PayPal Purge nebuminding

[bee]

Danny and I have been nebuminding the purging of paypal from Beeminder’s payments, but the project has still managed to suffer diffusion of responsibility and scope creep and generally Mustela-ish behavior, so we’re moving the nebuminding record to the public, here.

The goal has a rate of only 5 words per day, and an autoratchet of 7 days, so we should theoretically be able to check in once a week and do some progress towards purging paypal, summarize here, and then eventually paypal will be gone?

The last thing we did publicly re purging paypal was to send an email offering a honey money incentive to people with paypal as their default paytype if they change to something else.

There are currently (updated 2025-05-05):

• 2795 => 2778 users with paypal as their paytype
• 2553 => 2541 of them have only paypal
• 73 => 59 of them have added data in the last month

Our goal: come up with a next step to take towards being able to remove paypal from the payments infrastructure. In otherwords we need to move those 2000+ people off of paypal. Most of them are inactive, so there’s not really any lost revenue from switching them.

TODO:

• Decide an action to take: Fear-of-god a subset of people with paypal as their only paymethod
• Decide on the subset to execute this next step on – minimal / most restricted subset
• Draft the email
• Make decisions about CTA & timing
• Incorporate Nicky’s note about “you can sign up again” into the email draft
• write rake task to send first email
• write rake task to send second email
• write rake task to actually do the deletion (and don’t store the emails)
• Complete TODOs in email draft
• Do it

[clivemeister]

But you can still buy H$ with Paypal at the end of all this, right?

[dreev]

@clivemeister

still buy H$ with Paypal at the end of all this, right?

As one-off purchases I think this should be easy enough to keep supporting. I think Stripe may even support this by now? Having PayPal as a payment-method-on-file to be able to charge for future derailments is mainly what we want to purge.

[bee]

Last I checked Stripe only supports Paypal payments based on the “presentment currency”, but also based on the location of the Stripe account accepting the payment, which currently does not include the US, or USD. (See both “Presentment currency” under the Payment method properties, and “Country availability” at PayPal payments | Stripe Documentation). Presumably this has something to do with politicking and Competition between Stripe & Paypal?

That said, the cost of supporting one-off honey-purchase transactions via paypal, that is much less costly (in terms of tech debt) than integrating paypal as part of the default payments cycle. So it might not be too costly to keep the buying of honey in one-off transactions available.

[experientiallearner]

Nice. I like seeing the founders show their goals in public, especially when it’s a nebuminding goal.

I don’t use PayPal as my payment method here, but why purge it?

[dreev]

@experientiallearner

why purge it?

Mainly that it makes everything in our code more complicated, having to handle two different payment providers. Plus accounting and analytics. And Stripe has so many nice tools, including 3rd-party tools that access your Stripe data, that having all our revenue in Stripe has a ton of benefits. Also PayPal is just a nightmare to work with compared to Stripe.

[bee]

Ok, we decided to start with the lowest stakes group of users: the folks who’ve got paypal as their default, but never even created a goal. We’re going to send them a “Fear of God” email – something along the lines of: “we’re cleaning up unused accounts. if you want to keep your username, do [sign into beeminder and create your first goal] before [DATE], otherwise your account will be deleted”.

I’ll run a pre-query to check if there are any users where golcreated didn’t get instantiated when we added it. We’ll want them to match the query as well and get emailed.

query:
User.where(:default_paytype=>"paypal", :stripe_id=>nil, :golcreated.in=>[0,nil])

email draft:

Subject: create a goal to keep your (USERNAME) beeminder account

Hi there, it’s been years since you used your Beeminder account. We consider your account abandoned and want to reclaim your username and URL – beeminder.com/USERNAME.

If you’re done for good, simply do nothing and we’ll delete your account and free up its URL in in one week.

BUT WAIT! If you still want your account, here’s what to do:

1. Sign in to Beeminder (beeminder)
2. Create a goal

If you run into any trouble with that, please reply to this email and we’ll help sort it out! And if you’re still curious about Beeminder but now is just not the time, no worries! You’ll be able to create a new account any time. (You just might not get your original [USERNAME] username).

Thank you for trying out Beeminder way back when!
Danny and Bethany, cofounders

P.S. In case you forgot, Beeminder is about committing to a goal, tracking your progress, and getting charged actual money if you go off track.

P.P.S. There is no unsubscribe link down here because this is a one-time email about a change to your account. If you want to receive no more emails like this, well, do nothing and in one week your account will be deleted! Or reply to this email and we can delete it right away? But seriously, maybe give us a try first?

[bee]

My suggestion is that the call to action should be “create your first goal”. That makes the followup where we actually delete accounts real easy! But it is potentially a big hurdle, especially as it will force them to add a credit card as part of goal setup (since they only have paypal currently). @dreev what do you think?

[philip]

That’s a fine hurdle.

Having forgotten about Beeminder they’ve also almost certainly forgotten that they’d configured PayPal as the payment method. Let’s double check that the site experience is sufficiently hand-holdey for such returning folks, which also will be a benefit to onboarding newbees in general.

Suspect that there will be 3 groups of folks: non-responders, rage-quitters, and the newly energised. Seems like a slim slice that will remember/curious their way to the site and be offended by the payment options — and they seem unlikely to be Type Bee. The newly energised will welcome the reminder and become productive beemindees.

Speaking of reminders, for the initial run could further subdivide into folks who no longer receive even the annual beemail. The monthlies at least receive regular nudges that we exist, and could have curioused their way back before the email. Maybe that’s an argument for starting with them as a subgroup, since they didn’t unsubscribe altogether.

[bee]

ok, next thing i need to decide is: how much time to give?

if it’s too short, maybe they don’t have enough time to accomplish the call to action? (e.g. “we’re deleting your account tomorrow”), but if we make it too long, then we probably need to email them a second reminder before actually doing the deletion. Which, maybe that’s good? Maybe we sweep up a few additional folks with subsequent emails?

I think I had a similar series of notifications from a service in the last year and I suspect it was 3 or four emails over the course of about a month before they actually terminated my account.

[shanaqui]

Let’s not be like Photobucket, who have emailed me every day for at least six months, possibly longer. My attitude to my old Photobucket account is “go ahead and delete it then”, and I ultimately stuck their emails in spam because I am sick of the nagging. Just! Delete! My! Account!

Honestly, I feel like a week and a single notice is enough. Even if someone belatedly gets the email, they have no account history lost. The chances someone has signed up in the meantime with their desired username is small (and is it still their desired username anyway, after this much time?). They can just sign up again. We’re not blocking their way back.

(It may be worth saying that in the email too.)

[dreev]

How about 2 emails, 5 days apart. The first one like above and then a short follow-up to say it’s happening tomorrow (then we do that 48 hours later, for the most generous possible definition of “tomorrow” and with just over 7 days total elapsed from initial contact to deletion).

[bee]

Query:
User.where(:default_paytype=>"paypal", :stripe_id=>nil, :golcreated.in=>[0,nil])

Draft text for the followup email:

Subject: beeminder account [USERNAME] deleted

We emailed you 5 days ago to warn you that we’re about to delete your Beeminder account. As yet you haven’t taken action to retain it, so probably you don’t want it any longer. This is just the final notice that your account will be deleted. If that’s in error and you would like to retain your account, you can re-register at sign up – beeminder

Cheers,
Bethany & Danny, cofounders

This draft has now been added to my rake file for paypal purging.

TODO:

• verify that the default_paytype: paypal will get switched when they add a cc
• verify that goal setup will require them to add a credit card
• verify that the query will exclude them if they’ve set up a goal
• Do we need to include either boilerplate: NO, keep it short & sweet.
  • “You’re getting this because once upon a time you signed up for Beeminder. In case you forgot, Beeminder is…”
  • “There’s no unsubscribe link down here because this is a one-time situation emailing you specifics about your account…”

[bee]

Another final question to consider before executing this plan: Should we store the email addresses somewhere for use in the future? If so, where? I believe we’re within our rights to do this.

[philip]

I can’t immediately think of any non-creepy thing we’d do with them. Except perhaps for quietly counting the (presumably low) volume of folks who independently resubscribe and become successful beemindees. But if the series of emails doesn’t prompt that beehaviour, then ¯\(ツ)/¯

[krugerk]

@bee

Another final question to consider before executing this plan: Should we store the email addresses somewhere for use in the future?

No. Lean in the direction of the GDRP’s goals.

[bee]

Spent an annoying tock today debugging a weird syntax error in the rake task. Had to use binary search to figure out what the hell was going on.