Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

"(the first 30 days are free!)"

Why? I don't understand the arbitrary 30 day limit, or the need to be charging at all for the basic service. It seems like the best way to gain adoption for a product like this is word of mouth. As a totally free product, they could get thousands or tens of thousands of users in a short time period. Real people having positive experiences with a product is the best marketing there is.

The strength of glance seems be design and UI. Charging a monthly fee doesn't seem to be the best way to take advantage of that strength. Nice UI products do best when they have lots of people using them. I feel like it's too much trouble to set it up knowing that I'll have to make a purchase decision after 30 days, (not to mention that it doesn't say what the price will ultimately be). This looks like a cool product, but this might not be the right business model.

Maybe this is their monetization strategy. Instead of incurring the high costs of supporting a large load of unpaid users and then trying to monetize the user base from there - maybe they want to get to revenue quickly.

I think it's up for debate as to whether you should test pricing in the MVP stage. In this case, I think it's in the best interest to leave pricing out of the question and first inquire as to whether people find it useful.

http://qr.ae/1ygLq - my answer on quora regarding testing pricing while in MVP stage.

Mostly agree.

"You can figure out what they'll pay for it once you know they'll use it in the first place."

Seems a bit presumptive and opens the door for risk.

I think you're right. But what about the perceived value the beta testers have? Surely they won't be happy about paying for something that was free.

You're right in the fact that you'll piss off some people when you introduce a pricing plan later. This can be a very slippery slope and is the main reason why most b2c services don't charge for their software. I'm sure the team at Glance will be A/B testing for consumers vs enterprise, and the consumer registration won't have the 30-day trial text.

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