Why did we remove the paid plan and give away the features for free?
TLDR; We removed the paid plan and unlocked our Pro features for free to everyone. Read more below to learn more about why and what we've learned from it.
Mailist is a tool that allows users to create personalized newsletters from their unread bookmarks. That way, we make people actually read what they saved for later. Mailist is a tool which is growing purely organically for over 3 years and has over 2500 active users. It is essential to highlight that Mailist is a small personal tool.
From the monetization perspective, we've tried two strategies. We sold access to the premium plan as one-off payments when we added some more advanced features in the early stage. Later we decided to switch to the monthly subscription model. Both generated some income (~$1000) but not enough to call it a success.
We've got to the point where we realized that running Mailist in the current monetization model doesn't work. The monthly active paid users and their paid plans were not covering the maintenance costs. And to be completely honest, we failed to convince more people to buy the tool in its current state. (Due to many reasons)
The features we have right now are good enough for a personal tool. If we would like to grow Mailist and compete with more prominent players (like Pocket), we would need to invest considerable resources to develop those and generate the user base.
But instead of shutting Mailist down (oh, hell no! - 2500 others enjoy Mailist every week), we've decided to change the strategy a bit and start building something that will provide much more significant value.
Unlocking the potential
We announced the change last week by sending an email update to our users and writing about it as an IH community milestone post. It got a lot of attention and -- foremost -- activated existing users to add and import many links. Moreover, the paid feature we unlocked, tags, were added to many many links. That's super exciting because it is proof we are providing value for the individuals.
Next steps
I don't want to reveal too much yet, but here are the next steps for the tool:
– We want to achieve 15% MoM of users growth and reach 10k users before the end of the year
– We want to bring our product marketing game to engage users more and make them use the product more often.
– We are building a massive expansion that will enable us to monetize our product; we will be focusing on a completely different buyer persona while still giving the Basics for free to everyone.
Some stats:
Currently, Mailist has:
– 2,567 users
– 179,148 links added
– 980 newsletters sent every week
– $0 MRR and ~$50 of monthly recurring costs
Have a good day everyone and let me know if you feel we made a good move! :)
What are you planning about monetization after you reach 10k users? Again will try the pro features or try to implement different things like ads. I am trying to understand what you hope to achieve by increasing your customer base.
There are two things.
First of all, we know that the product is useful, people use it, but withing current features scope, no one is ready to pay for it the amount that would make sense. Therefore, even though it is not profitable, growing the tool is something that is really fascinating for me and gives me a lot of satisfaction.
On the other hand, as I mentioned, even before reaching 10k users, we are going to launch new paid plans. We are shifting the strategy a bit and our buyer personas will also vary. We project to find around 2% of this new type in the current user base. Once the new features are live we will start educating users about the new use case and hopefully manage to convince them to follow them.
Nevertheless, growing the product and its usage (by inviting more users) will help us spread the word about it organically (as it happens right now).
The next few months will be very challenging but exciting at the same time.
Thanks for your questions @ovabi!
Thanks for the explanation. I think the same with you. One way or another, you can monetize your customer base. The important thing is growing the customer base. I wish you the best!
Thank you!