Any tips for growing your business with a free tier?
We just launched our free tier of Flocknet, a Twitter relationship manager for founders, angel investors, and professionals (https://www.flock.network/) it seems to be pretty well received after just a few days. We're seeing dozens of signups already and haven't done any marketing, announcements, or promotions at all yet.
One thing I wanted to keep in mind before launching my free tier was to have a referral program in place. That way, new free users from day-1 can start helping you grow your network.
Other than referrals, have any of you seen any great ways to get users on your free tier to help you grow the company?
The secret to growing a business with a free tier is simply don’t have a free tier. For an indie hacker is a waste of time and resources. You don’t want free tier users, they’re subpar and will cost you much more than simply acquiring a paid user.
This may be true for many indie business, but certainly not all.
If you can get a free tier user to help you spread the word and acquire paid users, or if you have a strategy for converting them to a paid tier in a short timespan, then it can be worth it.
I personally like picking up the phone vs virtual hustling. It can lead to many untapped networks of their networks where as an email/post could be sitting there for a while (or too impersonal). But it's not sexy or as scalable.
But then again it depends on your industry. My 'customers' who buy into the free or basic tiers origionate from (value based) Facebook groups because they are by nature value seekers. The ones who pay at the highest tier I usually have touched with a few phone calls.
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