
Show HN: ProsperStack – Use Stripe to automatically prevent cancellations - gfloyd
https://prosperstack.com/
======
gfloyd
Hi HN,

My co-founders and I created ProsperStack after working at a SaaS company and
realizing how little we knew about why our customers were leaving. We wanted
an easy way to collect data and prevent cancellations by incentivizing
customers to stay, and realized that hooking into Stripe to automate the
process would be super valuable.

The app can automatically present offers to a customer before they cancel
using Stripe coupons, collect feedback from cancellations, and use your Stripe
data to show meaningful churn metrics.

Thanks so much for checking it out and any feedback you might have!

~~~
polyterative
As a customer i would LOVE to exploit this if it gets popular

~~~
gfloyd
Hah, we've definitely thought about that possibility. Fortunately we do have a
few things in place to prevent the most obvious abuse cases, but we need to
get popular first!

~~~
hartator
Ha! What would be the counter measures?

I am thinking someone on Reddit posting a trick to save money on your sub.

~~~
gfloyd
Right now it's fairly basic: we recommend you offer a limited discount (for
example, 30% off for three months) and by default a customer can only accept
one offer for their lifetime. That would at least minimize most of the risk.

On the roadmap are plans to target offers based on segmented customer data
(lifetime value, etc.) so even if you did try to follow a trick posted on
Reddit, it might not work for you!

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dexterdog
How does a flat $79/mo price make sense? Many small companies that could use
this don't have that much worth of cancellations in a month assuming something
like this will save them all. Medium-small and larger companies could justify
paying much more than that. You need to have some kind of flexibility here.
I'm thinking if you don't have more than $500 in monthly cancellations you
would never be able to break even on something like this.

~~~
gfloyd
Honestly, it probably doesn't make sense long term! We wanted to get the
product out the door with simple pricing to see how it works and adjust from
there.

We're mostly worried about the sales cycle being too long with performance-
based or scaling pricing, since none of the founders are trained salespeople.
I'm realizing we're probably going to have to adjust that mindset and learn
how to sell.

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efitz
Congratulations on your launch, and best of luck to you, but...

As a customer, I don’t want to be “saved”. Treat me right in the first place
and I will remain loyal. Otherwise, let’s part ways amicably without you
wasting more of my time.

~~~
whatch
As a customer, I can imagine unsubscribing because some service was quite
good, but not worth the full price for me. Maybe this service is still
figuring out its pricing model. If they, for example, give me cheaper price
and then keep it, I do not mind being "saved". Not sure how often this
scenario will be considered though.

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gingerlime
Congrats on launching. Very interesting. Does it support localization /
customizing the look&feel? I couldn't work out if it's something that runs
directly on our site, or we need to redirect to yours... I think some more
documentation/info before you sign up for a trial can help give better
confidence about what's involved and how it actually works (although the
homepage is awesome and explains the value proposition super well).

Like others, I'm a bit on the fence about the ethical aspects of it. Yes,
there's a lot to say about giving real value, listening to customers, but it
does start going down the path towards darker patterns like Amazon Prime
(there's a looong way to go down that path, but still feels like a step
there). I'm not trying to criticize, but just voice my personal feeling around
adding friction to cancellation.

~~~
gfloyd
The customization is limited right now (you can add your company logo, and
customize the text for offers), since our initial focus was on getting the
design and UX right. Localization and/or complete customization of the look
and feel is definitely on the roadmap.

We'll get to work on adding some more documentation for sure, but the short
answer is that it's a JavaScript widget that runs everything for you on your
site. You can check out the technical docs on the NPM package here:
[https://www.npmjs.com/package/@prosperstack/flow](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@prosperstack/flow)

Thanks so much for the honest feedback. I definitely agree about steering away
from dark patterns and adding friction to cancellation. We want the
cancellation process to be super easy, and hope to try achieve a balance that
actually benefits customers instead of trying to trap them into not leaving.

------
mik3y
Interesting product! Have had to implement this before and certainly would
check it out next time.

Have you thought about pricing based on performance?

At the low end, it could be "pays for itself": A monthly fee of max($79,
mrr_preserved_that_month). When the fee cancels out the preserved mrr, the
customer still gets data features of the product for free. Thinking mostly of
the indiehacker crowd here.

At the high end, I suppose you could flex up to something like a percentage of
mrr recovered with a cap.

(Always find subscription pricing economics interesting, especially to learn
how others do it.)

~~~
gfloyd
Yeah, we've definitely discussed a pricing strategy like that. For now, we're
just trying to keep it super simple until we get more data on how people are
using it.

I know that virtually no startup gets pricing correct right out of the gate,
so I'm sure we'll be tweaking it!

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praveen9920
Most of the subscription based saas products make easy money on inactive users
who are okay losing money for prospect on using the tool in near future.

Even though that is easy money, saas companies should offer "inactive account
maintenance" fees rather than full subscription fees, when the user starts
using it, they could charge them full. This is win-win situation where user
gets to keep the account for smaller fees and companies can retain more
customers.

ProsperStack like tools can offer these by default.

~~~
gfloyd
This is exactly what one of our first customers is using ProsperStack for.
They use it to offer an "on hold" option to maintain the account data in read-
only mode at a lower price.

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nvr219
Just let people cancel imo.

~~~
dubcanada
I don't disagree, but I don't see any harm in asking questions as to why they
cancelled.

Sometimes all people want is a discount, and as a business losing $20 a month
is better than losing a customer.

~~~
andrewla
> ... and as a business losing $20 a month is better than losing a customer.

This is some serious MBA-speak right here. Losing $20 a month is worse than
losing a customer. The only time there's a difference is when you're looking
to capture enough market in an unsustainable way so that you can paint a good
picture for someone dumb enough to acquire you to try to shut down
competition.

If you're well-capitalized, then this is just a straightforward monopolization
tactic; if you're not well-funded, this is just gaming the numbers so that a
well-capitalized monopolist can come in and use you to play the same game.

If you're a company that is trying to be successful and make money, then
you're better off using this as a signal about your pricing.

~~~
webmaven
> This is some serious MBA-speak right here. Losing $20 a month is worse than
> losing a customer.

I don't think the GP meant the classic "lose money on each sale but make it up
on volume" nonsense, but rather "it is better to forgo $20 of your margin than
to lose a customer".

~~~
andrewla
I think your read is more accurate than mine. To be honest, the article gave
me a bit of indigestion because these sorts of discounting antics always sit
poorly with me. I don't have the time or energy to haggle over pricing; and it
really bothers me when squeaky wheels get all the grease.

------
slowpesci
Coming from a SaaS background on the product design and development side of
things, I think churn is something many companies have given up on
successfully remedying within the product, or have sourced to other
departments in the company to help solve the issue. While user interaction
with Customer Success or Support is definitely necessary in many
circumstances, from my perspective, this could help battle churn for a myriad
of reasons which can be addressed and designed for a specific product or with
a specific user type in mind without being too abrasive or causing major
headaches for the user. Cool idea. Good luck!

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RogueBurger
Ive definitely noticed that one of the biggest inhibitors of growth in SaaS
companies I've worked with is just letting high amounts of unnecessary churn
happen, or throwing way too many resources at the problem only to reduce it by
a small among. Giving your customers the tools to prevent themselves from
churning seems like no-brainer and a very strong way to combatting that.

~~~
gfloyd
Yeah, that's exactly what we were seeing. Retention with customer success
programs is helpful, but many small companies just don't have the resources
for it. We're hoping to provide something that can make an impactful dent on
churn in an almost entirely automated way.

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hobochili
This is a good idea. It seems like it would help eliminate a lot of the
inherent guesswork in feature forecasting (as I've experienced it). "We have
lost x amount in annual recurring revenue due to the absence of feature y..."
It could also provide valuable insight into how well your product is serving
different markets.

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roosterdawn
Love the idea. Churn reduction is one of those unsexy parts of the funnel
(much like cart abandonment) that has a huge ROI but is traditionally
neglected because it's not as visible as top of funnel work. Of course, it's
all part of the same flywheel, which is why tools like this are so valuable.

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frankcort
Great launch! This looks similar to www.raaft.io which has been around for a
couple of years and supports Recurly in addition to Stripe. How do you
differentiate?

I think we would have used something like this (instead of rolling our own) if
it integrated with Chargify.

~~~
gfloyd
Thanks! I think the main differentiator is our deep integration with your
Stripe data. The cancellation flow is obviously an important part of the
equation, but ProsperStack can also give you insights into past cancellations,
with the goal of being able to win back subscribers from before you integrated
the flow into your app. We also want to make churn analytics a core part of
the value prop.

We'd love to integrate with more payment providers, and Chargify is definitely
on the list. If you'd be interested in helping us get a Chargify integration
going, I'd love if you'd send me an email (address in profile)!

~~~
solarengineer
Could you help us understand a few things about your service? How deep is this
"deep integration"? When we sign up with you, what are we agreeing to hand
over and/or to give you access to? Do you make copies of this data? Do you
sell data about our Stripe data to others? Are you training your ML models
based on our data? Do you have measures in place to detect or prevent internal
leaks of such data and external exfiltration (via security attacks, for e.g.)
of such data?

~~~
gfloyd
We request read/write access to Stripe via Stripe Connect in order to receive
webhooks on your behalf and to create coupons. We do copy a small amount of
data (customer and subscription details for cancellations) for the reporting
and metrics features.

We do not and never will sell your Stripe data. We're not using any ML, so
we're not training any models on your data.

We understand having access to your Stripe account comes with a lot of
responsibility, and we're taking that seriously. I'd be more than happy to
discuss security if you want to shoot me an email (address in profile).

------
bgs264
Are you eating your own dogfood?

If I sign up for a month then quit, what will it then cost me?

~~~
gfloyd
We are dogfooding the cancellation flow, of course. We don't have any offers
active since we kind of assumed people would know to look for them. :)

