Make community paid vs free
Hi there,
I'm currently working on a community encouraging people to read more.
In the process I have thought about wether to make the community free and therefore available for everyone, or paid.
If I would make it free then:
- It would be available for everyone
- more users
- more activity
- more bots
- less income?
- reliance on sponsors/affiliates (this is a real pain point, as I don't really want to
include i.e. amazon affiliate links to the books on the page, as I don't really like
that company)
If I would make it paid then:
- More income?
- No reliance on other sponsors or affiliates
- More engaged users
- No bots
- Less users
- Users are hard to acquire
I would prefer to make it paid, though I am a bit doubtful how to go about acquiring the first user. I mean, the first person who signs up will have no one else to talk to then me in the community.
Do you have other arguments I should take into account?
If you have created a community, how did you choose which way to go?
How would I go about getting my first users if I made it paid?
Tagging @sergiomattei and all other community makers.
What's your product, like an online book club? Maybe you can start book discussions (free) to build a community first and see if people find value in it. It would be useful to get feedback from your users and ask them what they would pay for, if anything. I'm just about to do just that for one of my side projects and I'll post the result to IH soon!
But if you're trying to encourage people to read, then it sounds like it would difficult to ask a user to pay for something that they're not inclined to do in the first place!
If your service is of value to people, they will pay for it, and if you want to keep providing it, you should be charging for it (you need to eat and pay bills don't you). If its not valuable day 1, but has the potential to be, you need to create that value, and then once it exists, charge money for it.
If you can create that value, and at the same time make money doing it, this is the best case scenario. If you can't, then you take the hit and make it free until you build up enough of a value proposition where you can charge for it. The more inelastic the demand, the more valuable your service/product, the more you can charge.
Capitalism 101.
How about a free one month trial? That way you could get people to atleast try your product. When they sign up keep them engaged so they don't churn. I made a community website AppLibsList and now providing advertised sponsorship. Let's see how it goes.
Would you say that it would churn a lot of people to make people enter their credit card when signing up for a free trial?
Preventing bots is a valid concern.
Credit card would turn them away, one way to prevent bots is to have email verification or captcha.