Freemium vs Paid with Trial
I spent 6 months building a B2B SaaS startup with a small team (Me, Full time as CEO, a CTO part time/evenings, 2x Developers Part time/evenings), raked up £25k in personal debt and ultimately failed and took a full time job.
We got fantastic feedback from prospective customers, but no-one would commit to buying as it "wasn't the right time". It was a paid product, with an annual subscription, as well as a lifetime subscription.
We got tons of people interested in free trials but at the end of the trial, as much as people would want to buy it (because they felt it truly solved their problem), not a single person did.
Now that I've recovered from my salty burnout period (I went full time about 6-7 weeks ago), I can't help but hate the idea of getting back out there and selling again.
I love the idea of giving something out for free, with a chance that a small percentage of the users take up the 'premium' option or purchase small addons here/there.
I'm not sure if my mindset is this way because of my recent failure.
Tell me your experiences - Freemium vs Paid from day 1?
It's interesting that they never paid even though the product solved the problem. What was the problem the product aimed to solve? Does it have a high pain level and/or occur often? I also wonder if those comments were of one of the "traps" discussed in the book The Mom Test.
I'm working on a B2C mobile app (called Lookscope which I've transitioned it from a completely free product, to a paid app (for installs), then to a freemium app. With the freemium model, the highest single sale has been around US$50 for its annual subscription.
I've never tried the full-subscription with no free tier, so I'm kinda just sharing thoughts without data to back up. I think the freemium model is fine if there is a viable plan to make money from free users (e.g., ads, affiliate). Another good reason for trying freemium would be when the value prop of the product isn't super clear yet, because offering for free can at least allow you to monitor how users interact with the product and check whether they actually get real value out of it. My app had a bunch of long-time (2+ yrs) users who have not paid. I haven't made any money from these people yet, but I was able to run surveys, get positive ratings, interview them for customer development and use the collected knowledge to improve the value prop of my product. This improvement helped me sell the app's subscription product to new users more effectively.
I'm curious about others' views on full subscription.