How We Used a Private Beta to Get Product Market Fit
How We Used a Private Beta to Get Product Market Fit
I love seeing examples of someone actually "walking the walk" when it comes to finding product market fit. A couple things I learned from this one:
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Private betas/demos are important early on. Do the things that don't scale, they'll get you better results. In this case, they got a great feedback loop from early users.
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Offer lifetime access when asking the initial beta users to pay for the product. Genuis on several levels! You get a small amount of capital ($200 x 100, for example, adds up) and then you have happy loyal users where price does not factor into retention. They will hopefully become your word-of-mouth marketing core.
Thanks for sharing this, Andrew. It was very useful.
I saw on the article you tested out a $200 price point as well. I'm assuming that did not work out. How did you anchor around the $100 price point and especially the lifetime access model? What other models did you try?
For my project, Tribe of Five (www.tribefive.me), the team have been debating the merits of a lifetime membership model.
Obviously our products are not the same so maybe it doesn't directly apply. With that said...
One of my hypotheses / assumptions is that users will be more engaged with a 30 day challenge if they pay for it each time versus paying ONE-time up front for lifetime membership.
The equivalent for your product would be that would your customers would use it more month-to-month if you charged them a monthly fee versus a lifetime fee.
Just my hypothesis though and need to test when we are ready. Would love to hear your thoughts about why you decided to go with $100 lifetime access model.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Hey, Jonathan. This article actually isn't my business so I can't speak about it in much depth.
Tribe of Five looks really cool. Membership site verse SaaS (which is what Fieldboom is) aren't too different in pricing theory since both are non-physical and heavily rely on engagement/use for retention.
I would consider a lifetime membership for just a few initial users. Early adopters may be the most engaged anyway, regardless of the pricing structure. Then monthly/annual pricing after the initial launch.
Best of luck! I joined the waitlist to see what you all put out.
Thanks much for the advice...and sorry for the confusion on my part thinking you were the author when you clearly called out that you were just sharing lessons from a Fieldbloom article.
I like the idea of the initial lifetime membership model. Will spend some time to test this out. It's a great early way to validate our business model.
Really appreciate you signing up for the waitlist! I'll certainly let you know when we launch.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Love your series, thanks a lot for sharing, Andrew!