The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey, it's Arvid and this is the Bootstrap Founder. Sometimes software founders are a weird bunch. They've built their businesses on open source software and the contributions of people who have done a lot of work for free. They've benefited at great length from infrastructure and tooling built on open standards that facilitate free exchange of data and ideas. Yet when it comes to their own software business they hold the opinion that you should have as much vendor lock in as possible when it comes to your users.

The moment somebody signs up on your platform and invests the data into it I've heard a lot of founders say unironically you have to lock them in. Make it as hard as possible for them to leave that's going make you money and that is a retention strategy for some. I think it is a horrible practice. So today let's talk about why and why you shouldn't. Quick word here from our sponsor paddle.com.

I use paddle as my merchant of record for all my software projects. They take care of all the taxes, currencies, declined transactions, updated credit cards, so many things that I don't have to deal with so I can focus on my product. If you want to do the same, just build your own thing, check out paddle.com as your payment provider or merchant of record. They also allow you to leave their platform and take your data with you. Right?

There is a migration path out there, so that might be interesting for you as well in the context of today's show. Now I believe that you actually increase your retention and strengthen your product by making it as easy as possible to import and export data at any given point. And I'm gonna make a case for this today. If you already think this is true, if you already like the idea of allowing your customers to import and export data as much as they want, well, you might come away with a couple ideas on how to make this even easier and how to communicate it more clearly to your customers. And if you think that it's a stupid idea to make it easy for customers to export all their data, I would ask you to give this a listen and then share your perspectives with me afterwards.

Maybe I can convince you, maybe I can't. I want to hear from you anyway. I'm generally of the opinion that informed consent and informed choice is the highest value retention strategy you could possibly offer in any software business, right? Offer to your own operations and offer to your customer because to retain people they need to actively choose to stay with you. So it is an offer you make.

If somebody buys your product because they understand that not only is it going to be easy to use that's great but it will also be easy to leave the chance of them sticking around or buying it in the first place actually goes up it's a bit counterintuitive that an easier offboarding process will cause people to stick with you longer but if you think about it realistically people will lock themselves into any software product you give them they will just by the sheer inertia of a process once it's established stick with that product so changing things in any product changing the process around it will always be hard and it's often quite complicated to change a long running process in the first place so anything you can do to make it feel like such a change if it ever is instigated if it ever happens will not be blocking the way, well that's going be a strong signal to a customer. But in the software as a service world that means making the data in your platform movable just allowing people to get a full data export of their entire account not to have to scrape things manually but to have it facilitated easily that is what that means.

And often just even the promise of this is sufficient. They don't need to actually get the data but when it comes to the due diligence that they might do on your business they will see that you thought about it and thinking about other people's end goals and their job to be done which for many people is simply to keep running their business as it is keep their process going well that's a very important thing to do and it's a strong signal that shows your customers that you understand them you get it so let me give you a real example from my own experience I'm running and have been running for like five years at this point a business called permanent link You'll find that under permanent. Link surprisingly. It's a URL shortener but it's also an archival tool in some ways. My customers they're rightly concerned with the long term survival of this business because the whole point of permanent link is for that link to be permanent right?

If you're linked to a website and that website goes down because link rot is a real thing links just vanish well then the chance that your visitors won't be able to see what you meant for them to see is quite high. Permanent link helps by rerouting visitors to an archived version of their page either a publicly archived version or a version that we archive ourselves or the customer archives themselves doesn't matter it's just a permanent and adaptable redirect. So permanent link, the service itself is responsible for this rerouting activity. If we don't reroute users correctly, if our service is down, even if the original link still were to be working, we would not be able to forward visitors to where they need to be. So permanent link itself needs to stay there and like any software business people are concerned with the long term survival of this particular business.

So instead of just saying yeah yeah we're going be around forever don't you worry I said here is our contingency plan and I outlined it quite intensely on the home page. So if that business ever shuts down our dynamic linking feature will be turned into a static link system that would at least guarantee that the links that people currently have are going to keep working until their original sources expire. Or you could change them to always go to the archived version in the Wayback Machine and then they would never expire as long as the Wayback Machine works which is a whole other thing. And for the long term, PermanentLink also offers a full export of every single rerouted and forwarded link formatted to be used on a self hosted Apache server, a caddy server or an NGINX configuration. If you just want to download all your links and automatically forward them yourself because you have a sub domain and you have already set that up in PermanentlyLink two, well we have the data format ready for you, you can off board and switch to that in a minute.

Like it used to take like five minutes to do all this configuration stuff easily a couple years ago now you just paste that thing into an AI whatever and it will tell you exactly what to do super fast super reliable just run it on your own domain and nothing would change nobody would see it we export all the configuration you would just have to run this server yourself if we were ever to go and this has been received with a lot of positive signals from the community People were like yep wouldn't have bought it otherwise but now I know whatever happens I can always export this data and just run my own server that really helps me make that choice and it helps because it gives optionality it gives people the expectation of what would happen in the worst case and for people who know how precarious the situation of software companies can be even if they are low expense like PermanentLink doesn't cost me more than a couple $100 a year to run you still want to give that optionality because people care about being given that and it generally feels good particularly now with AI systems to have a full data map and let anybody a machine a person or an AI do analysis of your data that you have in any given system.

It might be really useful for you to just export all your data in whatever service you might be load it up in some kind of AI chatbot data ingestion system and then have it number crunch and figure out are there any inconsistencies in this data? Are there patterns that I may have missed when I used it? You will find that these tools can do a lot of that with the data that you have. So allowing customers to use this however they want is giving them additional insight potential into their own information that they so graciously allowed you to host for them. So that's the export side of things right what people can take away should they ever want to leave your business But it is just as important to make it easy for them to get into your business, to take their existing data from other places that might make it hard or not make it hard to export and then make it simple for them to use it on your end.

So what I recommend here is to also make it extremely easy to allow people to import their data into your system and by import I really mean do you have the capacity to get them set up with a good enough version of the process that they've already established in their business as quickly as possible And I'm looking at my friends over at Fathom Analytics here. When Google announced that their Google Analytics version was going to change a lot of people needed to move off Google the Analytics Platform because it just wasn't giving them what they needed anymore and the changes were weird. People needed to find a new platform, another platform to run their analytics on. But obviously they wanted to keep their data around. So what the people over at Fathom Analytics did quite quickly was build a Google Analytics importer service.

I think Jack Alice talked about this very publicly on Twitter and it was fascinating to watch just how much resonance that import feature got. A lot of people came onto the platform because there was a way to take their old data with them and they were not locked out from using that. Right? It's another kind of lockout. They were actively encouraged to take that data and bring this into the new service with them and I find this both inspiring because it clearly worked for these customers and very important for the software as a service business itself because not only do you have a new customer that starts using a product but from that data you get a massive level of insight into the needs that this particular customer might have.

Right? You see just how much expected capacity is going to go through your system. If somebody has let's stay with the Fathom Analytics example they already have 10,000,000,000 page views in the last month and they sign up for your product and they import these 10,000,000,000 views up to this point you knew nothing about their business. You give them a JavaScript embed and all of a sudden you have 10,000,000,000 new items in your database over the next thirty days that would be a big surprise right but if in the process of importing that data before they even start using your service you see that while there's going to be an expected number of these items you can already pre provision the systems that make this run smoothly. This is kind of customer anticipation you could do that happens because you allow for data imports.

You can see what's happening in the past and kind of extrapolate into the future. It's a pretty important part and it gives people continuity and expectability and reliability. In a way, it's kind of a soft lock in because they take their old data to you. And as Google rolls down their service and their data vanishes there, now you are the only source of their data. So if you then also facilitate a full data export, now they have the most possible peace of mind.

They know that even if they would at any point leave your service, their data is safe. And if your service should ever stop for whatever reason, they can take the data onwards to the next service. They will not try to find alternative ways to store that data, which might even make them go for another potential vendor that has a less restrictive policy when it comes to data exports, you're making it harder for your competitors to compete with you on ease of use if you're the easiest to use in regard that when something might happen, if something ever happens, you'll be the least complicated solution in the space. So that's my recommendation. Allow people to import and export as much as they want, as reliably as they want, and you can provide it, and support importing and exporting of any kind of relevant tabular data.

That's my last point. I've noticed this with Podscan. I've noticed this with PermanentLink. I've noticed this with Feedback Panda before. In every single of my SaaS businesses, B2B, B2C, somewhere in between, people want to be able to export any table of data they see in the UI.

If it's a table, the moment you have tabular data with rows and columns, put an export button there and you will see some people use it for whatever purpose it might be. Maybe just to have the data on their own computer they might want to have a local copy in their excel or upload it to Google docs doesn't matter they might want to throw it into an AI system for just playing around with it might just want to have a backup just to go through the list later, import and export with comma separated values with CSV, whatever tabular data you might have, that's where export functionality for tables is always going to be useful. Whenever you have a table in your service that has meaningful business data, allow export functionality and you will find that people aren't going to use it. They're going to find new ways of using that data and they might even talk to you about this. They might say hey I took this data and I threw it into ChatGPT, I asked this question, I got this report, cool, can you build this in so I don't have to do this manually?

And in that they will become sticky customers in your service because you have allowed them to do something and then you can pull it back into the feature loop. So yeah allow everybody to import and export everything it's going to make them customers who have more use for the product they're going to use it more easily they're going to join more easily they're going to subscribe more easily and they're going to retain for longer because they know they don't have to look for an alternative So if anything ever happens it's going to be easy to leave so they don't need to prepare. It's a peace of mind situation and it's not going to cost you much. In fact it's going to make you stand out from all these other founders who have vendor lock in as one of the central mantras of their business strategy which they shouldn't have and neither should you. And that's it for today.

Thank you for listening to The Booster Founder. You can find me on Twitter avidkahl, a I v I d k a h l. And you know speaking of listening what people are saying, if you're a founder, a PR expert or a part of a marketing team, you're wondering what people are saying about you on podcast, that is exactly what I built podscan.fm to solve. It monitors millions of shows for people mentioning you. It turns this unstructured podcast chatter into competitive intelligence.

And if you're a founder searching for your next venture, please do check out ideas.podscan.fm, where we identify these startup opportunities that people just talk about on hundreds of expert conversations daily, and then you can build what people are already asking for. Share this with anyone who needs to turn conversations into competitive advantage, either of these two. Thanks so much for listening. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.