2
6 Comments

Should I monetize my product without having any market fit?

Hey everybody, my question is should We have any monetization plans or just let it stay completely free until we develop it to the state when it can compete with the rivals in features.

We're at super-early stage and have about 50 registered users and 2-5 active users

The most concerning thing to me is: if we start monetizing our users from now, we can scare off some early users and don't get any feedback from them and don't make our product better with this feedback.

Please let me know what do you think, it would be really helpful to hear about your experience

  1. 3

    Start charging.

    How else are you going to prove that people will pay for it?

    You can have free + paid to determine which feature-price point people will start paying but longer-term you have to ask yourself why have free users.

    There's the view about free advertising etc but make your own judgement. Free users cost you. Do you get enough in return?

    Avoid the "just one more thing" feature development trap and never really testing payments until after you've built your castle.

  2. 2

    My two cents is that there's no obvious right answer. It depends on your product, users, etc. One thing to keep in mind is that feedback from free users is likely to be quite different from that of paying users, so the feedback you're getting may not be that helpful after all. See if you can find some creative way to charge up-front, like a productized service or wizard of Oz hack, or maybe a pre-sale based on the features you expect to build soon.

  3. 2

    Yes. Free products is for startups and big corps. Startups give free product for growth and big corps as a value add. Indie hackers MUST charge for products from the get go. You might give a free TRIAL, but you need to charge. Would you open a restaurant or salon or car repair shop without charging?

  4. 2

    If you are desperate for 'user experience' feedback, make the product free. Otherwise, you need to find out as early as possible how to make money with your product. Monetization is the most important part of the product validation, unless you don't need to make money.

  5. 1

    Unless you can charge each 50k, what's the point?
    So you'd get one (possibly none) of them to pay, than how much do you make? Does that change anything for you or your Business?

    Do something that moves the needle that is impactful

  6. 1

    I think you have to develop a decent base of users, as for my experience, all beta test for services i used were free

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