

Show HN: Userfox (YC S11) — Better Welcome Emails  - pclark
http://userfox.com

======
pclark
we built _a lot_ of stuff for userfox over the past few months. and we were
looking at it all, making sure the user interface was usable, and so on: and
ultimately decided that actually: sending emails _when a user signs up_ is one
of the most valuable inflection points, because:

a) it applies to _every_ user (= highest ROI on copy written)

b) first impressions matter!

and c) its minimal work / thought for our customers. maximum value.

so we decided screw it! lets ship something this week! this month! and here we
are. lets do one thing really well.

so userfox today allows you to send a drip sequence of emails to your new
users. you can choose the days, the subjects, the content, we support your
custom email theme, we even show you clicks and conversions, and so on.

it's _awesome_ because its so light and easy. we're going to roll out some
awesome custom data features very shortly. dead simple things, like simply
"send this welcome email unless a user is on a paid plan."

et voila. when i look at products, i look at what they require me to do, and
what they give me in return. i think that userfox can move the needle on your
business, and to do that we ask for literally 15 or 30 minutes of your time.
i'd bet you'll see more impact from userfox than your sophisticated SEO
strategy in fact.

i have been on hacker news for a long time: it maybe even helped me get into
ycombinator! but these are all stories for another day: right now, i wanted to
show hacker news our product, because i think if you're a bootstrapping
business: userfox is a no brainer. "it just works."

~~~
diziet
Nice, we built something similar internally (but without the nice frontend and
relying on sendgrid for analytics etc).

What's missing in the longer term are more detailed ways of bucketing your
customers based on where they are with the product, ie: did they
deploy/install/upload a picture/whatever other functionality you offer. But as
you've said, shipping it is important.

Another pain point you guys addressed was that making custom table based html
templates for email is a pain. If you'd offer more templates in the future,
that would be a nice thing to add.

~~~
pclark
We'll offer bucketing. It just seems very hard to do right: now from a
software nor even design point of view, but in a manner that makes it worthy
of a time investment for young startups. welcome sequence felt like the low
hanging fruit. but it _is_ coming.

We actually had custom themes. My co-founder will mock me for now removing
them. ("simple is best!! these are UGLY!! People will want a clean simple
theme or custom HTML. REMOVE THEM.")

shoot me an email though and i'll get my designer to build you (or anyone
else) a custom html theme. (surprise bjoern!) peter@userfox.com

------
ScottWhigham
Congrats on launching - looks great! My issues that prevent me from signing up
would be:

1) No pricing structure means that I question whether you'll be in business in
a year, or if you are in business, that you're service will be wayyyyy
different then (will you insert ads into my emails? will you sell my info to a
3rd party? etc). These are questions you cannot answer today - you just can't.
You can say, "Oh no, Scott - we would never do those things!" But no one will
believe you b/c you haven't been around long enough.

2) My even bigger "beef" with this is that, because you have no track record,
you cannot estimate your delivery rate. A big reason to go with the big email
companies is b/c they can offer a high rate of guaranteed delivery. Your
delivery rate will, in large part, be out of your hands - it's in the hands of
your customers' content/emails. How will you protect yourself (and thus your
customers) from bad customers who buy lists and use you to spam the lists? How
will you vett your signups? What's your policies on when you would terminate a
customer for spam?

All in all, email is too critical to trust to a fresh startup IMO. I wish you
luck and, if you guys are still around in a few years and have answered the
above questions, I may become a customer!

------
jd
The sign up button says "try for free", which implies it's a trial signup. But
I can't find the price for the subscription anywhere on the website.

~~~
pclark
It is free for now. There'll be pricing eventually, but it'll be for
additional features (such as a/b testing and so on) as we ship them.

Right now, if you sign up, it's free to use, and we'd never be like, "hey man,
you now owe us money for stuff that you thought was free."

~~~
plasma
I've avoided signing up because I couldn't find a price.

Just saying its free / there is no pricing plans yet etc would have let me
sign up, or an actual pricing list.

I won't try a service without knowing whether I can actually use it going
forward (I'm time poor) so the lack of pricing information anywhere makes me
leave the page.

~~~
runako
I'll second this. I was interested, but it's not something we can evaluate
until you're ready to commit to price bounds.

Given the heat in this space now, it would also be nice to know how your
service differs from e.g. Vero or customer.io.

------
gtmtg
Looks pretty cool. One question - pricing? There's a "try for free" button,
but there's no indication of how long the trial actually lasts nor of what
happens after the trial. Note that I didn't sign up, - this information is
only from the home and signup pages - but it would be great if I (or any
potential customer) could see this info right up front.

~~~
pclark
Pricing will be for new, more sophisticated features, what you see today will
always be free. Features like push notifications, a/b testing, custom
campaigns, additional email themes, and so on.

I have learnt a lot from patio11 so we'll always be generous and honest about
this stuff. Pricing simply didn't feel like a reason to delay launch!

~~~
gtmtg
Thanks for your reply - definitely looks cool. As I mentioned above (under
@jd's post), it might help to change the call to action text...

------
connortomas
Would there be any reason to use this over, say, a Mailchimp auto-responder? I
don't mean that at all in a snarky way, just curious. I'd be interested to
give this a go, but can't quite justify shifting my auto-reponders from
Mailchimp just yet...

~~~
pclark
If you're starting today: userfox is much faster to get integrated and sending
email than MailChimp (or anything else.)

If you're already using MailChimp: send me a note and I'll show you our beta
"variables" feature that allows you to say things like "send this welcome
email unless this_custom_data equals that." launching soon.

------
silverlight
I couldn't find a Privacy Policy or ToS anywhere...this is really interesting
to me, but if I'm going to let you track everything my users do on my site,
I'm going to need to know that you're not going to sell their emails, sell
that data...

~~~
pclark
Oops. My heart just missed a beat that we forgot to add this for launch! We're
not going to do any bad stuff, we're not going to sell the data nor emails,
there is nothing weird going on here, we want to be as useful and valuable for
businesses as Olark is. We're a Y Combinator company, and are thusly obsessed
about doing the right thing and delivering an awesome product and support.

I'll get a Privacy Policy online asap.

------
aquark
This looks really cool and is something I'd definitely be interested in (been
on the 'todo' list for too long)... but I really need more info to decide if I
want to invest the time in trying it out.

Some kind of 'how it works' page ... how does information get from my app into
yours, can I embed per-user links (for example for email confirmation), how do
opt-out notifications get back from your app to mine, etc.

Minor UI issue ... the mouse pointer & hover action suggests that the day
icons on the front page do something ... but they don't for me (Chrome 22,
Windows)

~~~
pclark
I'll answer your questions here and then think about how to answer them on the
site.

Q: how does information get from my app into yours

A: async javascript snippet. my co-founder has the scars to prove it is
robust.

Q: can I embed per-user links

A: yep. our docs are a lot more elaborate than our user interface at this
point, but you can do almost anything you desire. best to shoot me an email
and i'll explain. peter@userfox.com

Q: how do opt-out notifications get back from your app to mine

A: we have a simple unsub API to communicate who has unsub'd, we handle the
entire unsub from userfox emails obviously. you're going to eventually (soon)
send all emails via userfox though.

Thanks for the note on the ui issue. we'll get it fixed.

------
nullspace
Interesting idea! However from what I have seen, to truly engage your
customers through email, it either needs to be personalized, be intelligent
enough to track current activity and engagement levels of users and tailor the
mails you send accordingly, or .. something else?

It would be nice to hear just out of curiosity what kind of market (low number
of important customers or high number of users or both) you are targeting, and
what is your strategy on a higher level to increase conversions?

~~~
pclark
Introduce your product through a series of emails.

Two huge benefits over what you do today (almost certainly a singular welcome
email)

* helps users understand your product

* reminds users of your product. What was the last product you signed up for? Unless it was userfox, you've forgotten!

Introduce features, tell the story of why you're building what you're
building, and so on. I love emails that profile power users. Real explicit
actionable advice.

I totally agree you should write specific emails about specific features.
We'll support that, but right now you'll make more money by sending a few
welcome emails rather than just one.

------
kristofferR
The landing page is quite nice, but the zoom animation and the pointer cursors
on the days really makes them look like clickable buttons that simply aren't
working.

~~~
zinssmeister
thanks! I actually wanted to remove the pointer/cursor but forgot. Will update
this shortly.

------
mmahemoff
This is great! I like how you provide some basic advice below the email
composition, since many users won't know exactly what to send. I'd even
suggest you could build on that with some more specific guidelines on sending
the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. And guidelines on determining how many to send, when
to send, etc, since those things can be edited by users.

~~~
pclark
We actually have a copywriter on team who would _love_ to assist people
writing emails. He manages a copywriting helpdesk for our customers, and also
offers services to write and manage content. Shoot me an email if this is
interesting to you. He writes dozens of emails with tremendous results for
some of our customers. peter@userfox.com

~~~
mmahemoff
Thanks! I've set it up now. One question about the embed code is what happens
if I don't have the user's email, or there's no user. If I just say email: "",
will that work OK? (ie do nothing.)

~~~
pclark
It'll do nothing. I personally wrap the userfox snippet on userfox.com (uh)
with a check to see if the user is logged in, but yours will work.

------
ghiculescu
I like it! My main concern is that it's Javascript only. Hopefully I'm wrong,
but I can't see anything the code from arbitrarily being inserted elsewhere
with my client ID but random email addresses and sign up dates, and thus
triggering emails in my name to go to these email addresses that aren't
actually my users.

~~~
pclark
we have an even more secure mode that we roll out to customers at volume;
naturally anyone can have it, but we're still working out the user interface
for it. if this is what is holding you back, email me and you can have the
docs. peter@userfox.com

------
nwienert
I bounced after getting to the form.. As a developer and therefore your main
target for potential customers, you never answered the most important
question... how? How does it integrate? Is it an API, do you have plugins for
my platform? Etc, etc.

------
felixchan
I've been looking for something like this for a long time. It's something I
wouldn't purposely implement because it's a pain to manage time/writing cron
jobs, etc.

Love the landing page too!

------
therandomguy
If I remember right there was a paid service around here that did the same
thing. You are going to put them out of business. Great product!

~~~
pclark
We'll put them out of business with a superior product. :)

userfox will be freemium business. (what you see now will be free, though.)

------
zach
This is really going to be tough for me over the next two weeks because I'll
have a lot of new services to become a power user on.

~~~
pclark
You (probably) jest but I would have loved LinkedIn and Twitter MUCH faster
had they done a better job at on boarding me. I didn't get what they were for
way too long. Needed a story.

------
pclark
who edited the title of this submission? thanks for using the proper em dash,
but userfox is supposed to be lowercase.

------
nfm
Nitpick - <http://userfox.com/about/> 404s.

~~~
pclark
will update the link. good spot. the correct link is
<http://www.userfox.com/about/>

sorry it isn't more exciting. I'll make it cool tomorrow.

------
peterhajas
You know what sounds like a great way to delight users? _Don't_ send me email.
Leave me alone. I signed up for your service, not for a newsletter.

~~~
propercoil
That is you, but others convert

------
robluu
it's like the next evolution of landing page signups. to me this was missing
from sites like launchrock.

~~~
pclark
We announced userfox with a launchrock page and I really wish I could have
tied launchrock into userfox: sending a drip sequence to users that registered
interest in a service would have improved launchrock 100x fold. (as asked, but
alas, they're busy.)

------
drdoooom
what are some comparative products, and how does userfox set itself apart?

~~~
propercoil
aweber.com currently owns the IM world. I have some experience with them and
with mailchimp. This is like somewhere in between, aweber is more spammy prone
while mailchimp won't allow you to auto-respond unless you buy a subscription.

Baisically, there isn't a reliable freemium service with an autoresponder. It
also strucks me as "hassle free" light service i would use for medium to small
size projects. Will use it soon

