How to retain customers

Alright, let’s talk about it…

How do you actually keep people on your software, reduce churn, and improve retention?

Because when you think about this — it’s extremely easy to throw money on ads, get a few paying customers, and post that MRR screenshot on Twitter.

In reality? most of them will churn next month. Never to return again.

Here’s my take on it, and how to improve retention 👇

The story of my failed startups

A lot of my initial projects (before Tweet Hunter) didn’t work. Or if they did, had little to NO retention built in. But I didn’t know that.

For example, One of my projects - ProductLift was a directory of communities where you could share your product after you launch.

Subreddits, Discord servers, Slack communities, Facebook groups, and Twitter accounts. It had them all.

But the product had 2 fundamental issues:

1 - You can’t get success using it.

You can’t just drop in a group, share a link, get out, and expect 100s of people to magically join AND PAY you for your SaaS. You need context, connections, and familiarity. Which takes weeks and months to build.

2 - Even if it did work, they would never visit my website again.

Maybe once, or twice. But then my product is dead weight. No use at all. This means 0 retention and no MRR stacking. I had to start each month from $0.

And so we failed. This was good for a feature in a bigger product, but not the product itself.

The breakthrough

This changed when we started Tweet Hunter (and a few other small projects around the same time).

We built the products for recurring usage and led the products in that direction.

You have to tweet daily.
You have to schedule tweets weekly.
You have no finish line for the usage. Always growing. (this is important)

But what’s truly important, is building a product that will integrate at the center of your user’s workflow.

That’s what “pain killer” (must have) is truly about. It’s something that moves the needle for your users (whereas ‘vitamins’ (nice to have) would not).

That’s why Tweet Hunter was successful.

It was important to people using it because it was a pillar of their acquisition strategy and traffic.

Resources for retention

Customer churn is one of the biggest pain points of running a SaaS business.

And this 20-minute talk blew my mind.

Here are the 3 main takeaways:

1 - No value in customer satisfaction. Delight doesn’t equal loyalty.

You won’t keep your customers by keeping them ‘happy‘. Pointing out flaws/criticism means they’re engaged.

Positive feedback giving customers might not be that into the product.

People leave because they don’t have a compelling reason to stay - They’re not successful.

2 - Value over engagement

Nothing changes for your customer by signing up.

The best thing you can do for them is instill your CORE EXPERTISE into the product.

This way, they use the software, change their working habits, and get success.

SaaS is a medium. Expertise is the product.

3 - Users don’t care about your product

You’re the only person who loves the software. No one else cares. All they care about is solving the problem.

They don’t want to buy a drill, they want the hole done.

Sell it like that.

As a side note: I want to thank all of you for taking the feather.so acquisition in great light! (for those who don’t know - here is more context)

3000+ likes
2M+ impressions
A whole discussion on X

Congrats to Bhanu for creating this! Super excited to take over.

I hope you learned something. Want to share any ideas, or tell me anything? - the easiest way is to reply to this email. I read all of them.

Tweet of the week

You might not like it, but this is what peak entrepreneurial performance looks like…

That’s it for this week!

Forward this email to a friend who needs to read this 🚀

And if you are that awesome friend - Subscribe here to get weekly emails on Tech, Creator Economy, and Building a Business.

Hit reply and let me know what you found most helpful this week—I’d love to hear from you!

See you next Thursday!

Keep building

Tibo 💻