Nice story! Thank you for sharing. A few thoughts:
1) when is the last time you sat down with new and existing customers to see their reaction to getting their physical boxes? You might get a lot of good insights of how exciting (or not) the existing experience is of receiving the candy. How does that change between the 1st and 10th box a customer receives?
2) why are people churning? Do you have a prioritized list of reasons? Not what they said (most users don’t actually want to offend you or your business) but what their real reasons were for canceling?
3) keep in mind that the real product is the box with candies. The website is just for sales. Yes, SEO is definitely important to get new subscribers, but to improve your product you have to improve the box or the offerings around it.
4) pricing. I noticed that the lowest offering of $29/month is rather expensive for a novelty purchase. How much experimentation have you done around testing lower price points with less frequent shipments? This could help with acquisition and retention.
I’ll be happy to help you understand how to look at retention, basic AARR analysis, interview customers, etc. just let me know.
This app is more geared towards casual/everyday use cases and lowers the barrier to make those things happen. This isn't necessarily for large scale crowdfunding projects.
I've used Myles' FollowGen tool and I have to say that it's awesome even though the site is broken half the time. Funnily, it didn't really bother me. Reading about his whole philosophy behind this now, puts it all into context. What I cared about was whether it did what it was supposed to, even if the bells and whistles malfunction from time to time.
I think what an entrepreneur is best at, and what makes him or her a true entrepreneur, is carving out your own path and creating value for somebody (who is willing to pay for it in return). Myles is succeeding in both. tip of the hat to you sir.
A great side effect of this is that lots of young entrepreneurs take on challenges where they are totally oblivious to all the hurdles and challenges ahead of them. And continuing the mindset of just pushing on, they tackle them one step at a time.
Not being afraid to fail (fast) along the way, is just as important as not being afraid to start.
It'll be interesting to see how our interaction with our phones will change once data transfer rates of 1GB/s are common. Sensors will play an increasingly important role, and who knows... probably many new innovations will be funded through the rising crowdfunding eco-system.
I used Launchrock the very first time I tried to "bring an idea to the world" and had maybe 40 signups. Mostly friends. If you're just starting out, you have no idea how to bring traffic to your site, create buzz, or do any kind of online marketing at all, so I definitely see value in being able to submit an idea to a community of early adopters and get at least an inkling if this is something worth pursuing.
and it's natural behavior too. doing stuff as as group requires making sure everybody is financially committed. I think that's the whole value of not collecting the payment until everybody paid/committed.
That's where technology trumps real life. if you collect cash from people, you have to return it.
The above mentioned approach is significantly simpler to implement and easier to measure (when it works! ha) than uniquely generated promo codes. So you're also looking at a cost/benefit trade off.
There seem to have been many of these horror stories over the past couple of years. And especially if you're a small business, not having access to your funds is just completely unacceptable.
1) when is the last time you sat down with new and existing customers to see their reaction to getting their physical boxes? You might get a lot of good insights of how exciting (or not) the existing experience is of receiving the candy. How does that change between the 1st and 10th box a customer receives?
2) why are people churning? Do you have a prioritized list of reasons? Not what they said (most users don’t actually want to offend you or your business) but what their real reasons were for canceling?
3) keep in mind that the real product is the box with candies. The website is just for sales. Yes, SEO is definitely important to get new subscribers, but to improve your product you have to improve the box or the offerings around it.
4) pricing. I noticed that the lowest offering of $29/month is rather expensive for a novelty purchase. How much experimentation have you done around testing lower price points with less frequent shipments? This could help with acquisition and retention.
I’ll be happy to help you understand how to look at retention, basic AARR analysis, interview customers, etc. just let me know.