The "Belief" Freemium Strategy That Took This Sideproject From $0-$8 Million A Year

This is a summary: full article link at the bottom

Only 2% of your market is actively looking to buy right now.

But if you want to succeed you have to be able to target the 98% that aren't.

But you can't sell your product to them - doing so triggers a cognitive bias called loss aversion and they will ignore your marketing.

This is why freemium was created.

It allows you to get your product in front of this 98% without triggering loss aversion (cos you aren't asking for money).

The idea is, of course, that they will try the product out for free and then love it so much that they will convince themselves they need to buy it.

But there are two problems with freemium.

a) it's no longer new & novel so it doesn't capture much attention these days. As a result, most startups don't generate that many free users with it compared to back in the day.

b) it's VERY hard to create a product and manage the freemium experience so that free users upgrade to paying. As a result, startups that do generate free users often struggle to generate many paying customers.

As a result, most startups that try the freemium model fail.

But what about the startups that succeed with it?!

Of course, there are startups that do succeed using the freemium model.

And you can too.

But you’re making life unnecessarily hard for yourself if you do use it.

To use an analogy, it’s like swimming a 1 mile against a strong current. It’s possible, but it’s hard and the vast majority of people that try fail.

But there's a better solution - one that enables you to keep the advantages of freemium (not triggering loss aversion) and avoid the disadvantages just listed above.

The solution - all the advantages & none of the downsides

The solution is to give away a specific belief called a BLUNT belief for free instead.

It's what Bullet Journal founder Ryan Carroll used to turn his side project into an $8 million-a-year business.

BLUNT is a mnemonic that describes the characteristics of the belief:

Brand-new: the belief is brand-new to the target audience & contradicts an existing belief.
Leading: the belief leads back to what makes the company's products unique.
Unfamiliar: the belief ties into an element of unfamiliarity in the target audience's lives.
No product required: the target audience doesn't need to buy the company's product to believe in and implement the belief.
Traction: the product(s) that the company sells have existing demand

This is a far superior way to sell to the 98%.

Why?

Because:

It's so much easier to create a BLUNT belief than implement the freemium model correctly.
Unlike freemium it always captures the attention of the 98% because a BLUNT belief is inherently novel and new (B in BLUNT).
It is very effective at convincing the 98% to buy (each of the characteristics of the BLUNT belief works together to convince those not in the market to buy right now that they need to).

To read more about why it's so effective at convincing them to buy (and to learn more about the BLUNT belief that Bullet Journal created) check out the full article here - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/belief-freemium-strategy-took-startup-from-0-8-million-chris-monk