
Why you should make it easy for users to quit your product - peter123
http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/06/15/why-you-should-make-it-easy-for-users-to-quit-your-product/
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mustpax
I once signed up to XBox Live with my credit card. Soon afterwards, I realized
that the online gaming "community" left much to be desired and that they
didn't even provide dedicated servers for my games. So I decided to quit. But
they purposefully do not provide an unsubscribe path through their user
interface, you have to call them, wait on hold, and provide your whole credit
card number + CCV to unsubscribe.

I have no doubt some MBA at Microsoft thought they could shave a couple
percentage points off their attrition rates with this tactic. I sure as hell
will think twice before I subscribe for any other Microsoft service again.

~~~
pyroman
I just went through the whole xbox live cancel thing too. No place on the site
or in the console to quit. Tech support e-mail would always say call them. The
person on the phone was able to take care of everything and even mentioned
billing.microsoft.com would allow you to stop the auto renew. I didn't try
that out since I was already on the phone. I don't know why the e-mail support
responses left that out. If that site works for someone, it would be nice to
know.

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billswift
He missed an obvious reason to make it easy to quit - I am more likely to try
something if I can back out painlessly if it doesn't work out.

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russell
You made an important point. I am interested in the enterprise space. The old
way of making a sale is to send a salesman out and have him convince some
executive committee to purchase your product. The sales cycle is 6 months or
more and the price has to be somewhere north of $100K to pay for it all.

If you go with the easy in, easy out approach, the customer, most likely at
the department or tech level, tries out your product as SaaS, with self-
service If he likes it, he signs up with a subscription. The benefits are
lower sales cost, a shorter sales cycle, and less time spent on tire kickers.
You are probably getting revenue in 2 or 3 months.

~~~
akeefer
One problem with that approach in the enterprise is that most of that $100k+
software is stuff that takes a long time to customize and integrate; there's
just no low-cost way to try something out.

More peripheral services like instant messaging or collaboration tools are
easier to do that with. Something like a CRM system is probably harder due to
the volume of data you'd need to port and the large change in how people do
their work, re-training required, etc. Something even more core like supply-
chain management or an accounting system is even harder to try-before-you-buy,
and the penalty for trying something that doesn't work is way, way higher. In
order to get to the point where you know if it's going to fail or not, you
have to take some big risks and sink in a huge amount of time and money.

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physcab
Marc Andreessen's blog post on "only thing that matters"
<http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html>

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piers
Link Fail

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hellweaver666
Is it the hacker news effect at work? Or just a crappy host? ;)

~~~
andrew_null
way underspeced virtual server ;-) Should be working now.

