My Product Launch Was a Failure - Here's What I'm Doing Differently
In early April, I launched my oh-so-incredible product to the world! Then, crickets.
So, what happened?
I forgot a fundamental rule of the internet: people hate paying for things.
My logic at the time was, "My product is different. People will get it right away." But, without social proof, explaining my product wasn't enough. Users didn't want to enter their credit card details to try an unknown product.
The product itself is incredibly cheap. This is part of the reason I figured people wouldn't mind paying to try it (and a few did). But most potential users were asking for a free trial.
I've now revised my strategy: a 14-day free trial with a credit card required.
I'm going to let this experiment run for a month. If it's still failing to convert users, then there are obviously other issues to address too.
So how did it go?
Hi Jerad,
It might seem that way, but if that was the case, there would be very few successful businesses on or offline.
The real reason that you're struggling to sell your product is not because people hate paying for things, it's because the vast majority of people in your target audience aren't looking to buy the product that you sell.
This isn't just the case for you - it's the case for every business.
It's VERY hard to find active buyers. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack.
The vast majority of people you're reaching aren't active buyers for your solution. And, because the only thing you're selling to them is your product (which they aren't interested in buying right now), you're unable to convince them to part with their money.
You need to be able to convince those not actively looking to buy right now that they should buy your solution - pitching your product isn't the way to do this and free trials usually don't make too much difference unless you are lucky enough to stumble across a way to attract a lot of active buyers. But even if you do, eventually, that group is going to run out (they're very small in number and if you can find them, your competitors can too).
This isn't a novel concept - it's the reason content marketing was invented in the first place. Yet, lots of people have difficulty doing it properly. If you check out this website (www.thebluntmethod.com), you'll find a free explanation with case studies of a very effective strategy to do this.
Hope that helps you.
Good luck.
Chris
Thanks for the feedback! I think both things can be true: education and content marketing are hugely important for broadening the market, but offering a free trial also removes a potential barrier up front.
I'll check out your website – content marketing is something I want to learn more about however I don't have much time to invest into it.
You're welcome.
Again, be aware that a free trial only removes the barrier for those that are actively looking to buy.
Still got to find those people. And that's hard (for all the reasons stated above).
Just a thought. I see the "needs 1,000 karma" message you have. I'd push all sorts of content around that kind of idea. "How to get 1,000 karma" figure out 10-20 pieces of content/info that can help. And get it into people's hands (blogs/infographics/pdfs/videos) Free course on udemy to help people gain Karma on Reddit might get you the people you want. And you'd help them get to 1,000 karma and thus be a clear needer or your automation.
But you can also "target" people by creating content for every major milestone: "how to get 100 karma", "How to get 10,000 karma", "Interviews with 10 people with 100,000 karma", "Karma Millionaires", "How many Karma Millionaires Are There on Reddit?"
If not that, specifically, just write about "why" people need to use reddit messages. 50 reasons why would be a good SEO optimized article, and probably fire off great more niche focused articles from that.
This is a great approach! Producing content is the next leg of my marketing journey and I like the ideas you have presented here. Is there a way to "test" if content will resonate with your audience before investing a ton of time into it? Most Reddit users do not care about their karma explicitly.
You don't need to reach "most reddit users" just the ones searching for answers and wanting to pay for a service/app.
Yes there's a way to test if content will resonate, it's "write 1". Just write one version. I'm also basing this off of the fact that I wrote 1 "celebrate 10,0000 instagram followers" years ago and it still gets 100 reads a week.
Just write one, then write another, then another. Each time you can edit the style/format, add more tips/tricks. They can all be essentially the same tips, or not.
Curating tips is not the hard part. It's just copy/pasting from everywhere people write about this stuff. But making something that is interesting and readable might be hard if you haven't had personal experience going from 0 to 100,000 karma. But that's what interviews are for.
You can test out 1: "20 ways to get 1,000 Reddit Karma"
And then write 1: "Interview with a Karma Millionaire"
and then write 1: "How I got 500 Reddit Karma"
All three of those won't take more than 3-4 hours each to produce in total.
And each one is infinitely adjustable for more articles.
You can have XX ways to get X,XXX Reddit Karma.
And you can Interview anyone with any amount of reddit karma. (that's a lot of people)
Even the interview one is simple to do: Create a google doc with 5 questions. Find 10 people email them asking them for a quick 5 question interview about their reddit experience, they can share any thing they are working on now. if 0 responses, find 10 more. if 0 responses edit your email and find 10 more.
If you get a response, make a copy of the google doc and email a link to them to edit it. Look at Starter Story interviews. or look at IndieHacker Interviews. (go do an interview to see how it is). Check out the amount of text they offer for each question to help make a great interview. And they don't ask so many questions.
What does your funnel look like? What's your paid conversion rate? Maybe focus on generating more traffic and use of your system to better identify value proposition and "a-ha" moment. Best of luck!
Thanks for sharing this. You're right, as someone working in the marketing industry, I've seen that people don't usually convert at first sight unless you have an awesome product with a value proposition. Now that you're using a good strategy, I hope you will get good results.
Thanks for sharing your experience and insights from your failed product launch. It takes a lot of courage to admit when things don't go as planned, but it's also a valuable learning opportunity. I appreciate your approach of taking a step back and reassessing your product and audience before making any major changes. It's also smart to focus on building an engaged community and gathering feedback from potential users to ensure that you're meeting their needs and providing value. I'm excited to see how your revamped launch strategy will perform - best of luck on your journey!
I'm in a similar boat with Kamara, the new project I'm building. Since it requires GPT-4 API I can't really provide a free trial since I still need to pay for the OpenAI credits and they can get expensive.
Let us know how it goes!
Exactly. There's operating costs that need to be covered by some level of "base" users. It's tough if you don't have a long runway to work with. On the other hand, you could get a lot of people using it for free for 4 months and then switch over to paid entirely. May have attracted enough attention to pay for itself. Best of luck!
How do you get to know that most potential users were asking for a free trial? Or, how do you collect this information from?
Many were asking on Reddit from the DM they received from me.
Thanks for writing this up, Jerad!
I also used to have a free trial and now switched to a model with a truly free plan and 2 paid plans. 2quiet2market.com (an app to build a marketing habit for solopreneurs) now allows you to create one project for free. If you want more projects, you must pay.
I thought that was fair, what do you think? It should also take the "14-day stress" away. 😄
Cheers
Matthias
This was my original approach as well. However, the economics are a little different with my product. The majority of users would only have access to the "Basic" plan because they don't have enough karma to upgrade.
Offering a free tier would likely not deliver enough value to convince them to upgrade. However, it might be worth attempting to disprove that theory...