How valuable are free users?
Hello indie hackers,
Hope 2023 has been great for so far!
I recently just hit 300 users for my startup Affistash, I decided around a week ago, that we will give full free access to all of the users, even though we had around 15 users paying for the paid plan. (We used to have 2 plans on the platform, a free & paid plan).
So right now, the product is only going to generate revenue through our B2B activity, which means that in order to be able to attract companies to get listed on the platform we will need a big user base.
Right now, we are growing around 20-30 signups every day, and I am planning to start actively reaching out to companies to get listed on our platform when we reach around 1000 users. Also, we have a return rate of around 20% for the users and when we send promotional emails, we have around 30% open rate.
I was wondering if I can get some more feedback on the approach, and I also wanted to know how valuable do you consider free users? What are some tips you guys have to maximise value of free users?
Looking forward to see what you guys think :)
Free users are potential paid users in the future, thus they should also be served well. Besides this, free users makes the community (if any) looks more active which is a good sign for all customers and investors.
I completely agree with the community aspect
Thanks for shearing this, really interesting
Been building multiple products like Micro SaaS HQ, Siteoly, Flezr and I would say free users are very valuable based on your conversion strategies and conversion rates.
Interesting, I have been thinking about this for a while, do you think it's better to drive traffic to your free plans and try to convert those users into paid ones, or should you drive the users mainly to your paid plan? Curious on what you think
I believe free users are very valuable!
First they help you validate and build product the user love (if you focus on collecting feedbacks),
Second, there is many ways to monetize them when you feel ready, depending on your product and goals.
Interesting point. I love the validation factor too, I have to admit. I am planning to gather a big dataset and after that try to make money using placements on the platform. We have already introduced that, but I am not marketing it actively
Link: https://affistash.com/companies (if you have a startup, you might be interested : ) )
Kinda trying to go the producthunt way
Nice, I like your product :)
Let me know when you launch it on product hunt, I will give you a shutout.
By the way I saw you don’t have a feedback component, and as you already know I am a big believer in user feedback.
Register to my early birds list to get free access soon -
https://feedbackuser.webflow.io/
xD I already signed up for your product, i have seen one of your posts on indie hackers
We launched on product hunt around 2 weeks ago
Lol nice! Sorry for missing your launch. Reach me out through Twitter and I will try to help by retweet your launch :)
https://twitter.com/noam_sachartov
Free users are like low hanging fruits for future. Having free users is adding a lot in product validation itself. You can send all free users different case studies of paid users and how they're taking value out of your paid plan, this will certainly push to paid plan