7 days. 7000 visits.
For the past three months I've worked with a developer on creating a map for tracking fishing vessels.
My site went live last weekend where I posted in a bunch of niche facebook groups asking for feedback. I gathered 7000 visits, 80.000 interactions on the map page and 850 email subscriptions.
The problem is costs and when to introduce a paywall.
Google Maps API costs will rise significantly with every interaction so I'm having a dilemma of whether I should introduce a paywall immediately and face threat of slower growth or try and get as many signups as possible before introducing a paywall ( equals much higher costs).
A few companies will get back to me this week about advertising but the long term goals is MRR or ARR from users.
Congrats! That's awesome!
Do you have a good feel for short-term growth trends and recurring user #s? Might be worth waiting for more user data before making any drastic changes (considering it's only been a week).
In terms of a paywall, what alternatives have you explored? Perhaps, you introduce a tiered subscription service (including a free option). Don't necessarily think it needs to be a paid, all-or-nothing product from the get-go.
Curious to hear what all you've looked into.
Closed the site jan 1. 2021 - went from 3-500 daily users down to only paying with 7 day free trial. Currently averaging 100 active subs.
Go back and forth with freemium / premium (more usage, could leverage banner ads for freemium, and learn to convert to higher paying features)
or stick to
7 day free trial and subscriptions. My problem is high churn as all the competition uses freemium so having a hard time truely proving value! with free trial & mrr I'm missing out on ad revenue if I had free roaming users.
Anyone know how to solve this math problem ? ;D
What would you do? Go immediately to paywall and grow at a slower pace or try and get as much attention as possible with threat of much higher costs
Depends a lot on what your runway is. Do you have money budgeted for the potential costs?
Can you try to guess how big you can grow it before introducing a paywall and what exactly that will mean on the cost side? Then you can work backwards and make the potential cost fit into your budget.
The other question to ask yourself is how do you know that people interacting with it for free will convert at all once they have to pay? Really the only way to find that out is to make them pay and look at the numbers.
Could you potentially come up with a freemium solution where they get a certain number of interactions before having to pay? This seems like it may be the best of both worlds because you should get paying customers to offset of the costs of the interactions of the free customers.
which I would have seen this comment a year ago as it makes so much sense right now.
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This comment was deleted 5 years ago
we moved to leaflet. Took forever but afterwards - much cheaper and better than Google maps.