The Cost & Implications of Free(mium) | Hacker News Reader

The Cost & Implications of Free(mium)

woothemes.com

28 pointsadii11 comments

You will occasionally get an email like this regardless of your business model: "Does it make bingo cards? I haven't installed the free trial because I'm not a computer person. I need you to call me at XXX YYY ZZZZ and explain how to install the free trial. I don't read email that frequently, so you have to call. Oh it is my cellphone and I don't pick up usually because I am a teacher and am busy, so just keep trying until you get me."

Paraphrased from an email this morning. (I also got five emails today from the best customer ever. In addition to paying for AR every month has given a stunningly good testimonial and feels it is his mission in life to act as my unpaid QA department -- and he writes better bug reports than any paid QA department I've ever seen. Charge more and you will get more of him than the other kind of "customer.")

As former frontline support for a small B2B ISV, I know exactly that type. What's your response to these types of questions? You probably have the luxury to just ignore them? I was always directed to call and make the sale if possible, since the price of that B2B software was about equal to my daily salary.

For BCC? "Thanks for the email Cindy. I'm afraid that, as I live in Japan, I'm not in a position to offer phone support to customers of Bingo Card Creator. You can find instructions for installing it at ... or I would be happy to answer questions via email. Regards, ..."

For AR, I do try to call customers/prospects, if for no other reason than to get feedback on what their needs are. As it matures, I will probably still make it a point to call at least some prospects -- the expected LTV on landing some white label accounts is "quite high indeed", and depending on my observed conversion rates for e.g. $80/mo or $200/mo accounts, it might be worth my while to screw up my sleeping schedule a little bit. (If I'm late to work the next morning, it is rather unlikely my boss will fire me.)

If you're losing customers because you won't provide free support for themes they didn't pay for, something tells me you're better off without them.

Actually, for me, the WooThemes Playground was what got me to purchase a theme. The Playground lets you try out all of the the themes WooThemes sales for free on a temporary hosted WordPress blog on their site. If you like what you made, you can just copy the export code, buy the theme and put it on your site, then import your code from before. Works great, and was what pushed me to finally buy a theme from them.

I think the moral of the story with this is, you should always have a way for potential customers to really try out your product before they buy it. For many, it may get them to buy when otherwise they might have waited out.

Flagged.

An article about {free themes} crammed with {free themes} keywords, without any real substance (so the cost and implications are, in short, that if we had to provide support for {free themes} that would be a lot of work that our {free themes} would cause us).

I don't know why this stuff gets upvoted. {free themes}!

Wow, considering our very non-spammy business and revenue model, I'm surprised you find it this way.

Actually pretty funny, as we've never spent 1 minute or $1 actually SEO'ing our own website. I couldn't care less about supposed keywords.

Perhaps I got the wrong impression, in that case, apologies.

"we've never spent 1 minute or $1 actually SEO'ing our own website."

Uh, why? Isn't that something that a company should care about, getting into the top Google results? Not saying you should be submitting to shady link farms, but not spending a single minute on it...

They probably care about "white hat" SEO such as having appropriate headers, and descriptive urls. However, all that is important for their actual store front and not their blog.

I imagine it gets upvoted because they have a very salient point about the real costs of non-corporeal freebies.

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