

Lessons Learned At Business of Software 2010 Conference - patio11
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/10/15/lessons-learned-at-business-of-software-2010/

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pchristensen
I'm particularly excited about this part:

"many companies I have worked with have “sticky features”, although not all of
them know it. (Some day when I don’t have another few thousand words to write
I’ll tell you about what they are for Bingo Card Creator and how I know.)"

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patio11
Thanks, I'll try to remember to write that up sometime.

Capsule summary: if you were to personally log into an arbitrary trial
customer's account, you could predict whether they were likely to buy the
software based on your intimate knowledge of customer behavior, and your guess
would be far better than random. You can code heuristics to make that guess.
You can make your heuristics adapt to data you collect, such that they no
longer depend on your (flawed and limited) intimate knowledge.

Pretend that you assign customers something like a credit score, and simply
chunk them into four buckets, from "people I'm most confident will buy the
software" to "people I'm least confident will buy the software". My conversion
rate for the free trial of my software is ~2%. Bucket A is closer to 20%.
Bucket D, the largest bucket, is below .1%.

I think there is a way to take the knowledge that the customer who is using
the app _right now_ is in Bucket B in a fashion which makes the business a
staggering amount of money. (Identify the customers at the margin, then push
them over it.) What I lack, which has prevented me from blogging about this,
is an empirical example of it working that I can talk about.

I think it is potentially as simple as "Offer them a coupon." or "Give them
explicit directions on the interface to try the features that you know
distinguish bucket A from bucket B." These interventions are, of course, split
testable.

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DJN
I'm halfway through your notes and I felt I should pause to say a BIG THANK
YOU for articulating your thoughts like this. Clearly, the best article I've
read all year.

"Key takeaway: The quality of your dialogue with customers is directly
proportional to the quality of the customers you will acquire. If you
understand their needs better, you will close bigger deals with happier
customers who consume less resources"

Those words, mate, are essentially gold dust. I wish I could pay/donate for
this content. Seriously.

See my other comment about including it in Hacker Monthly. I do hope the
curators include it in the next issue.

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thesethings
(It goes without saying, this was an amazing + generous post.)

A question for Patrick or anybody else about the following email advice in the
post.

"Free tip from me: note what search term sent them to your website, put a
variation of it in the subject line of the email, watch your open rate go
through the freaking roof."

Did this mean just in general to let search terms inform how you write email,
or that the list segmentation is that specific for any opt-in list member who
happened to come by search?

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patio11
The specific implementation for BCC sends you an email entitled How To Make
$TITLE Bingo Cards. Each subscriber to the list that I have a good guess for
has a field in Mailchimp set with that value through their API. (Parsing the
referrer is one option for guessing. My implementation is a mite more subtle,
to avoid having user input there.)

The net effect is a few hundred people tomorrow who looked for [Halloween
bingo cards] today and forgot about it will get an email tomorrow with the
subject How To Make Halloween Bingo Cards. My open rates are "quite nice."

Edited to add: I got a note from the Mailchimp CS people back in April about
having an unacceptably high unsubscribe rate (1.04% -- they take list quality
seriously), paused my campaign to look into it, and forgot to unpause it.
_facepalm_ Thanks for prompting me to check on this (as usual, I don't look at
things I think are working -- too much to do).

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rubeng
Even though I went to the conference these notes are extremely useful. My
notes suck in comparison so I'm sure I'll be able to retain much more reading
these over. There were some truly excellent talks and I'm looking forward to
watching them again on video.

As a side note: Patrick's talk was awesome. Those lightning talks were brutal,
I'd never want to go through that myself but I'm very glad he did it. The
video is going to be great I'm sure but it's no substitute for being able to
watch him put on a show in person. I highly recommend going next year if at
all possible.

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prs
Thanks for making your detailed notes available to the public.

Out of interest: How many hours of your time were approximately invested in
writing this blog post? A rough estimate is fine enough.

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patio11
You're welcome. I spent five or six hours at the computer (my whole work day
today), more over the last few weeks mentally digesting what I learned and
kicking around structure and phrasing.

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DJN
Your notes should be in the next Hacker Monthly issue.

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joshuacc
Thanks, Patrick. I found this post immensely helpful, and am looking forward
to the video of your lightning talk.

One thing I found intriguing was this: “why pay people so that they can buy
objects suggesting social status when you can just award social status
directly?”

Do you have examples of this sort of thing? (Other than the one you
specifically didn't mention.)

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patio11
If you have any question about content from the public talks, I will answer it
to the best of my ability. As I mentioned, in some cases the best answer I can
give is "You really want to wait until you can see this one on video."

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jswinghammer
Is the intention of the conference organizers to put any/all of the videos
online?

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patio11
Quoth the conference home page: "We will be posting videos and presentation
slides in due course." If you notice, in the last few years they put an awful
lot of the conference online after it had been professionally edited. (It is
good marketing for coming to the conference in the next year, right? They
certainly convinced me to fly fifteen hours out of my way to go.)

