Last week i emailed a friend who created a very good marketing automation product (Pardot). He pointed me to the article below by PaulStamatiou.com (ex-Atlanta tech alum). 

I have a problem and it’s one that’s plagued me with each of the five tech start-ups i’ve been behind and this ugly beast has reared its head again with my latest venture (FlashIssue). 

My problem: I need  a messaging service for acquiring, retaining and engaging users of my software service.

A user signs up to try our product on our landing page and the fun begins.

I know what i should be doing but i cant find a way to do it. There are many scenarios to address and i should be hyper focused on messaging each and everyone with a specific message but i cant.

Examples:

• A user signs up, browses the product but does nothing: They should be getting an email asking “what’s up, did we *f-up* somewhere”.
• A user tries it once but doesn’t come back: They should be drip fed emails teaching them about the product. Ideally based on the features they used.
• A user posted something on our Uservoice forum suggesting a new feature: She should be nurtured with a whole new level of messaging.

The post below is an excellent illustration of what i mean.

Ironically, my new venture, FlashIssue, is itself an email services product.

It addresses another deficiency on the email land scape (the difficultly of getting content into email campaigns faced by DIY marketers and small content producers). 

I will be looking at some of the products mentioned in the comments after the article, so we’ll see…

Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service21 Dec 2011It was the middle of our Y Combinator batch this summer.

Akshay and I had a decently functioning version of Picplum that we were continuing to test and polish up. At the end of our office hours that day, Paul Graham said our product was good enough and that we should stop coding and start selling & marketing.

I think about this quite often.Picplum at YC office hours in July. Photo Credit: Garry Tantl;dr Trying to draw attention to the importance of lifecycle marketing. I build up the case, talk about where lifecycle marketing makes sense, show an amateur first attempt at it, then proceed to layout a grand idea for a lifecycle email marketing service I want to see someone build.

Please share this post.I was in that mindset when I decided to sit down a few weeks ago and hammer out some code that would help with that typical engineer approach.. get code to do it for you. One of my perpetual to-do items in the few months following our launch was converting users that signed up but never did anything into users that sent out their first batch of prints.

The latter is more or less our definition of an activated user. You can find more info about Picplum in my lengthy post-launch article, Thoughts on Picplum Automatic Photo Prints.

via Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service — PaulStamatiou.com.

In January 2010, one of the most destructive earthquakes in recent history struck the nation of Haiti, uprooting communities, tearing families apart, destroying homes and schools. When relief supplies arrived, children gathered, and one of their most common requests was for . . . soccer balls. But aid workers quickly discovered that a regular soccer ball lasts only a day or two in the post-earthquake destruction before it almost inevitably hits a piece of glass or concrete and deflates. The spirits of the kids and communities which rose upon receiving a ball would deflate as quickly as the punctured ball. How different—and how much better—would it be if there was a ball that could stand up to such an environment?

Continue Reading: Simple Power Of A Durable Ball