher chance you’ll miss it. But for me, writing an email at 1:00 am makes great use of my time. I batch all of my email writing togethe…

Most efforts at user retention are post-cancellation. What if you could know someone was going to cancel before they did? For subscription services, it’s pretty easy to identify who is about to cancel. Look at their usage data. Let’s look at a simple example: A user signed up 2 months ago and is …

Here’s a trick question for you: “What’s the cheapest way to get a new user?” If right now you’re thinking about the price differentials between Facebook Ads and Google Ads, you’re doing it wrong. The cheapest way to get a new user is to fix that giant gaping hole in your bathtub that leaks users…

Customer retention is a key to success for just about any business, and the best organizations are constantly looking for ways to keep their customers coming back. Robert Scoble The definition Customer retention is anything a business does to get people to continue paying them. A close relative …