As many of you know, I have a new business called SaneBox.  In my continuing effort to live out loud, here is my current data and thinking about why some people leave SaneBox while most others stay and love it.  

For those who don’t know, SaneBox enables users to focus on important emails. SaneBox either has the unimportant stuff skip your gmail Inbox or we put labels on the envelopes so that you can go directly to a folder with only the important stuff in it.

We’ve been open for business (invitation only) for 2 months.  The churn rate has been 25% so far.  Now, I’m trying to figure out how to feel about that.  

The people that stick with it, seem to love it.  I get the nicest tweets and emails. Seriously, that part is fabulous. And frankly, even the people that cancel, on the whole, leave the nicest notes.

But, still I’m not making everyone happy.  And that troubles me.  I actually try to reach out to everyone who quits to see if there was some misunderstanding or at least to learn how we failed that user.

Of the users that cancel, as a percentage of the total cancels (ignoring the ones that don’t give a reason):

• Email is under control. So not needed   32%
• Some issue with labels on their emails  21%
• Don’t want to change workflow             13%
• Found the product confusing                11%
• Canceled and then signed up again        6%
• Concerned about their privacy                5%
• Don’t want to pay                                   3%
• Moving to an exchange server                3%
• New unknown contacts are important     3%
• Not accurate enough                              3%

Email is under control. So not needed:

I ask them what tools would speed up their processing or make it easier.  

Based in part on that question, I have since added 2 new folders to have Inbox email deferred to a later time - SaneNextWeek and SaneTomorrow.  So far users love the new folders, but I think the names need some work. Any suggestions?

Some issue with labels on their emails:

We created a feature where unimportant emails skip your Inbox.  In this mode we don’t have to label the Inbox with any additional label.  Additionally, we are going to allow users to choose their own label names (unstarted but in the development schedule)

Don’t want to change their workflow:

This usually means that they have filters that push emails to particular folders and these users just like those folders and their existing filters. I’m not sure what to do to address these users concerns. Several users were in this category and chose to get rid of their existing filters, they seem pretty happy to be letting us do the work now.

Found the product confusing:

We need an introductory screen capture video.  Sigh… we need an introductory screen capture video.

Canceled and then signed up again:

I count these people because they did cancel.  But, in the process of finding out how we failed them, they agreed to give us another shot :-)

Concerned with privacy:

I am considering converting to a fully translucent database.  Which is a database where database cells are obscured by encryption so that individual items can’t be readily identified.  Currently we only look at email headers, never bodies of emails. And we only store meta data about those headers, never the actual envelope headers. So most of the database is numbers.  Ergo, I’m not sure what the translucence buys us. But, I take these concerns very seriously, so I will continue to pursue any mechanism that might reassure users.

The other issues are such small numbers that I am assuming that they are individual concerns that don’t, for now, require a general solution.

But here is the thing:  do I need a product that makes everyone happy?  

Is it enough that 75% love/like it?  I’d like 100%, but as Daniela, my fashion designer wife says, every dress can’t look good on every woman.  If she makes some women very happy, that is enough. My response was to explain, in my geeky way, about the difference between an email filtering system and dresses.  This explanation, of course, ended in my quietly agreeing with her and writing this blog post.