I totally think that this is what they don’t get. It’s as important to get people to stay, as to get people to go pro once.
For example: myself: I took the 1 year membership in june this year, after considering it for a long time. I will not renew it. If many people do it (testing it, paying once, getting p**** off and leaving it), it’s not “sustainable”.
Keeping happy those who already are paying, should be their first goal. Otherwise, the pro-memberships may seem to grow now, but it won’t last. Things will begin to go bad in about a year, when people stop renewing their membership because the Memrise-made courses don’t have enough content and are not updated fast enough.
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The thing is, anyone signing up for Pro recently won’t know how it was a few years ago and may decide what they see has ‘improved’ recently.
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“Hey boss, our customers hate the new change we made and they’re talking about cancelling their paid memberships. I think we should admit all the money we spent on this new feature was a waste and go back to the way things were.”
THAT conversation is never going to happen. My paid membership is up in April. Kiss it good-bye.
Best of luck making your company profitable.
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I just cancelled today. I hope others threatening to do so actually follow suit in order to teach Memrise a lesson.
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One more week and still no answers from Memrise Team.
Hey Memrise, here are a bunch of people trying to provide feedback… can you hear us??? I guess not. Zidgy must be deaf.
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subduing through silence, again…
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Let´s not die this post. I am still waiting for Memrise answer to such a horrendous Frankenstein.
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No sign of any change. They’ve got 8 million-odd regular users, apparently, won an award for innovation earlier this year, 25 members of staff currently and 7 jobs they’re recruiting for. Not one of them is a customer services role, all of them seem to be technical, which is a huge mistake.
As far as they’re concerned, fewer than 200 people have posted on this thread, including multiple posts from the same person, so we can either: 1) bugger off to somewhere else, like Quizlette or Anki; 2) shut up and keep using the service; 3) talk amongst ourselves and keep using the service.
They may yet discover that just because they’ve been in profit for the last year or so and have also recruited lots of new members who are young children, doesn’t mean that that profit will last if their target market remains limited to such young children. Parents will cancel subscriptions when their child gets bored or struggles to get past a beginner or lower-intermediate level by themselves, without the motivation and self-discipline that older, more independent language learners have: after a few months, or a year max., if that’s the length of their subscription, parents will cancel on their children’s behalf.
Their business model is doomed to fail if they focus entirely on hoping young users and their parents forget to cancel the contract until it roles over next time, and more will come along just like them to cover next month’s costs when the original batch do cancel. That is a very sketchy business model that will not last in the long term. Whereas in fact they should make an effort to cultivate the users who made this website so popular: professional linguists, language teachers, and university undergraduates and graduates studying languages. Possibly also A Level students, as I had my part-time job with regular income, bank account and direct debits set up during Sixth Form, but those people will probably be smaller in number than over-18s. The majority of people maye CBA to write on forums but they will vote with their feet and take their money elsewhere.
It’s down to a university acquaintance with pro membership recommending the site to me two years ago for our middle eastern languages degree at Oxford that I have pro membership. I spread the word among students on my course in my year, in the year below, to people on masters courses, to our university academics, and many of those people went on to set up accounts on the basis of my recommendation, some of them also became Pro-members. Each one of us spreading the word, the must-have online account for vocab building, and the people we told who then spread the word themselves to others, are the ones Memrise needs to try to win back the loyalty of. Because there are new first year undergrads and masters students on the beginner language course as of the autumn term that’s just ended, asking for tips from people like me, final-year language students, and I’m not recommending Memrise to those people anymore. Anki and an Excel spreadsheet are less subject to mad updates deleting stuff I’ve cultivated for two years.
@MemriseSupport Memrise: you can do something about this: start communicating with your customers. Hire a customer services representative. Just one who monitors the forums. Is that too much to ask, really? Just one member of staff? Otherwise, you will notice that we will continue to leave your site. My subscription renewal date is in the diary: I’ll cancel just before it rolls over and then it’s over to Anki for me. Unless there’re signs of change, I may not cancel if you start to sort yourselves out. Until then I will continue to tell everyone at Oxford University studying languages who I know (and my word does carry some weight as I’m research staff as well as a student): stay away from Memrise, it’s shockingly bad how you pay up, hear no communication and then they delete features and stay silent on matters like the future of your own vocab banks.
Just my twopennyworth.
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Terrific, thoughtful post, Lydia.
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After working several days with the “improvements” of the last update, I completely agree with the community fellows who say it turned from bad to worse. In my opinion, the changes were made by people who never used themselves memrise for a longer period of time.
My first language is German, and here we have a saying: “Gefährlich wird es, wenn die Dummen fleißig werden” (roughly “we are in troubles when idiots take the initiative”).
Best, Auguste
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Thank you!
Please do not work hard on something no one requested - you screwed up something that was working fine. Even for the courses that I’ve completed, ‘NEXT UP’ up is always ‘Classic review’, no matter how many times I ‘classic review’ it. Please let us know how coercing the user to repeatedly review a course requires a “fair bit of engineering” and how it’s a “carefully picked” session when the session keeps repeating. This improvement is a fair bit of nonsense.
If you want to work hard on something, work on speeding up the web site.
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Summary:
I agree but I don’t think things will change for the better any time soon and these discussions may end up killing the web site as it transitions to a pure app based company.
Expanded comments:
==============================================
I agree with almost all you say but let me play devil’s advocate for a moment here.
This company is essentially a money play for both investors and employees / founders alike. If they are profitable and recruiting for talent, the early money in will be pleased, the recent investors will like the trajectory and there is no real pressure on management to change.
Right now, the people on this thread, as well as others after almost every update of late, are a vocal minority as you say. We are an annoying squeaky wheel in Memrise’s cogs of progress but essentially nothing more (from what I can only guess from reply numbers on change threads).
Their business model might just work. In the past, I’ve worked with startups that have focused on younger target markets and a couple of things stand out: the markets are large across a worldwide demographic and they are “evergreen” since the world is still producing children with internet connectivity. Not to say that the more mature markets (including specifically educational) are not a better target for long term monetary stability (though they are somewhat self-limiting due to many factors), but if a company can manage the churn (new versus expiring memberships) they can easily scale – at least to a profitable exit and that may be the exact goal.
Now, quite honestly (though very unhappily from a user perspective), I think that Memrise staff are doing the exact right thing and not engaging (outside of major bug fixes for identified issues). Their management has set a strategy and they are supposed to implement it, not defend it. They essentially have 2 choices: ignore and hope the furor dies down or accept that they messed up on the updates and are essentially powerless to effect change since they like their jobs. A statement from management would be nice but I doubt that we generate enough revenue for that to be forthcoming.
Unfortunately, I can only see this whole issue going down very badly.
-Memrise essentially shuts down the forums function and re-directs all people to an appropriate section of an iTunes or Google Play store
- Memrise applies customer service resources to both of the above platforms – on Google Play, they have something like 900K 4/5 star reviews - and they get a community manager to respond there (as well as Twitter et. al.)
- Memrise sunsets / phases out / orderly discontinues the entire web site platform and just puts up a marketing / redirect page.
Sorry – it’s a bit depressing to even write this since I’ve been around since someof the original gardens were planted but I just don’t see the trend changing unless there is a major shift in the financials (I will continue to at least sporadically use their free service – if nothing else to take up a few CPU cycles on their cloud servers 
) .
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So sad.
I think it’s already time to try to save your courses by transfering them to Anki:
I did it already, just in case another “improvement” is around the corner.
Therefore I recommend everybody to do it before it’s too late!
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Well, people, worry not. Apparently they read this thread as someone just removed my post (it was the first reply here).
jk, people, do worry lot. Export everything you can, dat boat gonna sink.
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I have a 21” monitor on my PC, I don’t need an ocean of blank space just so I can click on a tiny box to check what’s going on in my course and then click again in order to get back to infinite vastness of my “dashboard” only to do the same thing over and over and over to check my sixty-six courses (and lots of people have even more, mind you)! Now THAT’S a way to “improve” simple scroll! 
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Could you please attach a picture of the aforementioned screen. I might need some evidence for a talk this Friday. Thanks
They just removed my comment too without any notification. It was just “mrw I look at the hideous ‘new and improved’ dashboard” followed by a gif of Clint Eastwood cringing. I didn’t realize Memrise was based in North Korea…
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