The Lifecycle

The Lifecycle is one map of your customers. The road runs from somebody's first visit to buying from you and coming back, in the stages your business really has. Each stage can carry the emails people get when they reach it.

The map

• The road is your stages, in order, in your own words. Everybody stands at the furthest stage they've reached. Nobody is moved along it by hand: Kicklace moves people when something happens.
• Side roads leave the road for something that happens off to the side, like a failed payment, a trial ending, a refund, a cancellation, or something your own app reports. Somebody on a side road stays there until they leave it.
• Lists sit beside the road, for the people who joined one.

Somebody is at one stage at a time.

People shows who is where. Emails shows each stage's emails instead, and the same button flips back. Table shows everybody in rows. Press a person to open them beside the map: what they did, your notes, their fields, the lists they're on, and an email to them.

Visitors

A visitor nobody can name stays on the map for 30 days after their last visit. The ones who came back are listed first, with the page each was last on. The stage's card says how many left without getting in touch, and the page the most of them were last on, with your form to copy onto it. Nobody is deleted when they step off, and who counts as one visitor has the details.

What puts somebody at a stage

Each stage's card says it in one word. Press the word for more.

Changing the map

Press a stage, a side road or a list to change it right where it is: rename it, move it, or change what puts people there. The + at the top adds a new one.

More → Draft new map asks first, then walks you through the setup again, from what Kicklace knows now. Your map stays as it is unless you press Replace map at the end (Cancel leaves it), and a stage that's on both keeps its emails. Restore previous map undoes it.

Sequences

A sequence hangs off a stage. It starts:

• when somebody arrives;
• once they've been there a number of days;
• or, for a list, on a schedule, every week or month, to everybody on it.

Its steps run in order: an email, a wait, a note to you, or a task for you.

An email with no words yet has Write it for me. Kicklace writes it from where it sits and what comes before it, in your voice, and you change whatever you like.

A list's emails

A list isn't a road people travel. Its card has two emails and a button:

• When they join: a welcome, the moment somebody joins.
• Every week, every other week or every month at 9:00: the regular email, the same each time, with its news from one of your dynamic variables. The card says when it next goes and to how many. Where Kicklace fills any of it, you read it first; where there's nothing new, that one is skipped.
• Send one now writes a one-off to the list, and the card shows how the last one did.

On an empty list, Write it for me writes the welcome and the regular email together.

Switching one on

Nothing sends until you switch a sequence on. First Kicklace replays the last 30 days as if it had been on, and shows who would have got what, and who would have been skipped and why. Send me a test sends an email to you alone, exactly as it would arrive.

Once it's on:

• each person gets each email once;
• nothing is sent for something that happened before you switched it on, or because of an import;
• a sequence stops for somebody the moment they move on from its stage;
• nobody gets more than one tip or check-in a day;
• an email that's skipped says why on the person's record.

When somebody arrives at a stage, its first email goes within about a minute.

Three kinds of email

• Account emails, like a failed payment or a trial ending. They go unless the address bounced or the person complained.
• Tips and check-ins. Each carries Stop these emails, one click.
• List emails, only to people on the list, with the list's own unsubscribe.

Reaching a stage never puts anybody on a list. An email can carry a Join button for one of your lists instead; it opens the list's form with their address filled in, and they tick its sentence themselves. Email has the rest of the rules.

Variables that fill themselves

An email can carry a variable Kicklace fills when it sends. It's a chip in the email's words, and it can read:

• what shipped, from your deploys and commits;
• what changed on your website;
• lines and links you add yourself;
• how many people reached each stage;
• what that one person did, or how much they used your app.

Press the chip to see what it reads and what it has gathered so far. One written as a sentence for each person can take a line of yours on what it should say, like "thank them for what they built", and it still only says what they did.

A variable with nothing new in it skips the email, rather than sending one with a hole in it.

An email with a variable is read before it goes. Its words wait on Home, under Needs you, as the email will arrive. Approve it and it goes; decline it and that time is skipped.

Your own links. A list's email that reads your notes asks you for them the day before it goes, by email and on Home. Paste your links with a line on each. Kicklace reads each page and writes two or three sentences around your line. If you give it nothing, nothing is sent.

For developers

What your own code can post, and what each event moves, is on Events.

Guides

Lifecycle emails for SaaS is the set a small product needs, and the onboarding email sequence is what to send in the first two weeks.