gfloyd

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).

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)!

We are dogfooding the cancellation flow, of course. We don't have any offers active since we kind of assumed people would know to look for them. :)

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.

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!

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.

Would love to chat, contact info is at the bottom of the website, or you can email me directly (email address is in my profile).

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.

Absolutely, we've definitely considered that. We're still experimenting with pricing!

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.

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!

Hi HN,

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!

CATS | Minneapolis, MN | Frontend & Full Stack Engineers | Full-time | ONSITE

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.

Full Stack Developer: https://jobs.catsone.com/index.php?m=portal&a=details&jobOrd...

CATS | Minneapolis, MN | Frontend & Full Stack Engineers | Full-time | ONSITE

CATS (https://catsone.com/) provides a powerful, full-featured applicant tracking system for recruiters and small businesses.

We're especially looking for engineers with a keen eye for UI and UX. We're primarily looking for JavaScript experts (Vue.js and some React) and anyone with a lot of 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.

Frontend Engineer: https://jobs.catsone.com/index.php?m=portal&a=details&jobOrd...

Full Stack Engineer: https://jobs.catsone.com/index.php?m=portal&a=details&jobOrd...

CATS | Minneapolis, MN | Frontend & Full Stack Engineers | Full-time | ONSITE

CATS (https://catsone.com/) provides a powerful, full-featured applicant tracking system for recruiters and small businesses.

We're especially looking for engineers with a keen eye for UI and UX. We're primarily looking for JavaScript experts (Vue.js and some React) and anyone with a lot of 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.

Frontend Engineer: https://jobs.catsone.com/index.php?m=portal&a=details&jobOrd...

Full Stack Engineer: https://jobs.catsone.com/index.php?m=portal&a=details&jobOrd...

This looks like a really cool project. I'm excited to see it develop.

How would authentication work with configuration management? I see that new nodes are authenticated with a one-time token generated from the auth server, but that seems like it could be tricky to implement in a dynamic cluster (like an AWS auto scaling group).

Sent!

Thanks! I've got two to send out now.

We'd love to, but CATS has had 7 years of development now and has thousands of users, so rewriting it from the ground up would be quite the undertaking.

We'll definitely be using Meteor for any new side projects or external apps that tie in to CATS, though.

It's right in the middle of the page under the "Why is it free?" section.

Thanks for the screenshot! Seems to be an issue on Chromium in Linux. We'll get that fixed.

The candidate has to opt-in, but we do always send a request email. We're considering making it a paid option to disable those emails entirely, or customize them how you'd like.

We do want to be as upfront as possible about why this is a free service, so we hope we've communicated that effectively.

Meteor allowed us to prototype very quickly. We were able to build several different versions of the interface to see what worked, and then spent the majority of our development time polishing it.

Meteor being real-time also made some cool features really easy, like new candidates showing up in the inbox without having to refresh or poll.

Overall, I'd say development in Meteor was significantly faster than any other framework I've used.

I think this would simplify implementing a load-balancing proxy in some ways. If a server responds with a 503 generated by node-toobusy, the load balancer will know immediately to reroute the request to another server, rather than having to wait for a timeout or some other threshold.