
I keep forgetting to use your app - driverdan
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/01/i-keep-forgetting-to-use-your-app.html
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patio11
This is why almost everybody should be capturing email and getting in touch
with folks regularly. (Of particular interest to business productivity SaaS
startups: make the product design decision that you're going to send them, at
the minimum, weekly "Here's how much value you're getting out of this" emails
and, if they're not using it, use that scheduled opportunity to re-engage
them.)

~~~
lukeschlather
I filter 95% of such emails. I suspect people who don't use a lot of filters
end up just reporting them as spam. Actually, I see quite a few showing up in
my spam filter without any action on my part. Email is getting worse as a way
to reach people. With ads invading the newsfeed, Facebook is likely to drop in
utility as well.

~~~
patio11
_I filter 95% of such emails._

You filter 95% of such emails _sent to you_ , which is trivial but important.
If you're accurately reporting your filtering behavior (it is no slight to say
that people misremember things all the time), sending you email is
_stupendously profitable_. It just means it (statistically speaking) costs
about 20 cents to hit your inbox instead of 1 cent.

Your behavior is not normative, though. Even for very techy audiences, a lot
of people actually enjoy getting email. We _can know this with certainty_
because they will open the emails, they will click on things in them, and then
they will buy when you tell them to buy. Insert NDAed anecdote from Client #1,
NDAed anecdote from Client #2, and NDAed anecdote from Client #3.

The lady sitting 20 feet away from me in this coworking space runs a less
lucrative business than most enterprise software companies, and individual
emails have earned her more than BCC has earned me in the last year (at
approximately the same number of people on the email list).

The focus of my work for WPEngine this week was designing a marketing product
for them and making a drip mail channel to send _eight_ emails in the month
after someone uses that product. It should absolutely print money. (One penny
to send an email, use your imagination as to what a $200 a month hosting
account is worth.)

Hopefully, WPEngine will let me talk about it after we have good stats.

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robertskmiles
I think Android as an OS has a major effect here, because its Intents system
codifies that 'starting point for a task' concept. If I want to carry out a
particular operation on some data, all of the apps capable of handling it can
inform the OS that they are available as options, and I get a menu to select
which app I want to use for the task. What you want, as an app developer, is
to have your users become confident enough in your app to check the "set as
default" option in that app choice menu.

This is kind of the equivalent of the fight over 'file associations' in
Windows.

~~~
smackfu
I have a wikipedia app for IOS that I never use, because I only get to
wikipedia through Google in Safari. I wish there was some way to direct the
URLs to the wikipedia app, since it really is better.

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janus
Reputation and karma systems are very good at reminding. They normally engage
the users as if the site was some sort of "game" and persuading to have a high
score.

See HN, Stack Exchange sites, forum's post counts, xbox live gamerpoints, etc.

~~~
justincormack
What a bizarre thing to think. I do not care about these devices other than as
a way to keep interesting stuff visible.

Always thought the whole gamification thing was pointless too.

~~~
herval
It's so pointless and irrelevant to most people that companies like Foursquare
are conquering millions of users and fads like Zynga are making millions out
of purple cows...

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AznHisoka
I see the same effect in HN. Everytime I login, I see if the number next to my
username has increased. If not, I go somewhere else. I do this every few hours
somedays. It's somewhat addicting.

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shadowfiend
Yeah, the key is establishing some sort of habit. The other thing you have to
watch out for in this vein is weekends. If your product is work-related or
school-related, you're more likely to forget about it over a weekend, and then
never come back (unless someone tries to re-engage you). Path and other
friend- or interest-based social sites suffer from this problem less, because
weekends may even lead to higher rather than no use.

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naner
The fact that DDG is listed as a choice for search engines in Firefox is a
huge boon for DDG. I _never_ would use it until I took the step to make it the
default search in Firefox. It is great 80% of the time and the other 20% I
just prepend g! and it dumps me into Google.

Worth the tradeoff as I'm frustrated with Google lately.

