
Ask HN: How did you lose your first 100 users? - freehunter
Styled after &quot;Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?&quot;: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14191161<p>We&#x27;ve gotten some good advice on how to get your first 100 customers, but for me the harder part is <i>losing</i> customers.<p>Every business is going to lose customers eventually. Let&#x27;s hear your tips on how to deal with it, as well as stories of what you did that turned those customers away. How did you get feedback on why they left, and was that feedback reliable? If you were able to win them back, how did you accomplish that?
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codegeek
Running a SAAS business made me realize that no matter what, you will always
lose customers. The goal is to ensure that you don't lose too many very
quickly. You can never assume that once a customer joins you, they won't
leave. We had some of our best customers leave because their circumstances
changed. Things happen. Not because of us necessarily. Just that they didn't
need to do that anymore.

Customer retention is probably THE hardest thing in running a business other
than hiring and retaining talent.

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meagher
This a great question, but harder to answer than "How did you acquire your
first 100 users?" and probably more important.

Besides an obvious pain (like many users saying X is bad), users usually
become indifferent and just never come back. These users will likely never
give feedback unless they've had an abnormally bad experience.

Whenever you lose users, it's painful. But could be a good thing if they
weren't your target since you may waste time servicing them or building
_features_ they say they want.

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SyneRyder
I sell products rather than a subscription service, so it's harder to measure
when I've lost a customer.

I'm certain I've lost customers because I haven't had enough frequent updates
/ new products, and wasn't consistent with my email newsletter. I use a niche
toolkit that wasn't ready when 64-bit went mainstream, so I missed being in
the first wave of 64-bit ready products and got stuck with a lot of rewrites &
retooling. So, just getting the basics right is important!

I did include an optional survey whenever someone uninstalls the trial version
of my software. 90% of the feedback was useless (ie "id dint like it"), but
occasionally a customer would take the time to write about a bug they'd
encountered, or a compatibility problem, so I think it's still worthwhile to
include.

Some of the uninstall feedback was a huge red herring - customers kept saying
they didn't understand how to configure Photoshop to use my software, or had
problems using Photoshop itself, or didn't even have Photoshop, so I thought
I'd fix it by developing & including a stripped-back simple photo editor that
was preconfigured to work with my software. Some customers loved it & said I'd
knocked it out of the park... but it did not move the needle _at all_ and was
a colossal waste of time. If I'd looked more closely, I would've noticed those
uninstall survey requests had mostly come from Brazil & India, countries I
wouldn't have been able to monetize anyway.

I also tag incoming support requests so I can see which areas customers keep
having trouble with, so I can measure what might be the biggest holes. For me,
customers losing their unlocking serial code was the #1 issue & I solved that
almost entirely with an online lost-my-code lookup.

