We recently talked about ways to set your customers up to be successful, long-term users of your product. By identifying strong audiences and quickly leading users to their “aha moment,” you can ensure that the right people see the right parts of your product as soon as possible.

But even under the best of circumstances, people drift away. They lose interest. They get distracted by some shiny new thing. They forget about you before your service becomes the habit you want it to become.

For these people, early retention strategies pack no punch. We can't change who these customers are or when they signed up. You can't optimize your signup flow and or new user experience—they've already gone through them. You can't lead users to an aha moment—many of them have already found it.

Yesterday, we explored how brands use colors on Instagram. Today, we're looking at trends in Instagram's early-adopter photographer community.

Anyone who's used Salesforce is familiar with its reporting dashboard. The deal pipeline, the closed deals speedometer, the reps' activities. As companies mature, these dashboards begin to inspire complex questions that the built-in reporting tool just can't support. Salesforce openly admits their limitations. After all, their primary goal is to help you manage relationships with customers.

In October, we launched our new product, RJMetrics Pipeline. Pipeline integrates data from all the systems you use to run your business into Amazon Redshift so that you can analyze it with any analytics tool. As with any new product launch, excitement around the office ran high. We celebrated every free trial signup, and about a week post-launch, we were eagerly awaiting our first batch of real clients.