Churning in Public. 👋 Weird or honest?
As Indie Hackers are we alway supposed to be positive? The MRR graph always goes up and to the right... 📈 ... doesn't it?
... but people leave our platform every day - and when they do, they often delete¹ their account and all their data... 😢
We've always been public about the survey we offer when "Delete Account" happens - you can see this data right here at https://onesub.io/open/leavers.
Is it a bad idea to be so open about people leaving?
Should we ask/publicise more² questions?
Thanks. 🙌
You should celebrate. Fail fast, learn fast.
The earlier you know people are leaving, the earlier you know how to improve.
People come and go for various reasons, and you should dig out the root cause and try to avoid it happens again. Keep it up @jimbomorrison
Thanks @felix12777 - just the confidence boost I needed this morning. 🙌
How many people don't delete accounts but rather just stop visiting?
Good question.
More generally...
NB:
Footnote³ - Okay, there wasn't a ³... call this an afterthought.
We don't know who left what feedback and we can't follow up!... the TypeForm has no PII and the readers' accounts, by the time we see the TypeForm, have been destroyed.
Again, interested to know whether folks think that's bonkers - or about right...
Footnote² - FWIW we do ask other question and/or get some really interesting information in the "Other" responses... but we've chosen not to expose that in the public page for the sake for our readers' privacy...
It's a balance of transparency over privacy. Do we agree we've got the right approach?...
25% other sounds like you option cover isn't optimal, maybe
Good point. Most of the others are "I don't have time"... I've added some more options.. Thanks. 👏
Footnote¹ - This was actually the first "feature" we shipped, back in 2019.. long before we had a product. I think it's probably something that's often overlooked in a small startup and I imagine that bigger you get the harder it becomes, technically, to implement... but what do I know? 🤷♂️
I'd be super interested to hear from anyone who's had experience trying to implement a full, quick data-wipe a long time into developing a deep product...
At least before recent privacy regulations all delete are commonly soft deletes
It's not uncommon in big companies to get undelete request from customers even when everything says "are you sure? This is permanent and irreversible" and often it's in the business interest to restore data even at a big Labor cost
And reusing old account details for a new account at times causes a lot of pain
Whips both real and soft are a pain, big pain to test, bigger pain with edge cases, bigger pain if it has side affects, especially public facing ones - outside the account owner, who is the article owner/writter if the owner got deleted but the doc is to stay?...
Companies often need to be able to do forensics on past data for legal reasons for example. Or just want to help with an account that had a rough worker with some permissions
And covering security protocols, guardrails and safeties, it's so much easier to revoke db delete privileges from the app user
Just saying delete is frequently a pain
Fascinating - yes, I can see how some of these cases play out.
For our core news product, although it's a "personalisation" product we're actually designing a rolling 30d auto-delete for all their personalisation data and designing the product to cope with that. There's no real user data that would be of value to anyone if they wanted to undelete - they'd just as well create a new account...
However.. 🤦♂️ we are building a companion product which is user-generated-content based and I haven't even considered what happens when someone who's published there then deletes their account. Thanks for making me think about it! @hatkyinc 🙌