[rekshaw]

The article is interesting, but what intrigued me the most was the carefully coordinated marketing:

- Medium article to capture inbound and not make it look like an ad, but a "We want to share this discovery with you"

- Hacker News submission to get audience

- (probably) team upvote boost to trigger front page

- 50% off promotion ending in ~4 hours with the tagline "you'll never see this offer again".

Cost of advertising: $0. Nice job!

[ntumlin]

Not to mention every comment dpower has made is on a post related to Hiri. Maybe HN should just explicitly allow and tag accounts made to promote a company. It makes sense that people who create products want to talk about them, and they can certainly have valuable advice or insights. That might give them a platform to share more without people feeling there's some hidden motive.

[dpower]

I'm a lurker, not a poster for the most part. And as you can see from our blog, we don't write that often. We don't really do content marketing. Any revenue we make as a result of this post certainly won't cover the time I've spent writing it. Hiri is a bit specialist.

Would be happy to tag the posts - think it's pretty clear this is a company blog though. Your point is well taken/made all the same.

[wccrawford]

I've come to associate those things with snake oil. They're right up there with "Free trial, but you need to put in a credit card." Sure, some legit services use those techniques, but they're a red flag that they might be a pain to deal with if you choose to back out.

[j45]

A lot of legit services take a cc with trial sign up to separate the people who might pay from the people who would pay if it was the right solution. The right thing to do when taking a cc for a trial is to send reminder emails that they will be charged.. Which not enough do.

I see more and more startups using stripe, between that and the ability to do chargeback with that cc company, I worry less about it. The chargeback dispute is quite powerful.

[bosie]

> The right thing to do when taking a cc for a trial is to send reminder emails that they will be charged.. Which not enough do.

Not sure about that. Wouldn't the "right thing to do" be to not auto-renew the account? Suspend the account after the trial until the user logs in and confirms the renewal?

[wilmoore]

> The right thing to do when taking a cc for a trial is to send reminder emails that they will be charged.. Which not enough do.

> Wouldn't the "right thing to do" be to not auto-renew the account?

I suspect we sometimes conflate "right" and "convenient". I am curious, don't most people (especially those with technical chops) just drop a calendar event as a reminder?

[j45]

Those would also be good ideas.

The worst scenario is when the subscription begins and the user has forgotten the cancelation date. A link could be embedded in the email to say yes or no. It must be profitable not to do this for some.

[dpower]

- (probably) team upvote boost to trigger front page Nope - the HN algo would murder us for this. Don't risk it.

- 50% off promotion ending in ~4 hours with the tagline "you'll never see this offer again". You'll see this if it's your first visit to the site, been that way for a while. But that's another article...