To free or not to free?
I'm working on a new version of Papyrs (work in progress landing page at https://papyrs.com/v2/) and am still thinking about new pricing plans.
At the moment there's no free plan, as it's mostly B2B (companies/teams). I'm wondering if it would be helpful for growth to add a free tier though. Our customers tell us they're happy with the product, but medium/large B2B accounts are often not the kind of customers would who then use something like Twitter and tweet about the tool, so there's few word-of-mouth referrals in that sense.
Introducing some kind of personal free plan might help with that, although that also means more support of course. I'm curious to hear what experiences fellow makers have with either introducing (or removing!) a free tier.
Thanks!
Papyrs seems a bit like Notion (except focused on wikis) and I know Notion has had great success with their free tier (they've even upped the free tier user limit to unlimited "blocks" this year). However, since you're more of a B2B product, a free TRIAL is probably more interesting than a free tier.
Yep it probably does help them a lot to get the word out. So far our focus is purely on teams/companies, and I agree for those a free trial is fine. I guess a free plan experiment could target individual early adopters/freelancers/professionals to increase awareness of the tool in general.
I think if you have paying customers already, you will have to careful about making a free plan.
You could -
Make individual plan free (bottom - up approach like slack, notion) so these people get used to the product and then recommend to their companies. This has to result in a viral loop, ie individual sharing links that bring viewers. In such case, your free plan user is getting you more leads
Start with a free trial of certain period. Monitor usage and ask them if they want to extend. When you know that they are at a certain point, you can ask them to pay up. Youtube does this to me. I use it every day for an hour or so. They have seen that I am a regular user and now their adds are growing longer everyday. This is kind of tactic to convert me into paying customers.
On your website, you can add clearbit integration to identify if the visitor is from a prominent company and offer longer trial periods. checkout useproof.com experiences or how mutiny handles this. You could do this manually yourself too.
Do check this out - https://productled.com/free-trial-vs-freemium/
Right, as we already have a free trial and paying customers, I was thinking of adding a personal plan of sorts. Thanks for those pointers, I'll check them out!
Over the last 15 years, I've worked with customers offering free trials. If a tech product has any kind of learning curve, our customers' data demonstrates that offering free trials early in the sales cycle significantly reduces the likelihood a prospect will buy.
The reason is serious prospects, early on, are creating long list lots of different solutions and don't want to spend their time learning and trialling each of them. Rather, prospects / leads want to know if your product solves their problem, that other, similar companies are using it (size, industry etc...) and other people at credible companies say it's great.
So early on, front page of the website and in early stage engagement, it's better to have customer logos, your branding, what problems your solution solves etc..., customer testimonials. Further on, at shortlist stage, free trials etc... help prospects buy and the presence of free trials so prospects can see your solution is also helpful.
Incidentally, the reason we have this data is because I help customers be more successful by creating video testimonials and video marketing. We follow-up with customers to see what works and the data on free trials is clear and consistent. If you want to chat about the data or even maybe talk to one of our customers, happy to help as I'd love us all to be more successful! I can't even pitch you for business because I'm in a different country so you're safe but happy to help!
Interesting about free trials reducing the likelihood of a sale in your data points. From anecdata I agree most prospects have a long list of solutions they "need" to try out, and that the decision is often based on what is recommended or well-established (vs the product itself, which comes third, fourth or final place in the decision). Being well-established/trusted is a bit of a chicken-egg problem of course, so that's where extra traffic/mentions might help.
To be honest I'm in the middle of crunch time right now to get this thing launched, but thank you so much for your kind offer!
Good luck with the launch! The chicken / egg problem's been solved by every one of my B2B tech customers. They all pretty much did the same thing: They had a couple of businesses take it free and built from there. I mean, who do you trust more, the company trying to sell to you or the customer who's bought the solution? But again, that's just the experience of my customers. I realise there's a whole world of organisations out there and maybe they've found other ways but I can only talk from the successes I've seen.
Coincidence or real need? After lockdown I felt there is a big gap in the way employs communicating with each other. I noticed this in my own organization and I thought of making a simple internal wiki. I even brought a domain for this project insideTalk.io :)
Internal wiki's are required for organizations now than ever before, I see great potential for your product.
Regarding the Free account, I will share how my product benefited with free quota. I have a popular online watermarking tool www.Watermark.ink . Most of the non-corporate users rarely converted to paid users. My corporate clients don't care about free quota, they test it once and simply go for paid account on the same day. I made this tool 2 years back and as I was not getting enough attention that time I just gave it away free. I am also not happy to charge users as there were many bugs that time. After an year I fixed few bugs and just enabled Stripe payment option. It somehow got good attention and SEO building(I didn't do anything to improve SEO, not even a blog or how to doc. I ashamed to say I did nothing in that direction) in-spite of all that payments started. It somehow pickedup, I believe that is mostly because of the free quota.
But when it comes to corporate products like wiki, I am sure decent level corporate don't care about free account. And for corporates the bigger headache with free services is they need to go through your free policy, most decision makers prefer to go with lowest paid option(which is paid by the company not from their pocket) than they spend time reading the free policy document.
I will recommend Papyrs in my company, goodluck.
Hah wow, well I hope it's a real need :). Thanks for the kind words and recommendation!
Nice to hear about Watermark.ink. It seems you also addressed a real need; not being able to stop people from paying without any marketing is always a good sign! I also think corporate accounts are not going to care for a free plan at all, so like in your case it would just be a marketing tool to get traffic/improve search rankings.
In my business life, a service not having a free tier has never even slowed me down let alone stopped me from procuring a service. Now, there not being a free trial/trial I could start using immediately without talking to a salesperson has completely turned me off from services multiple times though. You already have a nice 14-day free trial and it looked like I could immediately self onboard myself. So that doesn't really seem to be a problem for you.
Thanks for the feedback. Yep definitely agree on the importance of at least a free trial and the option to self-onboard. I don't expect the free plan would be needed to really improve onboarding or conversions, so it would mostly be a marketing tool to get the word out on the tool and acquire more traffic/leads that way.
Yeah, I mean it would certainly seem that a free tier would drive more users, which produces more opportunity for word of mouth marketing. I suppose ultimately the question you'll have to figure out is will it drive word of mouth marketing to users who are likely to join on paid plans or will they drive word of mouth to more free users. Of course, it's not going to be 100% one or the other, but you'll need to determine if they drive enough paid users to be worth the cost of the free users it takes to get there.
Free users are going to be an ongoing cost in both infrastructure and time as opposed to the paid acquisition channels being a fixed cost per user once they're onboarded. They might still be worth it, just some additional things to consider either when making the choice or when running the experiment if you choose to add a free tier.
Yes good points, there's always a risk free users will just attract more free users. It's probably a good idea to start with a short experiment first and get more data on how much time it takes up vs any noticeable change in traffic/leads.
How many large companies do you serve at the moment?
Well I don't exactly mean Fortune 500 here ;), but I'd say 100+ companies which I wouldn't count as small anymore. In some cases it's a smaller team within a company, so it's not necessarily about the size of the account per se, but rather the target audience. So the idea is that perhaps a freemium/prosumer audience is more likely to share/mention such a tool than an employee who uses it because it's deployed at their company (even if they're perfectly happy with it).
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"They will freely pay you", nice one ;). Yes I'd definitely stay B2B first, so if it would require changes to the product or new features just to be able to give it away for free, I wouldn't consider it as a marketing tool at all.