

Ask HN: What was the startup that got customers with failed payments back? - amitu

I remember seeing it here. I am looking for a service that mailed customers on my startup&#x27;s behalf after they have failed to make the payment on time and has stopped using my startup.
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patio11
There are two: BeStunning.net and ChurnBuster.io. I use CB, though integration
is only half complete. I know both guys and they're "good people" in Chicago
parlance -- would recommend either. (They have slightly different takes on the
problem/solution.)

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rfelix2121
Thanks, Patrick!

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aculver
Hey Amit! I run Churn Buster at
[http://churnbuster.io/](http://churnbuster.io/) . We had a blog post hit #1
here recently, so it may have been us you were thinking about. We send emails
_and_ have a real human make phone calls to customers who have repeatedly
failed a charge.

On the email side, we've got a lot of optimizations and reporting baked into
our service that most folks would find too difficult or time consuming to
implement and maintain if they were doing this on their own. As a result, even
folks who already had a standard "email customer when payment fails" webhooks
implementation get much better results using Churn Buster. (For example,
[https://twitter.com/citadelgrad/status/499015554209185792](https://twitter.com/citadelgrad/status/499015554209185792)
.) They also completely eliminate their administrative overhead and relating
to failed payments. :-)

I hope you'll take us for a spin! Email me at andrew@churnbuster.io if you've
got any questions or if you'd like to schedule a Skype call to talk about it.

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Major_Grooves
Interesting. We do the same for "regular invoices" \- i.e. chase customers who
fail to pay invoices. [http://www.satago.com](http://www.satago.com)

We've had a few queries for whether we could do this for SaaS companies paying
via credit card too, as a Stripe integration. I'm still not sure if there is a
real/big problem to be solved here that makes it worth entering.

~~~
colinramsay
How does Satago improve on Freshbooks? It offers automatic payment reminder
emails and a breakdown of debtors, and the like.

~~~
Major_Grooves
To be honest, I don't know Freshbooks that well and since we've started off in
the UK, we haven't had much demand for it yet. That said, one of our
developers started integration with their API, but it is on hold.

Where we typically improve on whatever the accounting system has, is acting
more like a CRM system for credit control. We typically have a lot more
customisation and control over who gets chased with what message, we enable
you to automatically send hard-copy payment demand letters. Also you can
connect your accountant or bookkeeper to us (or rather they connect to your
account) if they are doing credit control on your behalf.

Lastly we enable users to anonymously report when they get paid vs agreed
terms to see if they are getting paid faster or slower than other suppliers.

~~~
colinramsay
Thanks for the breakdown!

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rfelix2121
I'm Richard, founder of Stunning (bestunning.net). We've been dealing with
handling failed payments on Stripe longer than anyone else out there (and I've
been running successful SaaS apps since 2009).

I'm happy to freely share what I've learned, if anyone has questions about
cutting churn and retaining SaaS customers. You can catch me on Twitter, where
I'm @rfelix.

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logn
Looks like OP got the answers needed. However, are there similar services that
use actual lawyers, work on contingency basis, and have a global reach? This
is probably something my local law firm would do, but I'm curious if there's a
SaaS out there to initiate litigation.

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nathanpowell
We currently have our eyes on Churn Buster. It looks to be solid and we've
heard very good things.

