Every Step Costs You 20% of Users

My favorite example annecdote: when signing up to pay for Dropbox, I got pretty far along the tunnel. I think after giving Credit Card details, but I'm not sure. At that point, I was presented with a choice: "Pay monthly ($10 per month)" or "Pay Yearly ($8 per month, paid in advance".<p>Being faced with this question, I decided to think about it, then left the page and didn't sign up. I did end up signing up a while later, so maybe this doesn't mean anything, but I could definitely imagine not remembering and ending up never signing up.<p>And all they had to do to was add another option: "Sign up for monthly billing ($10) per month. Don't worry, you can later convert to a year and start saving from that point".

I wonder what the averages are for users of business software. Lead to trial. Trial to customer. Paying customer to active user. It would be interested just to get an average of how many dormant paying customers there are for web-based subscription apps. I know I am a dormant customer for at lease 3.

In addition to losing 20% or so users at each stage of the funnel, the bigger picture is that most startups closely follow Zipf's Law, e.g.:<p>* Hacker News has (hypothetically) 300,000 unique monthly users.<p>* Of those, 30,000 have an account.<p>* Of those, 3,000 submit at least one comment or story over the course of the month.<p>* Of those, about 300 are regular contributors (at least 5 comments and/or story submissions per week).<p>I don't know what the real stats for HN are, but I doubt that is very far off.

How are you measuring the app store pageview -&#62; install step?

Is having a forced Facebook login necessarily a bad thing? Sure, the sign-up rate might only be 50%; but if it's inherently a social app, it'll pay of with a richer user experience once the user is 'signed-in with his graph'. Of course there are many apps that simply abuse the social grap for viral invites only - that sucks. But there are also apps that are just more fun - if they can overlay / provide access to the social graph. At the end: Every app attracts the users it deserves; those who appreciate it and those who don't. As an app developer, if my app is worth the trust of a social graph, I'd rather have the users that appreciate it.

You can likely mitigate the drop off at the signup stage quite drastically by first creating value, then asking users to sign up.<p>Signing is a conscious decision on part of the user to accept the possibility that your app will spam their wall with achievements and updates. If you ask them to take the risk before you show them why they should, it's natural to expect such a large drop off; I've personally deleted several apps because of it.

"Only 90% of of the people who download your app will actually open it - I'm guessing that people are stockpiling apps for the impending apocalypse."Hah!

I find it amusing that the title claims that the cost is 20% on every step but the article itself says that the value varies and is not unique for every business. What's the point of choosing 20% in an arbitrary way like this?<p>Following this line of thought we could rename the article to "Every Step Costs You 50% of Users" if we chose that case as the example.

At Kera we're only limiting users to people with google accounts so it's interesting for me to read:<p>"completion rates as low as 50% with forced Facebook logins, while another one allows signing up with different methods (username/password, Facebook, LinkedIn) claims completion rates of 90%"<p>Do you have more information on this?

At Kera we're only limiting users to people with google accounts.<p>You mentioned "completion rates as low as 50% with forced Facebook logins, while another one allows signing up with different methods (username/password, Facebook, LinkedIn) claims completion rates of 90%"<p>Do you have more information on this?