
Ask HN: How to Improve Retention Rate? - newbierails
My app is an e-learning website linked to a freelancing website. Users take courses in the e-learning part of the website and complete tasks for companies in the freelancing part of the website. But you can only apply for a task if you have completed its required courses.<p>The problem is that a lot of people have enrolled in a course but nobody has completed it yet. And since they have not completed a course, they cannot apply for a task. And hence, companies are hesitant to post tasks on our site as there is nobody to complete them.<p>So, how do I incentivise people to actually complete courses on my site without any tasks on my site yet.
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_ah
A few thoughts off the top of my head: 1\. If you can, offer a discounted
promotional rate for tasks on your site, where some tasks will be completed
for free. Tasks must be approved (by you). Then, just do the freelance work
yourself at below-market prices.

2\. Post tasks yourself. When people complete the training, pay them to help
develop your app / site.

3\. Offer discounted rates where you subsidize the income of the freelancer.

4\. Offer badges for completing training, and then auto-create a freelancing
profile for the user to advertise on other competing freelance site. Yes
you're driving away your freelancers initially, but you must offer them
something of value or they have no incentive to participate.

The problem you're having is not retention, per se. You are trying to be a
middleman and create a new market. The problem with creating a market is that
you need to ensure BOTH sides of the market are up and running (buyers and
sellers) before you start to attract organic participants. This is the same
problem Uber faced and ultimately conquered. Creating a market is hard, and
almost impossible to do without large amounts of funding.

~~~
newbierails
1\. We were thinking of personally completing tasks at first to get a steady
supply of tasks 2\. We cant afford to post task ourselves as we are just
starting out (no funding) 3.Again no funding to do that 4\. We have created a
profile that shows courses and tasks a freelancer has completed on our site. I
can maybe add a feature that allows them to share this on other freelancing
sites or on job finding sites

But really the problem is that even if we had tasks most people arent
motivated to complete courses. This seems like a problem in other e-learning
sites as well. People just enroll in a course but they dont have the
motivation to complete them. So, I wanted to know how we could incentivise
users to actually complete a course

~~~
_ah
A user will only engage with your product if it's rewarding to them. This can
mean internal rewards ("I enjoy this / feel good") or external rewards ("now I
can earn money"). You've identified the missing external rewards, and have
reasons why this cannot be changed. That leaves only internal rewards. The
fact that your users are not engaging is hard data showing that the experience
of your training course is not rewarding enough. Stated more bluntly, your
product isn't good enough. Fix that.

You must stop thinking in terms of "retention", because this leads you down
the path of tricks and dark patterns. Focus on making your core training
product inherently compelling. This is likely to be more than one small
thing... there are probably a hundred separate improvements that you need to
make to polish your core offering.

