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gdevoreon It’s Not What Your Software Does, It’s What People Do With Your Software

Great example of what I am talking about.

gdevoreon It’s Not What Your Software Does, It’s What People Do With Your Software

I don't think they are the same. We used to provide training for high-end medical devices. The manufacturers would often have a lot of features that looked good on a spec sheet but they were so complicated to use that no doctors ever actually used them.

Technically, they had the feature but the feature didn't help the doctors be better doctors. Features don't automatically translate to outcomes.

gdevoreon When Freemium Isn't Free: In Defense of the Bootstrapper in the Chargify Fiasco

I agree with points 2 and 3 but point #1 is a big stretch. Drop that and people will take the article more seriously.

Chargify isn't blaming their customers for incorrect assumptions, but their customers are feeling the effects of their incorrect assumptions.

With the way things are now at Chargify it costs more to maintain/support a current customer than that customer generates in revenue. You can afford to grandfather old accounts if you can still at least break even on those accounts. If you can't then you have to do something like what Chargify did or your business will cease to exist. The key is to do all that you can to not put yourself in the position that your support costs are so high that you can't be profitable on existing customers.

I blogged more about it here:

http://www.bluemangolearning.com/blog/2010/10/building-scala...

gdevoreon Chargify New Pricing

The problem with charging for actual usage is that most of Chargify's support costs are probably incurred while their customers are setting things up. And that is when they don't have any users. Once you get chargify set up you don't have to touch it too much.

Regardless though, this was a bad way to handle the price increase.

gdevoreon Ask HN: Help/FAQs/documentation system, like Google's help?

ScreenSteps Live combines a hosted documentation service with a desktop client for quickly creating screenshot based documentation. It also integrates very nicely with Zendesk. You can see an example here:

http://help.screensteps.com

Or, here is another example site we set up:

http://ipad.screensteps.com

Very simple to use and very effective. You can read a case study here:

http://www.bluemangolearning.com/screensteps/case_studies/se...