Make your users commit to the subscription before they start their trial

Before you start reading this, you should be aware that I am not an expert in marketing or finance, I am a developer who built web apps, some of them having premium versions that makes me enough money I don't need to think about having a day job. The advice I write is from my own personal and particular experience, and it might not be the best way for other startups, but it might be a way to go for some of them who struggle to get paying customers.

I am writing this post at suggestion of a member of this community, after I have the same suggestion to more threads to fellow indie hackers who were struggling with their SaaS startup.

The problem faced by our fellow indie hackers was that despite they had hundreds of trial sign-ups, none of them converted to a paid membership. I remembered that few years ago, when I launched one of my products, a premium version of a free WordPress plugin, I had about 500 sign-ups on website in the first few days, but no one subscribed to the premium version.

I understand that there might be a lot of causes for this, bad client funnel, bad landing page, unattractive call to actions, no persuasion, etc. Then, I read a lot of articles with tips on how to create better landing pages, how to write better emails, how to make users convert, but I realized that I am not a marketer, I am a developer and the best thing I can do is to invest most of my time in developing a better product, and spend less time sending emails.

What I did was to make the users to create a trial subscription at my payment processor ( most of them allow this ). Then I started to get dozens of trial subscriptions created. Around 30-50% of them continued their subscription after the trial period, for long periods.

Some of you might think that in this way customers might be fooled and taken advantage of those who forget to cancel the subscription. I don't think this is the case, because the payment processor is sending automated emails before the trial ends, with links to unsubscribe.

The problems I figured it that in the previous scenario, people that sign-up for trial without creating a subscription does not pay enough attention and forget about it. The subscription created and an action needed to cancel creates a deadline to test the product before they either start paying for it or cancel. The paid subscription creates an incentive to finish what they started: evaluate the product until the trial period ends.

I understand that I might miss customers that are completely against creating a subscription with the payment processor before they have a change to evaluate the product without any commitment, but I think that this compensate with the time I am saving trying to persuade people to create the subscription after the trial period. This might not apply when the product reaches a certain level, but at the starting point, in the first few years, I think that it is more important to invest the time into developing the product, instead of employing different marketing techniques.

Another aspect that should be taken into consideration is that I have e completely free version, so people already know that there is a real product before trying premium version. So users are not lost, but if they are not familiar with creating the subscription for the trial, they can still remain users of the free version. If I had time to invest in marketing, I could persuade those to become users of the premium version.

Having implemented a system with low marketing efforts, leaves me more time to invest in developing the product, or to work on other products that are waiting on the list. As I previously said, this might not apply to indie hackers who are good on marketing, or to ones that have in plan to employ marketing teams. However, since this is a startup community, I think that my advice is worth trying, especially for developers who want to abandon their product thinking that people don't want to pay it, statement which might be completely false.