Have you tried bootstrapping freemium?
Has anyone here tried bootstrapping a freemium model with their startup?
I'm contemplating trying it with my next startup but I'm concerned it may be too expensive / time-consuming to maintain.
Have you tried it? Is it working for you?
How are you minimising / offsetting the costs of your free users?
What was your experience if it didn't work for you?
Me and my team (friends) have done this with our app Chap (https://trychap.com)
I think it depends if your startup is b2b or b2c. As you might know, b2c requires extensive marketing experience which we didn't have (and frankly barely have now, though we continue to learn).
Our MRR is currently ~$200, and it's been roughly a year and 4 months. Our expenses are roughly that as well. I think if we had known what we know now back then, we would be 4x the revenue, but that's another topic.
So, in our experience, it's definitely hard to maintain. However, I feel like there's a lot of variables that matter. For example, 1. we all had full-time jobs to maintain, 2. our app is in a VERY broad category with lots of competition, 3. we didn't really spend any money other than the necessities, 4. motivation waned from time to time.
So I think it just really depends on a lot of factors and not just the fact that it's a freemium model.
Thanks for sharing Paul. Do you think freemium has given you any benefits that you wouldn't have otherwise?
I can't say for sure but I think so. We chose our model because in terms of apps, people feel a real friction in paying even a low fee of like $3 or something, when they would easily pay $20 for an item on Amazon or something like that. So most apps in our category have the same model. I think there is one big one charging $7-8 upfront - I'd be curious to see their inner workings compared to a similar app with a similar audience with a freemium model.
However, I think where we messed up was actually giving free users too much. We wanted free users to be able to pretty much use the app without ever paying for it because that is what we would want for ourselves. However, as you can imagine - probably not the best business model for revenue!
We're still learning and growing though, so our workaround so far is simply adding more features to entice people in using the subscription version.
Don't do it Ryan - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-freemium-free-trials-are-a-terrible-growth-strategy-for-startups-937542e2a1