Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cs702 19 days ago
Think of it as a perpetual bond with declining coupon payments.

Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition.

Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.

2 comments

> a perpetual bond with declining coupon payments

Most things with royalties (oil fields, songs) work like this.

Yes, agree.
Add to this that they make it really, really hard to unsubscribe. I think there's been some legal crackdowns, but for a time, they could make it literally impossible.
correct, they have made it impossible, charged my 2002-era PayPal account when i said, "i want to leave, don't"
This article is like an advertisement. Here's how they spin it:

> Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli said some of the scrutiny was due to the fact that products such as Evernote were genuinely loved by their users. But he said that despite all the changes, customer retention has been “remarkably stable.”

Ah yes. In other news, the prison population size is also remarkably stable.