200 paying customers. Will Fremium help or hinder?
Running www.ga-Insights.com, we've hit 200 paying customers and it's a nice milestone.
An upcoming growth strategy is to include a Fremium model as well as a Free Trial. As you might expect, I'm worried about giving away too much and alienating (or losing) some currently paying customers.
One strategy is to give a cut down version of our report and alerting functionality to users who have less than 50K MAU.
But, I'm struggling with
- Is it worth the development effort?
- Will I hurt or help our business model?
I'd like to be able to say we offer a free tier, as I'm hoping it will look better on product directories, marketing etc. But I know this needs to be carefully considered. We do also have users ask us about free tier regularly, but these might not be the kind of users that have any ROI.
Any thoughts welcome!
Hey, fellow analytics buddy. I'm not sure about the exact question at hand (whether or not to have a freemium model), but one thought that occurs to me looking at your pricing table is that I would not put Slack integration in the free tier.
That's not something that I've actually considered. Mostly because, until recently, Slack was all that we had.
Great idea!
I just read this today, and find it applicable: https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/
If you have paying users, taking the time to understand why they pay and what makes them happy about using your product. If you make those features free, they may end up switching from the paid tier to the free tier.
Also, I'm a big fan of the studies done over at Price Intelligently. Their blog has good stuff: https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog
Thanks!
I'm confused, you say 200 customers but why does your landing page have:
As well as logos of big companies above that section, what are those logos for? Are they actually customers?
We have 6000 users, not paying customers necessarily. I should really update the landing page.
The big companies are a mix of paying customers and users.
I suppose you're asking if we have made this up :) No, we haven't - but we have positioned ourselves as more successful and established than we perhaps are.
I've heard advice go both ways on this. On one hand, free users will cost you money and may not ever end up being good customers where as by having no free tier, you could be limiting upsells.
My product is around the same price point and I do not offer a free tier. The reason is, it's early on (first 50 customers), and I don't want feedback from people to be clouded by what people in the free tier think.
I am planning to offer a free two week trial in the future though once I've spent more time on my onboarding funnel to make sure new users have a great experience.
Don't offer a fermium. Just give a 7-day trial (it will maximize your learning and you will have more serious clients).