If your SaaS startup is not generating revenue and traction, will you make it free?
The reason to make it free would be to atleast generate some traction and not waste the efforts that went in building it.
The reason to make it free would be to atleast generate some traction and not waste the efforts that went in building it.
No, I will try to learn and understand what's stopping free users to upgrade to paying plans.
@MilanM , if there is no traction with an offering with some free credits, there is a possibility that one is not targetting the right audience and the audience that one is reaching out in current marketing efforts doesn't resonate with the pain point that this offering is trying to solve. Or, the offering doesn't meet the pain point of the audience adequately enough for them to make an investment in the offering in the form of either purchase or time (using free credit). A pivot in either customer segment or feature could be worth considerations in this situation.
Thanks Shashank. I agree with you on pivoting customer segment and hence I was thinking of making my SaaS free to make it easier for me to market and customers to trust.
I agree with Shashank on providing free credits upon signing up. Once they use it and find value, they will eventually pay and continue.
Cool. We at GitHustle (www.githustle.com) have rolled out a new offering - CustomerDiscovery. This covers coaching + execution support for validation of key aspects of the business model, getting a clarity on the target market, finding early users/ customers and discovery of ways to reach out to early users. This is rolled out as a private launch, so you will not find details on this on the website. But, if this looks interesting to you, I can send you details on email.
Ok can you email me on milan84 at gmail.com
@MilanM I have send you details to your email.
Originally I was going to charge for my service up front, but after considering the time it will take to build a userbase that makes the service useful I have decided to do a long term trial to start and shorten the free trial period as I gain users and the service provides more value. Eventually I will either make the trial very short (somewhere around a week or a month) or remove it completely. I plan on marketing/promoting it in the same fashion that I was going to when it was paid for up front, I think that investing into finding good initial users will pay off in the long run for my service specifically.
If after some time it becomes clear that the service isn't going to make money, I will probably just tone down some of the features that are more expensive to maintain and make it completely free. It will be less useful as the full featured version, but it won't cost me much to keep running ($10-$15 a month) and it is something I will be using my self.
For my service, which is a consumer service, I will mainly be using social media ad's to get it in front of the target audience. I have also found some online communities that are part of the niche and will be posting content to them.
Why would you want to do that? The moment I'll make a product (partially) free, it will cost me (even) more money to run it.
If I don't get people to pay for my product, I need to figure out why. Is my product lacking? Fix it? Are my customers not willing to pay for it? Find other customers.
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I have a couple open source projects with quite a few users. Another reason not to do it is the cost and time to support it. Free users request features, get pissy when there are bugs, and demand time and effort that they have no intention of compensating you for.
The amount of effort it takes to deal with an open source community and their general attitude towards open source maintainers these days has really turned me off the idea of working for a bunch of assholes for free.
I certainly appreciate the major open source projects I use and I try to give back as much as I can and pay for software that I depend on. But as a solo developer, I don't think it makes much sense to open source things unless it's part of a larger strategy to get revenue.
Thanks for sharing your story.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago