If you're starting a new product category and competing with 'free', should you offer a free tier?
Hey, Jonny from progressionapp.com
Some context:
We're a B2B 'progression framework/personal development' proposition. We help our customers to build progression frameworks and career ladders for their teams, then allow their teams to measure themselves against those frameworks.
Our main competition is g-suite (spreadsheets and google docs, for examples go to https://progression.fyi). Managers are used to the flexibility of this, but it lacks any structure or guidance to the content (which is very painful to write), a nice mobile optimised experience for their teams, and any interactive layer for measurement, which we think is the real win.
We believe that over time we can make it (a) easier to write and configure (b) more powerful down the road for teams to use. But competing with free is challenging. We're currently in closed beta with a few customers and testing pricing.
My questions:
Should we be offering a free tier to lower that barrier to entry?
Are there any other saas models we can be looking at as examples of this done well?
Anyone got experience of freemium? What is the cost in terms of team time?
You are a B2B solution. Businesses, at least well-managed ones, don't care to say a few hundred bucks per month. They want to use a solution that solves their problem. If your solution is better than those based on gsuite, you will have no problem converting.
Honestly, I don't like freemium for small companies. The most common result is that they offer a too generous free tier and end up killing their sales. Put a free trial with CC. Data shows that asking the credit card leads to more conversions and you will avoid time wasters.
Offer help for the onboarding process, add a video demo and some text based guides that you can send through email and explain how to use your product.
Yeah onboarding support has got to be the way forwards. Thinking of advertising it as a cost on the site then offering it 'free' for all annual subs.
Don't start with freemium. It's usually pretty difficult to push freemium users to a paid subscription.
Your solution looks really extensive already. Why don't you try to sell a 'launch' offer to your current waiting list? Pay 6 months of Progression right now, and you'll get a free onboarding and 12 full months of the subscription.
I can imagine that your audience gets excited looking at the screenshots. It might be a really good experiment to understand more about future sales cycles.
Thanks Lucas! Valid point. We just need to work out what we can afford to sell the product for and then discount accordingly :)
(Free onboarding ftw when your onboarding process is not perfect!)
I'm working very closely with a company that is charging for setup (basically a paid onboarding). Their software isn't self-service yet, so they positioned the manual onboarding as a way of 'setting it up perfect'.
By offering a 60-day money back guarantee, you basically take away all the doubts during the sales process.
For people that are able to quickly decide if they want to continue you can offer a 50% discount on the setup fee.
Ah interesting. I'd love to know more about that if you can share the details? Sounds super relevant to us.
(Not sure if IH supports any kind of DM, but you can DM me on twitter twitter.com/jonnyburch)
You have a kind of product that a trial would be more effective, it needs some setup to start working, and since it is done the user will be more inclined to pay.
You have a great landing page and content, congrats.
Thanks @Eduz07 – yeah a trial feels right.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Ah thanks @ybrickman – yeah I'm a big fan of https://tuple.app pricing (no trial, but money back guarantee) – but they have a great video demo which will likely ease people's upfront fears. I think that might really help us out too.