Show IH: Paid - Don't pay Google, pay your users
Hey everyone! This idea has been nagging at me for a while so I finally decided to throw it out there. I went no code for this first launch, but if I see interest I'll be building this out full time. Would love your feedback!
Paid helps SaaS companies get their first 100 paid 💸 users and compensates early adopters for their time.
❓Problem
- Paid ads are ineffective and prohibitively expensive for startups
- Finding high quality early adopters without a deep network is challenging
- Even if you get a user from an ad, it's hard to understand:
- Why they signed up
- The problem they are trying to solve with your product
- Why they stopped using it
🎯Solution
Paid creates a contract between the user and the company which pays the user for their time. In return, the user agrees to a:
- 15 minute onboarding session
- 7 day product trial
- 15 minute exit interview
🙋♀️ Early Adopter Compensation
The user is sent a Visa Gift Card ranging $50 to $300 depending on the users qualifications (e.g. where they work, their position, etc.) and the company.
Sign up as an early adopter / user
🔎 How does Paid make money?
We offer two structures:
Standard
- Company pays the full reward to the user
- Company pays 20% of the reward to Paid
Split
- Company pays 50% of rewards to the user, Paid covers 50%
- Company pays back 3x the covered portion out of MRR
More details here http://bit.ly/2LmCgDQ
I like the idea, still not quite understanding the value-add. Are you actually bringing the leads (early adopters) to the platform in the first place?
If not, and I find my first 100 paid users - couldn't I set up my own program? Is it a technology play? Is the value in the contract?
This does sound valuable. I'm still unsure how you (Paid) would be able to convert your list of segmented users into paid users of other people's products. That sounds like an immense challenge (IMHO).
Other tools will let you pay for market research or UX testing, but never claim to get you 100 paid users + the feedback that goes along with it. I'd envision you'd get a bunch of folks who'd pay $7 for the monthly pricing, get their $100 check and peace out.
If it's the technology play (and valuable enough) you could just offer the services to the SaaS and capture the opinions of an existing user base. Then you wouldn't have to play to both sides of the market.
Thanks for the feedback, very helpful to get a fresh set of eyes on the idea.
I'd be starting at a higher price per month (PPM), for example, we paid $100 to start at https://www.stitchdata.com/pricing/ and eventually paid more. The reward would be commensurate with that price, so someone wouldn't get $100 for a $7 a month product, but might get $150 for a $100 PPM.
I think of it relative to Google Ads. For many keywords, you'd pay Google $50 for a click and know little about what happens after. Here you can pay the user directly and know exactly what they think before starting, trialing and after trialing the product. This doesn't scale, but it doesn't need to for your first 100 users.
I like your idea, I think it's really interesting. I too wonder about how as a company, you'd be able to prevent users who are just jumping from product to product, "testing it out" (but not really), and then collecting their check.
BUT, that's not why I'm commenting. I just want to give my support and encouragement for coming up with an idea and putting it out there. Don't be too discouraged by everyone's questions - it shows there is interest, at least. If you can successfully figure out good answers to those tough questions, you'll be doing great!
Good luck!
Thanks dude! Trust me, I'm not discouraged, this is all good stuff.
And thanks for the encouragement!
I am also going to play devil's advocate here.
On the Mobile App Acquisition side, there was a similar product that had come around in India, which paid the user (in terms of coupons and mobile phone recharges) when they installed Apps from their platform. At first, it looked great, but in time all the users starting gaming the system. As the system got gamed, when the user got paid moved deeper and deeper into the app lifecycle: Install to Install and keep the app for a few days. This moved was pushed by app makers, as they did not see value in those installs and pushed the risk towards the Acquisition product, till the service no longer made sense.
While I love the problem you are solving, I do believe that paying early/beta users throws the incentives of whack for the entire system. Also, I think what you are missing from the AD spend is the branding being built as people see Ads but don't engage with them.
Hello again, just leaving another comment besides my other one giving some encouragement.
Have you considered that the "Visa Gift Card" portion of your business model may be the main concern for companies? What if companies would be required to offer X months of free highest-tier service for that tester? That way, only users who are interested in using the company's product would sign up.
Here's what I would think could work:
This (hopefully) addresses:
I'll play a bit of the devil's advocate here, but I don't see how this actually gets you real users. If anything, this just gets you people who want $50-300. And to be totally frank, I don't think any product manager at Uber, for example, would be motivated by $300 for the amount of attention it takes to schedule two meetings and use a product for 7 days.
You also might be overestimating the cost of Google Ads. It's not always cheap, but the cost per acquisition of your product (up to $300) is much, much higher than any CPA I've seen for solid SaaS Google Ads campaigns.
CPA is often measuring a click on an ad. Which means the user only hits your landing page.
I think we'd be offering a fair amount more value with having the user try the product and tell you what they liked or didn't like.
We'd need to pay people what they're worth and some might be out of the range a company would be willing to pay, but I think there's a sweet spot of high value people that like trying out new products, but wouldn't jump thru the extra hoops (interviews) without some compensation.
Thanks for the feedback!
Tell if I got it right. You say that it is expensive yo get new users from ads and your solution is to charge $60-360 per user (I included your commission here).
The users are paid to test and they need to do just 30 minutes of work to get $50+, So basically companies should pay $60-360 for an individual that has a huge incentive of making a few bucks fast (how many people make $100+ per hour?).
If I got it right, this is absurd. The CAC is high, higher than most paid channels in fact, unless we are talking about super expensive products, and the user and the company interests are completely misaligned.
Yes, we are talking about expensive products, e.g. companies in the range of MixPanel, Stitch, Intercom, etc. pricing. Those companies wouldn't need us, but think the next generation of products in those categories that'd be charging $50+ per month.
The CAC looks high at a glance, but when you consider, but learning is almost as valuable as users at this stage. For companies going after high value users, it's really hard to get them on the phone and figure out what they were thinking when they signed up and if they didn't convert, why?
A concrete example I have is over 10 users signed up for our product from Spotify, Uber, and Lime, but we were only able to talk to one of them. We reached out multiple times to try and diagnose what went wrong, but could never get them on the phone or even to respond. Paid would aim to solve that.
It's hard to get users on the phone for free. For $100-600 per hour, I doubt that it is hard. And again, it is one thing to get feedback from someone who signs in out of interest and from someone who signs in because it is more lucrative than his salary. And for this reason, $60 is not the CAC.
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