First Subscriber

Today I closed my first custom subscription plan, which also happens to be my first subscription. $40/month.

I feel like I'm doing things a bit out of order, but here's how it happened. Timestamps has been operating on a pay per use model for a few weeks now, and shorter after making that switch I got a message on LinkedIn from a Founder of a company that was very interested in using Timestamps. We had an intro call where we introduced, talked about our businesses. He said on that call he'd be happy to pay some kind of subscription. I gave him a promo code for a free unlimited trial for 2 weeks.

Fast forward 2 weeks. We call again to see how it went and discuss next steps. The trial went great, it was useful to them. After a bit of negotiation on the price and volume (uploads), we settled on $40/month, unlimited uploads.

Lessons:

Don't be afraid to put yourself as Founder and CEO of your company on LinkedIn. It's possible I wouldn't have had this opportunity if I hadn't overcome the embarrassment of calling my tiny project a "company" and calling myself "CEO".

You don't need to write a ton of code to have subscription plans. You can actually do so much of it manually with Stripe. Just directly have a sales conversation with a customer, agree on a plan, manually invoice them with Stripe, and then set up a recurring subscription manually in Stripe. It won't scale, but it's totally doable to do your first few subscriptions this way. All you need is some minimal way to grant or restrict access to your service. For me, I am using a very simple promo code implementation I wrote.

Small scale custom plan sales negotiations are very different from "enterprise sales" negotiations. I watched a ton of enterprise sales videos to prepare, and while they were helpful, they were a bit much for how casual of a negotiation this was. That said, it's good to be aware of how to negotiate in a give and take kind of manner, and not necessarily give out discounts for "free".

You don't need lawyers or a formal contract to do business. Technically an email can work as a written agreement. I literally sent an email with a bunch of bullet points after our initial agreement call, and we went back and forth on that a bit, but that's ultimately the form our contract is in. I wouldn't recommend this for managing complex contracts or large sums of money.