Categories: AI Product Manager
Resubscribe: A Post-Mortem on Product-Market Fit
I've spent more hours than I care to admit staring at analytics dashboards. You know the ones. The graphs go up, the graphs go down. Clicks, sessions, bounce rates... it's a sea of numbers. And while those numbers tell you what is happening, they almost never tell you why. Why did a dozen users sign up yesterday and then vanish? Why did that cohort, the one we had such high hopes for, churn after just one week? Itâs the multi-million dollar question for any SaaS business.
Every now and then, a tool comes along that promises to answer that 'why'. A few years back, a name started popping up in product circles: Resubscribe. It had a simple, brilliant premise. But if you go looking for it today, you wonât find a slick landing page. Youâll find this:
Visit Resubscribe
A digital tombstone. A 404 error. Another good idea that just... fizzled out. So what happened? And more importantly, what can we learn from the ghost of Resubscribe? Let's pour one out and talk about it.
The Big Idea Behind Resubscribe
At its heart, Resubscribe wasn't just another survey tool. We have enough of those, don't we? It was designed to be a conversation starter. The core feature was running in-app user conversations to get to the bottom of user behavior. Think about that. Not a generic pop-up asking âHow would you rate your experience?â but a real, contextual chat aimed at understanding a userâs motivations at a critical moment.
Imagine a user is about to cancel their subscription. Instead of just letting them click the button and disappear into the ether, Resubscribe would have allowed you to intervene. To pop up a chat and just ask, âHey, I see youâre leaving. Would you mind telling me what we could have done better?â It was meant to be the digital equivalent of a concerned shop owner walking up to a customer who's put an item back on the shelf and asking, âWasnât quite right?â
The promise was gold. Pure, unadulterated qualitative feedback, right from the source. For any product owner or marketer drowning in spreadsheets, the idea of getting direct answers on conversion and churn was, frankly, a dream come true. It was about closing the gap between the data and the human being behind the screen.
So, Why Did Resubscribe Disappear? The Product-Market Fit Problem
The official reason for Resubscribe's demise is a story as old as Silicon Valley itself: it failed to achieve product-market fit. For the uninitiated, product-market fit (or PMF) is that magical, mythical state Marc Andreessen once described where a product is in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. It's when the dogs are eating the dog food, so to speak. You don't have to push your product on people; they're pulling it from you.
Resubscribe never got there. The 404 error is the final confirmation. Why? Well, we can only speculate, but I have a few hunches from my years in this game.
My Personal Theories on the Failure
First, I wonder if the concept was too intrusive for users. We're already bombarded with notifications, pop-ups, and chat bubbles. Was a direct, real-time conversation at the moment of churn or confusion a step too far? Maybe it felt more like an interrogation than a helpful chat. Itâs a fine line to walk.
Second, was it too much work for the product owners? The idea of having real conversations is fantastic, but who is having them? A small startup team canât be on call 24/7 to chat with churning users across different time zones. The manual effort required might have been far greater than the insights gained, making it a solution that didn't scale well. You'd need a dedicated team just to manage the conversations.
Finally, the competition. While nobody was doing exactly what Resubscribe was doing, tools like Intercom, Hotjar, and even SurveySparrow were doing 'good enough' jobs at solving pieces of the puzzle. You could piece together a similar, if less elegant, solution with existing tools. Maybe the market wasn't hungry enough for a dedicated, all-in-one conversation platform when they could already get 80% of the way there with their current tech stack. It's a tough spot to be in.
The Lingering Question: Do We Still Need to Talk to Our Users?
Absolutely. A thousand times, yes. The failure of one company doesn't invalidate the problem it was trying to solve. In fact, it makes the problem even more apparent. We are still desperate to understand our users, to stop churn, and to improve our conversion rates.
Resubscribe's story is a powerful reminder that the how is just as important as the what. The desire to understand user motivation is timeless. The platform that successfully cracks this nut without feeling creepy or creating a mountain of manual work will definately be a winner. Until then, the ghost of Resubscribe reminds us to keep trying, because ignoring the 'why' is simply not an option if you want to build something that lasts.
Building Your Own 'Resubscribe' with Today's Tools
So, the dedicated tool is gone. What's a modern product team to do? We have to get creative and piece together our own feedback-gathering machine. It's not as neat, but it's totally doable. Hereâs what Iâve seen work well.
Instead of one tool, you combine a few. You can use Hotjar or FullStory to watch session recordingsâthatâs your fly-on-the-wall view. Then, you can use targeted exit-intent surveys with a tool like SurveyMonkey or even the built-in features of many marketing automation platforms. For more direct interaction, you can use a chat tool like Intercom or Drift not just for support, but to proactively ask questions to users who are on, say, the pricing page for a long time. And for the deepest insights? Nothing, and I mean nothing, beats an old-fashioned user interview scheduled via Calendly and conducted over Zoom. It's manual, but the insights are priceless.
Itâs a bit of a Frankensteinâs monster approach, but it works. You get the quantitative, the qualitative, and the conversational without relying on a single point of failure.
Frequently Asked Questions About Resubscribe
- What exactly was Resubscribe?
- Resubscribe was a SaaS tool designed to help businesses understand their users better. Its main feature was the ability to run in-app conversations to figure out why users weren't converting or why they were canceling their subscriptions (churning).
- Why did Resubscribe shut down?
- The company shut down because it couldn't achieve product-market fit. This means it wasn't able to attract and keep enough customers to build a sustainable business, likely due to a combination of factors including competition, implementation challenges, or the solution not being quite right for the market's needs.
- Was Resubscribe a free tool?
- There's no public pricing information available anymore since the company is defunct. Like most SaaS tools of its kind, it most likely operated on a tiered monthly or annual subscription model. It was not a free service.
- What is the best way to get user feedback now that Resubscribe is gone?
- There's no single 'best' way. A strong strategy combines several methods: analytics tools (like Google Analytics), session recording tools (like Hotjar), targeted surveys (like SurveyMonkey), in-app chat (like Intercom), and most importantly, direct user interviews.
- What is product-market fit?
- Product-market fit is a state where a product perfectly meets the needs of a strong market, leading to high demand and organic growth. It's the point where the product basically starts selling itself because it solves a problem so well for so many people.
Pour One Out for a Good Idea
The startup graveyard is filled with brilliant ideas that, for one reason or another, didn't make it. Resubscribe is one of them. Itâs a bit sad, really. It targeted a real, painful problem that everyone in the product and marketing world faces. Its failure isn't a sign that we should stop trying to talk to our users; it's a lesson in execution, timing, and the brutal, unforgiving search for product-market fit.
So, hereâs to Resubscribe. A noble attempt to help us all understand the human on the other side of the screen. The problem remains, and the quest continues.
