Thanks! I think the main differentiator is our deep integration with your Stripe data. The cancellation flow is obviously an important part of the equation, but ProsperStack can also give you insights into past cancellations, with the goal of being able to win back subscribers from before you integrated the flow into your app. We also want to make churn analytics a core part of the value prop.
We'd love to integrate with more payment providers, and Chargify is definitely on the list. If you'd be interested in helping us get a Chargify integration going, I'd love if you'd send me an email (address in profile)!
Could you help us understand a few things about your service?
How deep is this "deep integration"? When we sign up with you, what are we agreeing to hand over and/or to give you access to? Do you make copies of this data? Do you sell data about our Stripe data to others? Are you training your ML models based on our data? Do you have measures in place to detect or prevent internal leaks of such data and external exfiltration (via security attacks, for e.g.) of such data?
We request read/write access to Stripe via Stripe Connect in order to receive webhooks on your behalf and to create coupons. We do copy a small amount of data (customer and subscription details for cancellations) for the reporting and metrics features.
We do not and never will sell your Stripe data. We're not using any ML, so we're not training any models on your data.
We understand having access to your Stripe account comes with a lot of responsibility, and we're taking that seriously. I'd be more than happy to discuss security if you want to shoot me an email (address in profile).
Honestly, it probably doesn't make sense long term! We wanted to get the product out the door with simple pricing to see how it works and adjust from there.
We're mostly worried about the sales cycle being too long with performance-based or scaling pricing, since none of the founders are trained salespeople. I'm realizing we're probably going to have to adjust that mindset and learn how to sell.
Yeah, we've definitely discussed a pricing strategy like that. For now, we're just trying to keep it super simple until we get more data on how people are using it.
I know that virtually no startup gets pricing correct right out of the gate, so I'm sure we'll be tweaking it!
The customization is limited right now (you can add your company logo, and customize the text for offers), since our initial focus was on getting the design and UX right. Localization and/or complete customization of the look and feel is definitely on the roadmap.
We'll get to work on adding some more documentation for sure, but the short answer is that it's a JavaScript widget that runs everything for you on your site. You can check out the technical docs on the NPM package here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@prosperstack/flow
Thanks so much for the honest feedback. I definitely agree about steering away from dark patterns and adding friction to cancellation. We want the cancellation process to be super easy, and hope to try achieve a balance that actually benefits customers instead of trying to trap them into not leaving.
This is exactly what one of our first customers is using ProsperStack for. They use it to offer an "on hold" option to maintain the account data in read-only mode at a lower price.
Yeah, that's exactly what we were seeing. Retention with customer success programs is helpful, but many small companies just don't have the resources for it. We're hoping to provide something that can make an impactful dent on churn in an almost entirely automated way.
Totally agreed! Our goal is to make the cancelling process smooth and easy, while also helping companies retain users who are leaving for preventable issues like price sensitivity. Another great use case is offering a free month or two for someone cancelling due to the current pandemic, hoping they'll be able to afford it again once business picks back up.
Not to be too much of a jerk about it, but you clearly don't agree. Hard to tell exactly without a end to end demo but it looks like it's at least a couple questions and making sure you click the right button to cancel. And you have to be careful what you click because you swap the "success" button from cancel to accept offer. That's not the same as "just let people cancel".
I'm sure it makes sense from a business perspective. Forcing people to go through a couple questions and click off some offers will increase retention. It's not a big deal. Businesses do lots of things that are annoying to customers because ultimately it makes them more money. Just own that this is what you're doing.
My co-founders and I created ProsperStack after working at a SaaS company and realizing how little we knew about why our customers were leaving. We wanted an easy way to collect data and prevent cancellations by incentivizing customers to stay, and realized that hooking into Stripe to automate the process would be super valuable.
The app can automatically present offers to a customer before they cancel using Stripe coupons, collect feedback from cancellations, and use your Stripe data to show meaningful churn metrics.
Thanks so much for checking it out and any feedback you might have!
Hah, we've definitely thought about that possibility. Fortunately we do have a few things in place to prevent the most obvious abuse cases, but we need to get popular first!
Right now it's fairly basic: we recommend you offer a limited discount (for example, 30% off for three months) and by default a customer can only accept one offer for their lifetime. That would at least minimize most of the risk.
On the roadmap are plans to target offers based on segmented customer data (lifetime value, etc.) so even if you did try to follow a trick posted on Reddit, it might not work for you!
I was immediately thinking the same, but I'd assume there are certain rules in place for when users are eligible for a discount and the amount of the discount.
This looks really awesome! Just curious, have you considered offering a "value added" pricing model for those who don't want to pay for a subscription? Meaning, you'd take some percent of revenue you've saved them (either as a 1x fee or as a recurring subscription as that customer stays on)?
Good to hear! If there's a way to contact you guys (LinkedIn or otherwise), I'm working on a project that has some adjacency so would love to chat if you guys have some time.
1. Documentation, how exactly does it integration with Stripe? How does it handle my weird subscription setups? etc.
2. Pricing, I know it says $79 a month in the blue banner, but if you are like me you basically look for a pricing page and all I see is "Start a free trial" I am going to close the site.
Beyond that I am fairly excited to see such a product come out, I am surprised Stripe doesn't have a setup to handle this.
1. Currently it imports all your previously canceled subscriptions to report on the amount of lost MRR and number of cancellations over time. The integration will also automatically create and apply Stripe coupons for you. For weird subscriptions setups, that is indeed a tricky issue, but it can actually be used if you're not using the "normal" Stripe subscriptions. You do lose out of some of the benefit (no Stripe coupons, so you need to handle offers manually, and no reporting). We're definitely planning on handling different setups though (including other payment providers). I'd love to learn more about your "weird" setup!
2. Makes total sense, thanks so much for the advice.
CATS (https://catsone.com/) provides a powerful, full-featured applicant tracking system for recruiters and small businesses.
We're especially looking for developers with a keen eye for UI and UX. We're primarily looking for JavaScript experts (Vue.js and some React) and anyone with experience building great-looking, intuitive interfaces for web applications. Our backend is PHP, so experience there would be great as well.
We're located in a skyway-connected office in downtown Minneapolis. Founded in 2007, we're a small, growing team and we're bootstrapped and profitable.
Hello! I was thinking about applying (I'm about a 10 minute bike ride from your office!), but then I saw that the application requires disclosing my current salary, which I found pretty disappointing. I hope you'll consider dropping that requirement.
I took a 30 second look and yeah there's no real validation other than can't be non-empty so feel free to type in "I'd prefer not to say" or if it were me "I don't feel this question is appropriate" but yeah..
We'd love to integrate with more payment providers, and Chargify is definitely on the list. If you'd be interested in helping us get a Chargify integration going, I'd love if you'd send me an email (address in profile)!