You know how you have one Netflix account shared within your immediate family, a few colleagues, that couple you met on holiday and your family physician? So, that's called 

. We've all done it at one point or another, and by and large, most people see it as a victimless crime since the only ones put out by it are big, faceless corporations who make too much money and probably test their products on puppies or babies or something equally defenseless and small.

The thing is, it's been happening at Prezly in some form for about as long as Prezly has existed, and we haven't tested anything on a puppy in years. Even so, the problem has never been huge.

 to scrap the user minimum and instead price each subscription per user, with the option to pay more if you want extra features like additional newsrooms. This meant that our cheapest plan went from €240 to just €40 per month. It also meant that bootstrapped startups and one-person NGO teams could use the same tools as the biggest agencies and enterprise powerhouses. We counted that as a win 🎉

But even with subscriptions stripped back to about a third of what they had been, account sharing went up. People will always try to lower the price; it's in our nature.

Why pay for three seats when you can get one and share the login?

Honestly, we often look the other way if there are only a couple of people involved, or if the activity is limited. I get the feeling that many companies do the same. There's no way the people at Netflix buy that the members of my household habitually travel between Leuven, Brussels, London, New York and the Hague.

But even if the cost of lost subscriptions isn't that high in the grand scheme of things – Prezly has been generating a healthy revenue for years and continues to do so – there are  other hits you will take by allowing account sharing to take place: it's harder to give support, security issues, misuse of team resources, a drop in quality for all users, and a potential loss of trust.

Let's use an example to illustrate what I mean.

Walk into any McDonald's in the US or Canada and you can get a coca-cola with the promise of free refills for the duration of your meal.

: you pay a set amount to use our software for the month or the year, and fill the CRM with as many contacts as you like, send out however many campaigns you need to, publish all the stories you want. Endless multimedia, unlimited comms, and support are always there when you need it.

To ensure that everyone wins, it's generally understood that some baseline rules go unspoken.

So at what point does it become too much?

What if it's not a couple of friends that walk in, but a busload of tourists. They drive up to the McDonald's, come in, take a seat – all two dozen of them – and order a single drink.

Maybe they wheel in their own barrel, surreptitiously plugging a tube into the bottom of their cup to siphon off the stream of coke until the machine's sputtering. At which point they turn to the cashier and ask that they come to fix it, and fill it up again. So she does, while the queue of regulars stacks up, getting more and more impatient. A few walk out the door.

The majority of people wouldn't dream of walking into McDonald's and doing something like that. Hell, they probably wouldn't even pull that stunt in a Wendy's. Online on the other hand? It's all too easy.

Here are some anonymized stats on the account sharing we see every day:

It is hard to put that into revenue numbers as we know not all those customers are planning to upgrade their accounts to include a seat for every team member and it's not factoring in volume discounts, but lets try

It's easy to think of companies as greedy capitalists whose main ambition is to wring every cent from prospective customers. But there's another level to it.

For a relatively small business, particularly a bootstrapped one that cannot rely on any external investment, that missed revenue (100k/year) means we cannot hire additional developers to build out the 12345 features our existing clients have asked for. 

Perhaps more annoyingly, Prezly wasn't intended for multiple people to use the same user account, so the practice messes up functions like conversation tracking with CRM contacts and the history of who published what story when, who sent out which pitches and campaigns, and so on – features that are absolutely core to the way Prezly functions.

(Not to mention that it's not exactly fair for the 88% of our clients who pay for our product according to their usage.)

Today there are about 100 people taking advantage of Prezly's bottomless brunch system. For now, we're approaching tackling this account sharing in tiers.

Speak with the worst offenders, letting them know that we know they're account sharing and informing them of the 

 (that this is against our terms of service, that it messes up the history within their account, that it can compromise security).

Tier 2: The slightly inconveniencing carrot 🥕

If the polite nudging from tier 1 doesn't work, we wait for our system to flag that there are too many people accessing an account simultaneously and we force a password reset. It's easy for people to get around, but gives enough inconvenience to show that hey, we weren't kidding about this "breaking our terms of service" thing. Please cut it out.

If those doing the account sharing continue to ignore our warnings and don't respond to our emails to work something out in good stead, we put on our big-boy pants.

Honestly? Sort of. We had the carrot conversation with a few accounts and some of them made allowances by paying for additional seats or pinky-promising not to account share again. Others were less cooperative, so we're in the process of making a go of the tier 2 response, which is proving a bit trickier than expected. I'll update this post with the results once we have them.

For now, I'll reset my Netflix account and politely mention to my aunt, colleague, and the barista at my favourite coffee shop that it might be time they get their own.

I'd love to hear your perspective on this. Have you dealt with this? Do you see it as a problem? Should we just let it go? Is this all a capitalist scheme to help us fill our swimming pool with coins? 

Looked into some numbers on account sharing @Prezly and discovered:• 2% of customers with extreme account sharing activity (more than 10 simultaneous sessions)• 10% of customers showing mild account sharing activity (3-5 simultaneous sessions)1/4— Gijs Nelissen (@digitalbase) August 25, 2021



Gijs Nelissen on Twitter

English (Global)

Lifelog

You know how you have one Netflix account shared within your immediate family, a few colleagues, that couple you met on holiday and your family physician? So, that's called account sharing. We've all done it at one point or another, and by and large, most people see it as a victimless crime since the only ones put out by it are big, faceless corporations who make too much money and probably test their products on puppies or babies or something equally defenseless and small.

Account Sharing and Free Coca-Cola Refills

This holiday we spent a month with the family in Sweden 🇸🇪. It was awesome. This is a quick write-up of note-worthy tips, the route of our trip and the experience travelling with a family of 5.

We were in a big mobile home (7.5 meters) that has a sleeping capacity of 6. With everyone sleeping inside it tends to get really crowded and it takes a while to transform the living area into the sleeping area. 

The biggest disadvantage of sleeping inside is that the living room can not be used as soon as the kids go to bed (between 8 and 9). Considering that in some areas there are a lot of mosquitos once the sun goes down we figured we'd bring two 10-second tents to have 4 more sleeping places outside.

Other stuff I took to make the trip more noteworthy:

I think i'm doing something wrong. Bike (left), Mattrass, SUP board (right)

We started the trip in Trelleborg and did a tour from the South to the East coast of Sweden all the way up to Stockholm (which is only about 1/3th of the country). Sweden is Huge!

We arrived on the ferry (from Rostock Germany) in Trelleborg. Since it was late, 22:30 when we got through border control, we drove to the closest camping which in hindsight was the most commercial and expensive camping we did in the entire holiday. 

On the map, it looked great (South West corner of Sweden) but it was pretty much a full campsite with over 100 campers nicely parked between 4 lines. Icecreams and mini-golf at the reception 😱

In the morning I could not wait to get out of there and discover 'real' Sweden. Based on weather forecasts we decided to do the East coast and drive our way up to Stockholm. 

Leaving the camping site our first stop Falsterbo beach. On our way there we passed Mikes pizza restaurant with a huge 'Pizza World Champion' banner which did it for the kids. Bribed the kids with some variation of 

We'll go to the pizza place after you all play on the beach/in the water to 

It was later afternoon when we left the Pizza place with destination Ystad. The sun was out a curly road that was right next to the ocean and trees/forest on the other side. A few km's later our kids saw someone diving from a small jetty and asked me to pull over. 

On the parking, we met a super nice German couple who were wrapping up their 3 week holiday and decided to stay. 

It was a super nice spot next to a small sand beach! The road was close (30 meters) but it didn't bother us that much. First chance to take out the SUP-board and Canoo so decided to go all the way 💪🏻. Kids wanted to sleep in the tent, and after they were all down we spent a super nice evening with the neighbour couple that was travelling with a 6-month baby.

After saying goodbye we were on our way to Ystad where we took off the bikes for a short tour and our first chance to do a Swedish Fika (tea/pastry) after which we took a long drive. With the evening approaching most of the spots on Park4night were taken and we had to keep driving to end up in Gislövhammar where there was a small green campsite with a great view over the sea. 

Drove 150km to end up on the East coast of Sweden

The kids made friends, we met a lovely Belgian couple and their dog and decided to stay another day. The second day we went for a Belgian BBQ and invited another Dutch couple to join us (to finish the wine). 

In the 2 days on this campsite we also did:

The next day we stayed in a small harbour in Hörviks Hamn. When we arrived all the paying/good spots were taken but I managed to find a spot that was not intended for camping. The spot turned out to be great. It was 5 meters from a small beach. 

 where we had our first restaurant visit so far. It was great (although the restaurant was understaffed and everything took so long). The kids were playing near the docks, we had the best riesling, the good was great and we could watch the sunset from our table. ♥️

The next morning I took Annelies on the SUP-board before we resumed the journey. Next stop: Karlskrona (or somewhere close).

I got a tip from the German couple (day 2) that the islands near Carlkrona are super calm and worth a visit.

On our way to the bookmarked spot, we passed some small camping sites one of which was 

 which turned out to be an awesome camping site. Only 4-5 campers, a small private beach, trees all the way to the coastline and evening sun. That's our spot!

We stayed there for 3 days. The kids were enjoying themselves swimming to the island on the other side or spending time on the playing ground. On the 2nd day, we spent time in Karlskrona. I took off the bikes and we biked across the city visiting the submarine museum, the marina and the park. Beautiful day!

Week 2 - East Coast + Öland and Stockholm

We initially wanted to visit Gotland but the ferries were all booked. Some of the people we met warned us that Öland is super touristic and some of them were advising us to skip it. As it was raining that day and we wanted to drive over the bridge we decided to give it a go driving all the way up to the North of Oland.

I didn't like the harbour that much as there were too many campers, it was very windy and pretty much concrete everywhere you could see. Had some time to dry some of our laundry (the previous place had a washing machine) but didn't trust the kids to just hang in the harbour because of the wind and the water.

We found a great restaurant in the harbour and enjoyed some seafood where I encouraged the kids to all try an Oyster (which they did. Didn't like it).

After the kids went to sleep I met a group of travelling swedes that invited me to have a few drinks. I brought Belgian beers. Stayed there until about 2 in the morning where they convinced me to try a few of their typical Swedish drinks: Rum/Coke, Sprite/Rum and Whiskey 🤕

The next day was rainy and we decided to drive to Vimmersby to visit the Astrid Lindgren (

) museum. The inside of the museum was not that impressive (I get bored really fast) but the gardens were great!

I wanted to find a super isolated spot and try 'real' free camping (preferably next to a lake). We drove around for a bit and were looking at google maps to find a small road that led to the water. Took about 45 minutes to find a great spot with no one around.

Stayed there for 1 night only and drove up to a super nice farm in Ydre. We were welcomed by a couple that, together with their 3 kids, moved to Sweden 1 year ago to start a small farm. There were able to buy a piece of land for in his words 'less than a new Volkswagen transporter' 🤩

Every night (stayed for 2 nights) we sat around the campfire and met other guests staying there or had some time to get to know the hosts and their stories. Awesome memories, hope I can be there someday and see what they did with the farm.

In the morning it was pouring rain which made the host happy as it hadn't really rained in about 3 months. Joked about Belgians taking the bad weather with us and left for Stockholm.

Because of the weather forecast, we decided to book a short stay somewhere close to Stockholm to visit the city. We found a great spot on Airbnb next to a river with our own private jetty. The house had a separate lake house with 2 extra beds, a Sauna (which turned out was not working) and a great kitchen. A nice feeling after spending 10 days in a 2x6 camper van 😀

Enjoyed spending some time in Stockholm and were able to meet 

's family (and baby). My kids were so happy to see Frederik again (we worked together quite intensively a few years ago starting Prezly). We made some great memories!

The day after we spent a day in the city Center of Stockholm, gave the mobile home a good clean and started planning the rest of the trip as it was time to see the rest of Sweden.

The next morning I wake up with this view from the bedroom. 

We wanted to spend more time around the big lakes and drove to Västerås (pronounced Westeros like GoT). 

We found a nice spot on an almost empty grass field next to 

 which was built over a small river. There was a mini-golf terrain, almost no tourists and a nice pizza place which made us stay for a day longer.

The kids wanted to swim and I promised them to do a big tour on the river with the sup board. Inflating the board is a real workout as it needs 1.5 bar to work well but it was totally worth it! We spent a few hours on the water making sure the kids were tired enough for a smooth bed routine 😴

The next day we drove to Örebro to visit the Stadspark which was advertised as one of the most beautiful parks in Sweden. While the kids were playing in the playing ground had some time to walk through the park and found this beautiful walnut tree.

After the kids were tired of the playing ground I told them they'd get ice cream if they could guess which tree in the park is on my top-5 of the most beautiful trees I've ever seen. They guessed it quite easily 🍦

We left the city park and drove all the way up to Värern which is the biggest lake in Sweden and one of the largest lakes in Europe. It's beautiful.

Found a camping spot right on the east side of the lake. Sun was out, no clouds at all so time to set everything up and take a swim. The water was super clean and we stayed in much longer than planned. After dinner, I told the kids to go and find some wood to make a campfire. We had bought marshmallows a little earlier and allowed the kids to get sugared up right before they went to sleep 😫

Annelies wanted to go more North to see real Sweden so we left early the next day driving  North and closer to the border of Norway. Most of the campsites were full and there were noticeable fewer spots on park4night. We landed in Årjängs Hembygdsgård, a small camping site next to a lake. 

The best thing about this spot was a nearby coffee bar/restaurant/hotel that had an awesome backside terrace with a view over the lake. We went in for a quick coffee and spent almost 3 hours. We started talking to the staff, met a fellow Belgian couple while the kids were playing inside. The place was so awesome that we had to get a table for dinner the same evening. One of the best meals/experiences we have had in Sweden so far! Even with the limited menu choice (we did not have a choice) the food was great, the staff super helpful and the view was stunning.

Kids finishing their chocolate dessert - Sunset

We wanted to get back to the lakes so drove all the way down to Upperud where we found a horse farm that rented out Canoes. Because it was raining all evening we went to bed early and kept everyone inside (no tents). In the morning we prepared lunch, double-coated the kids with sunscreen and put on the lifejackets. Canoe trip!

This turned out to be awesome! From the farm, we had to follow a small creek for about 1 kilometre to get to a side lake of Värern. Choices for Canoes were limited so we got two single Canoes and a double one. I took Marcel and Lucie in the double one where our youngest sat on my lap. This was quite a workout and outside of the kids complaining (I'm tired! I'm hungry! My arms!) it was by far the most exciting thing we did so far.

We spent about 4 hours on the water and got back to the camper about 30 minutes before a big thunderstorm. Packed up the tents and decided to drive through the bad weather on our way to the bottom of the lakes. We arrived in Kedumstorp later that evening. Everyone was tired after the boat ride and road trip so we took out a pizza and stayed over in what in retrospect was the worst spot of the holiday (which was still a 6/10). We left at 9:30 to drive to Hjo.

In Hjo I did not want to camp in the commercial campsites or harbour so looked for a spot close by so we could visit the city by bike. Found an awesome spot close to a small lake west of Hjo.

Outside of the flies (there was a public toilet that desperately needed taking care off), it was a great spot! 

Our camper, tent. And the small hut with toilet

We ended up staying for 2 days with mini bike trips to Hjo city centre where we had the best ice cream. The sunsets on this spot were awesome and the water was only 50cm deep for the first part of the lake. This allowed the kids to play in the water until it was time to sleep or food.

Because the water in the lake was a little smelly we needed to wash ourselves every time we came out. We figured out we could do outside showers opening the camper side window and pulling out the showerhead.

All the books about Sweden talked about the west coast being so beautiful. The Swedish people we met during the holiday told us that it's the side of Sweden the Norwegians took over

They like to come over with their big boats, expensive cards and you know, they just take over...

So we had mixed feelings about exploring the west coast. We drove up all the way to the Norwegian border where we stayed on a small farm (with 2 horses). Upon arrival, we were hesitant to stay the night but the owner convinced us

Yesterday a moose came down that hill and were grazing the field here. The German couple that stayed here saw it around 6 in the morning. We also have t

When we left for Sweden we said it would be great to see a wild moose and now we had the opportunity to do so. We set up the camper and tents and called it a night early. I had set my alarm clock to get up around 5 in the morning to start spotting. Nothing :-(

As we were close to the Norwegian border we decided to drive up there to see the Älgafallet waterfall and the old border bridge (t

). After that, we drove up to Strömstad where we had some time to go swimming and found a nice small tapas restaurant. The perfect day ❤️

I did tell Robbert about my morning activity and the white moose and he wanted to double down. 

Dad, if you wake me up I will do the deer watch with you. Maybe Mom can help too...

To maximise our chances we started to search for tips 🤓such as at what time of the day are Moose most active? Do they come in groups or by themselves? I decided to talk to the owner once more to get some more pointers.

Although I was tired of last time, and not too confident we'd have a chance spotting some we agreed to a new schedule for the next morning. 

Crickets 🦗🦗🦗...We were all pretty disappointed not spotting anything significant (2 Crain birds and a small deer) we figured it was time to move on and also prepare the way back to Belgium (ferry vs bridge, driving at night or not...).

 that had some room to park up to 8 campers. As it was a beautiful day we drove down and decided not to visit Goteburg. I don't know what it was but after our Stockholm visit, we didn't feel like getting back to a city. 

Right about when we arrived and set up the tents it started raining while the sun was shining so we had to go hide inside. 

We put the kids to bed on time (a long day) and I found a small window to take a short run. I got lost and didn't want to take my phone so the run took way longer than expected. I think I ran around 15km and arrived around 11:00 where everything was pitch dark.

This holiday we spent a month with the family in Sweden 🇸🇪. It was awesome. This is a quick write-up of note-worthy tips, the route of our trip and the experience travelling with a family of 5.

Swedish Summer 🇸🇪

On February we allowed visitors on the website to sign up for a 14-day trial. At that time we decided to get rid of Hubspot because:

We needed something simpler that we could extend so decided to use airtable for a backend to power the forms on the website (demo, contact form, trial form).

All forms on the website are now submitted to an /api/form endpoint. The most common form on the website is the request a trial flow:

The good part about creating the license first (Prezly Admin API) is that we receive a customer_id and a user_id which can later be used to link sales data back to the original form submission. In a way, you could say that Airtable has the mapping information to link visitor sessions (anonymousId, userId) to Prezly database information.

Turns out Airtable is super friendly to anyone that wants to organise those form submissions in a way that is useful for them. Take this view for example:

Which is an overview of expired customers that have healthy activity. 

Without going into details on how we did it (Lambda functions, Airtable automation and webhooks) here is the information we additionally store into the form submissions base:

It would be nice to get some of that information back into segment.com (and mixpanel) so I create additional reports (

The first thing we do is add the handlers

https://github.com/digitalbase/solving-marketing-attribution/blob/feature/day-11-airtable/src/handlers/segment/segment.serverless.yml#L25-L33

Notice how I add a GET and POST endpoint? They are both doing the same thing but the GET endpoint is easier to use to debug/test and backfill the sales data for the last X months of trials.

The code to fetch data from airtable + fire identify calls is wrapped in a method trackUserSales.

https://github.com/digitalbase/solving-marketing-attribution/blob/feature/day-11-airtable/src/SegmentTracking.js#L106-L145

 (or check out main) to make sure you have all config variables. Using a quick 'sls deploy' should publish that function.

To overwrite/fill in the history of our website data I have copied the list of all userIds from airtable. Other ways to find userIds:

That gave me a list of a few thousand userIds (I went with 3 months) which I stored in 'trial_userids.csv'. Using some bash I called the GET endpoint to backfill that data.

The code to trigger the calls (one call for every line in CSV):

> cat trials_alltime.csv| while read line; do https --print=b --ignore-stdin [LAMBDA_ENDPOIN]/prod/segment/identify/user/$line/sales; done

After I ran that command I could see that sales attribution data in mixpanel:

Trial Requests by Qualification (subset of data)

With the data now being backfilled, I need a way for this to automatically be triggered. I was planning to use Segment.com Personas > Journey for that with the following criteria:

That combination will make sure that we get pretty accurate reporting on new trials while the continuous sync (based on lastSyncedSales) will ensure that even older trials get refreshed every 30 days.

So I set this up using a Journey that looks like this

Personas Journey with 5 branches. Same webhook

 which I modified to support the new steps (by key). The code now looks like this:

https://github.com/digitalbase/solving-marketing-attribution/blob/feature/day-11-airtable/src/handlers/segment/identifyAttribution.js

I set up a similar journey based on the lastSyncedSales property to ensure old trials are kept up to date at least once every month.

Tomorrow I will have a look at the different questions in this post, and if they can now be answered in Mixpanel just using this new data.

On February we allowed visitors on the website to sign up for a 14-day trial. At that time we decided to get rid of Hubspot because:

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Solving Marketing Attribution

Hello! I'm Gijs

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Hello! I'm Gijs

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.css-1hnz6hu{position:static;}.css-1hnz6hu::before{content:'';cursor:inherit;display:block;position:absolute;top:0px;left:0px;z-index:0;width:100%;height:100%;}Account Sharing and Free Coca-Cola Refills

Swedish Summer 🇸🇪

Day 11 - Sales Attribution

Account Sharing and Free Coca-Cola Refills