Unwaffle

It turns out that you can get a lot of benefit from just looking at the data being collected directly, even before applying any of the cool bayesian classification or Machine Learning stuff to it.

Knowing what people are doing, you can turbo charge a Lifecycle Mail campaign to send little rescue mails to people who have lost their way during setup or just stopped engaging.

So now Unwaffle has a way to quickly pull that information out, either directly in the app or via an API call.

More here:

https://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/things-worth-knowing-about-your-trial-users.html

Refining the idea a bit, with some thoughts on how to build something to track this data if you're not into using a service like Unwaffle to do it.

Because it's worth doing even if it means not giving me any money.

https://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/saas-onboarding-metrics-for-developers.html

I kinda stumbled into this idea back in 2016. I had added a feature on S3stat (https://www.s3stat.com/) where Users can create extra logins for other members of their team. So instead of printing out reports and sending them to their boss, they can simply add Mr. Boss Guy to their team and he can check his own reports. Less work for the account user.

But it turns out that it was a better idea than I'd thought. Because if Joe User let his trial lapse, he'd get an email the next week from Mr. Boss Guy asking where the hell this week's reports were and why couldn't he log in to S3stat anymore? Joe would explain that gee, that thing costs like ten dollars a month and I don't have a budget for software. And Mr. B would yell at him and tell him to go subscribe right now. Here's the company card.

I wrote a big ugly SQL query to count how many Users had signed up for trials since that feature went live, how many of them converted to paid, and to see whether Trial Users who added at least one team member converted at a higher rate than users who didn't.

And while Trialers as a whole were converting at 9%, the "Added Team" group converted at something like 45%.

So Step One was to change S3stat to strongly encourage adding lots of team members. And Step Two was to automate the tool that let me surface this sort of information.

That new tool survived maybe a week as a backend feature of S3stat before it became obvious that it needed to be a product of its own.

More here:

https://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/maximizing-saas-trial-conversions.html