Day 91: Why people uninstall Hide Feed

product

Note: This post is currently being written! Like right now!

About a month ago, I added a hook into Hide Feed so that when someone uninstalls Hide Feed, they get redirected to a Google Form asking why:

Since March 9, when I assume most people will have received the extension update, I’ve had exactly 100 people uninstall Hide Feed:

Out of those 100 people, I’ve had 21 people fill out the Google Form. That’s actually much higher than I expected — I would’ve guessed around 5-10%. Let’s dig into those responses, shall we?

Here are the reasons people gave, split up by category (my comments are in italics):

Functionality

  • should be able to temporarily deactivate it without clicking many buttons, e.g. when workday is done (i work remotely)

    • Sounds like they never discovered that clicking the extension icon temporarily reveals the feed. I could definitely make this clearer in the onboarding.

  • If only you could just hide the feeds without putting a picture (and hide this minutes count everywhere)

    • I’d gotten this request a few times and after seeing this, I added the option to have no image for the super minimalists out there. Planning on adding the option to hide the time saved count in a future release.

  • Slowed down facebook messenger, which I still need to use

    • Hm, not sure what they’re talking about because Hide Feed doesn’t support messenger.com. Maybe they were using chat on facebook.com and felt like Hide Feed was slowing that down?

Don’t want to pay

  • Didn’t realise it was a bait and switch scam

    • This was the very first submission I received after adding the form. Super.

  • because the trial was ending and i didnt know how to have the normal , not pro, version

    • This feedback came up a lot more than I expected and will be discussed further in this post.

  • I would rather do a one time payment versus a monthly payment. This is a great idea, though! Great work! Please keep it up!

    • The reason I use a monthly subscription instead of a one-time payment is to align my incentives with the user. The sites supported by Hide Feed change all the time, and having users who can unsubscribe means that I’ll be committed to providing prompt updates or else risk losing subscribers.

  • Pricing I sent a message earlier.

    • This person had sent me a separate message asking for a lower monthly price or a one-time payment instead of monthly payments:

      • I would like to support Hide Feed but I think $5 a month is too much. It’s a great service and if you want to charge monthly, I would appreciate a more affordable price. I would also prefer a one time payment although as you mention this service could stop functioning if websites change their code.

  • Didn’t know I was on a trial, just thought it was free

  • Well made but didn’t want to pay :)

  • Looked like you had to pay for it

  • Not free

Don’t need it

  • I just wanted to try it, because it looked cool. I appreciate it and do think it’s a really well designed extension , but I don’t need it at this time. (I suggest like a browser-wide turn off switch for the extension though)

  • It’s a great extension, but I work in social media and I should have known better than to hide my feed. I did pass this along to my coworkers who DON’T have to look at social for their job though! Thank you for making this <3

    • <3

Prefer an alternative

  • Undistracted

    • Undistracted is another Chrome extension that hides feeds. It’s well made and completely free, which is why this user probably uninstalled Hide Feed in favor of it. The downside of free extensions is that there’s no incentive for the developer to continue maintaining it long-term. As a result, free extensions usually take a while to get fixed (or simply remain broken) when websites change their code:

???

  • I’m tested
  • dadsads
  • will added soon
  • a
  • huerf
  • na
  • It’s a great app

The most commonly given reason was not wanting to pay, which is what I’m going to explore here.

It’s obvious from all this feedback that it’s not clear enough that you can continue to use Hide Feed for free even after the Pro trial ends. There are some potential solutions that come to mind:

  1. Get rid of the Pro trial

    • This would entail starting everyone on the Free plan and offering the Pro plan as a paid upgrade
    • I don’t think this is a good idea because as mentioned in Day 9: Designing a Paid Plan, Hide Feed’s value becomes compelling only once you’ve used it for a while, and I think being able to use it across multiple sites expedites that process

  2. Offer the Pro trial as an opt-in

    • In the onboarding flow, require users to explicitly opt-in to the Pro trial
    • This option seems superior to option 1

  3. Make it clear that a free plan exists and that users can continue on it after the Pro trial ends

    • Right now, I show an alert a day before the trial ends letting the user know that the trial is going to end:

      I think adding a button that says “Downgrade to the Free plan” and/or or including additional text that makes it clear that the user will continue on the free plan if they don’t upgrade will be helpful to clear up the confusion.

#3 will be straightforward to do, and I’d also like to explore #2 to make it clear during onboarding that there is a paid plan and that they’re getting a trial of the Pro plan.

Hm, providing a trial of the pro plan is turning out to be kind of tricky, and perhaps I should re-examine the whole strategy.