I have ~600 emails from an abandoned project with 100% churn. How should I reach out to them?
A couple years ago I launched an iOS budgeting app. I abandoned the project pretty quickly after launching but left it in the app store. I got a few signups here and there over the past couple years but the app has 100% churn, no one sticks around.
My biggest mistake with that app was that I didn't validate demand before building it and I didn't engage with the customers that did sign up.
I'm still interested in budgeting and realize the best thing I cand do now is reach out to these leads and do customer development interviews. But it seems awkward since I'd either have to acknowledge that I built an app they didn't like or just not acknowledge where I got their email address from.
Any thoughts on how you'd approach this? Thanks!
I'm with @ryanerickson here.
The two mistakes I see folks make are:
not reminding them where/why they signed up in the first place.
overexplaining what happened, making it all about themselves (the reasons they failed) instead of about ANYTHING reader would care about (their problems, their interests, etc) along with over-apologizing and all but telling people they shouldn't subscribe.
Seriously, I've seen all of this, and often in a single email.
Make it about them, and their problems. "Unfortunately, that thing isn't happening, but if you still care about XYZ problem, I have something for you!"
Offer them something valuable to them NOW to earn their trust instead of a generic "new list, subscribe over here instead."
I personally don't think there's anything wrong with owning up to a learning moment. I think it would be easy to just write an email with a quick, "Hi, you signed up for Project X over the last {time frame}; I writing to let you now of a new project, Project Y [A quick blurb on Project Y]. If you're interested you can find out more at cool_domain.com"
And just leave it there. No further contact.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago