#46 - Build A Successful Shopify App - Improve churn 🚀

For the time we hired a new person that I don’t directly manage.

Najib joined our team to handle customer support with Ogi.

And it was the first time for Ogi. A new manager role isn’t easy and you can make many mistakes.

But it was also something new for me. The new hire won’t refer directly to me.

And it creates a few problems:

• You don’t personally know if the person is doing a great job

• You talk less to that person so it’s harder to build a relationship

• You don’t really know if the manager is managing properly.

And I figured this out. I make some calls with both of them to ensure everything is going well. And I focus on questions I can’t verify myself:

• Do you have any problem with your manager?

• Is there something we can do better?

• What were the recent issues you faced? How are you handling them?

• Do you need anything else from the team or me?

And what I also like is to talk about their personal life. I already know what they like because I asked about it during the interviews so I can go from there.

It’s important to know a bit about their personal life and to show empathy so they see they can trust you and it becomes easier to onboard the person.

But I also ask a few questions, especially for new managers (with training as well):

• How is your new managing role going?

• How is the new hire?

• What recent problems did you face? How did you solve them?

• What can we do better?

• What do you need from me?

And a few people think being the CEO is being the boss. But in my opinion, it’s the contrary.

Don’t tell people how to do their job → Ask them instead how you can help them achieve it.

Don’t fix all the rules → Ask them what we should change

Because a CEO is making sure everyone can work together in the best environment possible. And you can only achieve this by listening to them.

By the way, it can be a bit frustrating because as you grow you do less of the daily tasks and more communication with the team. So you can sometimes feel like you’re not moving forward.

But in reality, you're going faster because you have many people working.

How to use Mixpanel to reduce the churn

I talked a lot about churn recently and Noah from Social Snowball asked me this question:

How do you use Mixpanel to reduce churn?

Because churn is terrible for most Shopify App Founders targeting SMBs. You have to deal with people uninstalling your app AND people closing their stores!

So here we go:

1) Understand that you want to reduce revenue churn and not user churn.

User churn is the number of users leaving your app every month while revenue churn is the money you lose every month.

If you have 2 people leaving your app and they were paying $10 and 1 person is upgrading his plan from $10 to $40:

• Your user churn would be 2 people

• Revenue churn would be negative because one person upgraded

That’s why revenue churn is even more important than users churn.

2) Segment your users base

When you use Mixpanel you can attach events or properties to a profile.

Then you can make assumptions:

• Maybe the people who came from Youtube churn less than those from TikTok?

• Perhaps the people with 50 products churn less than those with 1 product?

Then based on the assumptions I will compare the churn and you can notice differences.

In our case, people coming from Youtube will churn less.

3) Take action on the segment

Once you have the information you can take immediate action to improve the churn.

In our case it might be focusing on Youtube because churn is better for these people.

4) Add more plans

Another way is to add monthly plans. As we’ve seen above, if 2 people leave but someone upgrades, your revenue churn can be negative.

But people can’t upgrade if you only have 1 plan or if you don’t ask people to upgrade.

So show people the value of your other plans and increase the number of upgrades

5) Jump on calls

Another thing we did was to send a notification to Slack whenever someone with specific properties would open our dashboard (like people successful with our app).

Then we immediately send them a message in the live chat when they are in the dashboard so you get a better response rate than sending an email.

And we ask them to jump on a call.

We can then:

• Understand what they don’t like about the app so you can update your app

• Understand why they are successful so you can repeat this with others

• Understand who they are so you can attract more of them

And if you iterate on that, there is no way your churn won’t improve!

That’s it for today’s email!

See you next week,

Mat 😁

PS: Reply to this email to let me know how you deal with churn!