WHEN should you start charging for your Saas product?
There are a lot of great guides out there about SaaS pricing strategy, pricing psychology, and marketing etc. but there isn't much information about when to start charging.
Obviously, the answer is as soon as possible but I'm wondering if anyone has experience in determining when to start charging. For example what are the benefits/consequences of charging off the bat vs. after beta vs. after first 1k customers etc.
Start charging from day 1, @Gabe is right the features free users request don't correlate with what paid customers want.
Doesn't mean you can't have a freemium pricing tier.
Also don't have a "beta", if the product provides value and works then it's great.
Might want to join https://www.startupschool.org/ all these questions are answered in the lectures.
One downside to starting out free is you might find yourself iterating on feedback from users who would never actually pay and end up building the wrong kind of features.
I’m planning on offering a “Founders Price” that subscribers lock in if they sign up at launch. My thinking is this helps offload some of the risk for them, but also provides meaningful validation about the product. I really don’t want to worry about the signal vs noise issue that comes with a flood of free users off the bat. I’d rather get paid users that are invested in the success of the product.
Complex matter, you need 1-2 development (not paying) clients which help you to find bugs etc but from then you have to understand that SaaS is very much about your sales skills. 90% of SaaS is not used because it has a good UI or so. It's your salesforce.
With sales skills, you mean being able to convey the appropriate value proposition right? For example at at the landing page of your website / app, and also the sales skills in marketing? Could you please specify what kind of sales skills you are refering to? I am trying to enhance both my sales and marketing skills, so I wondering what kind of it i should focus on.
King regards,
Polomalolo
b2b sales is quite hard. i'd say that raising money from investors is easier than closing enterprise customers. different skills come together, growing your network, hiring good sales people, communication, sales tactics/strategy, getting all stakeholder within a company closed (which is super hard) ... the more competitive the landscape the harder it's for you to close.
it isnt easier to define what are good sales skills, good sales people are rare and i highly admire them.
Ah okey. Well how do you think it is best to develope those sales skills, exp growing your network and sales strategy and tactics.
Sure enough there are many good free sales training on the internet, such as youtube (Dan Lok, Grant Cardone).
Also some books. I only know "Never split the difference", haven't read it yet though.
About to launch V1 of remotime, and the plan is to start charging from day 1.
The app doesn't have a cloud backend yet, which will be part of the subscription pricing, so I'm charging a once-off fee to buy the app, because:
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