Request for Feedback: A Customer Retention App For Bootstrapped Founders

Hey Guys! We have an open beta running right now for our upcoming app: Retained: http://getretained.com

It’s a collection of awesome tools that we’ve needed in our years of running SaaS apps, all tied together in a useful product that has helped us to retain more customers in the 2 months we’ve had it in our apps.

We’re running an open beta right now and are looking for awesome bootstrappers like yourselves to try it out in their apps so that we can make it as useful as possible. Finding out what fellow bootstrappers want is critical at this stage.

Please sign up, check it out, and let me know what you think! This does require a JS snippet to be installed into your app, so be prepared for that. Thanks in advance.

http://getretained.com

Hey - I’ll give it a go.

  • The form elements are a little lacking in contrast though. My MacBook Air screen is fine with them but my Philips monitor which looks great but isn’t handling the contrast or something right barely shows them. I took a crappy photo but hopefully it conveys the difference in some way.

  • I know it’s beta but during the setup you set price of plans and they’re forced to $. Is this going to be a variable in the future? I.e. Will I be able to say “my ‘100’ is ZAR”…

  • You haven’t got HTML title’s set on your setup

It looks like an interesting product and you have a nice onboarding process. I did receive the confirmation mail twice, and got into a redirect loop while trying to access the dashboard the first time. And there are some small L&F issues in addition to what @imsickofmaps mentioned (color consistency & flash notification location bothering me the most). But at this point that’s all just fine and the app looks nice.

My first impression was “this does so much that it must miss some advanced functionality”. But I found out that you have support for multiple products and teams, so I can e.g. add a separate support person. Still, I’m wondering if this is meant to be an intermediate product for people who can’t afford to buy these tools separately, or what’s your main audience?

How does Retained compare to e.g. using Desk with Pollen and Temper?
What’s the added benefit from using Retained?

Will the newest customers show just the most recent customers, or all customers on trial?

Gotcha. Thanks for the pictures, I’ll have our designer look at that.
Yes, currencies will be variable in the future. Gotta start somewhere!
Good catch on the title.

Thanks!

Interesting. Thanks for letting me know about the confirmation email/redirect thing. Definitely going to look into it.

What do you mean about color consistency?

Our main audience is 1-5 person, bootstrapped teams who have people who wear more than one hat (for instance, I do backend work, write copy, keep the servers running, do scaling, write blog posts and do support) For people like me, it’s easy to let things that keep my business moving fall off of the table, or to spend time working on new things that I think are awesome when a good chunk of my customers are irritated about some change that I made within my app. Spending my time being as effective as possible is what’s most important to me.

Since Retained is fully integrated, you can easily log in, look at your dashboard and see problems before people ever get to the point of cancellation. You can easily see how individuals have become more or less engaged or happy with your app over time, and why, based on their sentiment over time, how much they use your app, their previous support interactions, etc. We can surface interesting and useful information that you wouldn’t get from using multiple tools, just by virtue of everything being in one place. The goal is to give you immediately actionable information. Lots of services let you get a bunch of data in, but not many go the extra mile of telling you what to do with that data.

If your company does get big enough, you’ll be able to have one person concentrating on each area, and using standalone services might be a better choice in that case. But for a small, bootstrapped company, we feel that Retained is going to speak directly to you.

Right now, newest customers will show the most recent customers. But we’re still playing with what exactly will end up on the dashboard, so that may change.

Thanks!

Thanks, that sounds great to me.

Color consistency just means that when you have picked certain colors to represent something (e.g. table headers), you should use the same colors/metaphors all over the application, unless there is a strong reason for the change.

You can find these just by taking all the screenshots side by side and finding the differences. It’s a minor issue, many users wouldn’t even notice.

“100% free during our public beta” - this turns me off a little. I’m left wondering “if i move in to this service and after Beta ends he says it costs me $1000 a month, what’ll i do then”. I’m not sure how you can solve this.

Let me assure you that it won’t cost you $1000 a month. We are building it for bootstrapped companies like ourselves, who don’t have a bunch of money to spend, and who need maximum results for their money.

We plan to make Retained affordable for bootstrappers, so we will have fair pricing that a small company with a profitable product can afford. Pricing will start somewhere between $30 and $50/month.

You will not pay per-app, as you do for competitors of ours. We will have tiers divided up by the number of active users that you have across all of your apps. That way, if you want to use Retained on a mature app that has customers, and a beta app that only has a few, we won’t be doubling your monthly charge for no good reason. We feel that Retained is so awesome that you’ll want to use it across all of your apps, and we don’t want to penalize you for doing that. Retained’s pricing will only grow as your apps do.

I hope this helps!

We’re scrapping the current homepage soon. It doesn’t do a very good job of explaining or talking directly to our audience, We’ve just been focused on building the product lately :smile: