"Rule #5: Don’t do freemium"
Isn't CrankWheel, the author's company, a freemium product?
"Free forever for limited use. No credit card needed"
What experience does the author have with SaaS products that have no free tier?
I stopped reading here.
Isn't CrankWheel, the author's company, a freemium product?
"Free forever for limited use. No credit card needed"
What experience does the author have with SaaS products that have no free tier?
I stopped reading here.
I think this list is sound. In my world, rules that are not able to be break when needed are not worth having.
I haven't run a non-freemium SaaS company, but I do see what benefits it would bring if we were able to operate on a typical 14 or 30-day trial model. The big ones that would bring are a much shorter sales pipeline and shorter feedback loop on ad spend.
Since you are using freemium at the moment do you have some way of quantifying the hassle that this decision has created? It would be interesting to know more about how you navigate this kind of tradeoff since this is really what matters when it comes to detemerning whether a decision like freemium vs no-freemium is actually a good decision
There's considerable customer support cost.
The main thing that I feel makes life tough is that the pipeline from, say, doing some paid ads and seeing the results is several months long, and the feedback loop on changes that can affect conversion rates and monetization is similarly very long. We've learned to cope with it but it would be nice to have a one-month feedback loop or shorter.
Similarly, a B2B startup I worked for chased the biggest customers in the vertical, while our product was still pretty bad. You think they’re going to pay more once the feature set improves? Only if you split the product in two (which is a pain for use developers).
They weren’t trying to maximize revenue. In fact they basically guaranteed they never could. They were trying to maximize prestige so they could sell the company, and therefore us.