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Should I try to keep the customers who are just taking advantage of the free trial period? - Weekly backlog 2020/14

Even though we had a long weekend because of Easter, last week was really busy. Mainly because two of my products are focusing on holidays, especially Easter so the number of support requests and questions was much higher than usual. Basically, I spent most of my time helping my customers.

The start wasn't that great. About a week ago I got a feature request from one of the users of Discount Hunt. It was something already on my todo list so I told him I'll add it to the app soon and will let him know when it's available. I developed the feature, sent him an email with a short tutorial on how to use it and he canceled his subscription without any feedback. Okay.

I'm also afraid that some of the customers are taking advantage of the 5 days free trial period. In most cases, 5 days is more than enough to try the app and also run a short campaign. And I can already see that some of them used the app for 5 days to run an Easter egg hunt and removed it right before they got charged.

I'm not sure if I should try to keep these customers or just try to live with it. I don't want to remove the option to try the app for free, and if I change the trial period to 2 or 3 days I think they would do the same with their campaigns. Or they'd look for another app.

Because I spent my time supporting my customers and the existing products I couldn't come up with an idea for Makers Festival so I won't participate. Maybe next time.

For this week, I have a few more features I'd like to add to Gift Hunt and Story View so I'll focus on that.

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Todo for this week:

  • Create more “how to” content for Discount Hunt - after rolled out the new features
  • Mailchimp integration for Gift Hunt
  • Autoplay feature for Story View
  1. 2

    You can always convert free trial users and get them upgraded you just have to create fomo

  2. 1

    There is an interesting saying that if you try to compete based on price, you will only get cheap customers.

    Even if there are customers that abuse your trial, it shows that they at least value your product enough to spend their time using it. Their attention is still valuable to you. The question is not whether you should try to keep them or not, but how you can use their attention to grow your business.

    For example, one thing you can do is start with a very short trial period and let users extending it by getting their friends to sign up.

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