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Founders - how do you think about "free" product launches? I'm testing an idea now, would like to launch it along with pricing so I can validate the pricing/willingness to pay along with the idea, but feel like there's a lot of pressure to launch new products for "free".
Thoughts?
(1) It takes a lot of effort, maybe one day to one week, to really evaluate a product and know if it is worth it.
(2) That evaluation will feel like wasted time if, at the end, I find the product isn't worthwhile
(3) It will also feel like wasted time if I decide I like it but my employer decides not to pay for it.
If somebody gets paid $100,000 a year and spends a week evaluating something, the "free" trial costs $2000.
Thus I am not a believer in free trials.
It makes the most sense where you expect your actual hosting costs to be symbolic for small-scale users and hope to earn from bigger customers.
This practice has been present since the dawn of (software) time — even Microsoft never really bothered with private illegal copies of Windows (or DOS), knowing it will get future customers into the Windows world and they'll want Windows at work too.
However, going straight up with the paid model has been there forever as well: it mostly depends on your individual market evaluation and existing entrentchment.
I find it is very rare that I actually complete a free trial, particularly for something I use for software development at work. (1) It takes a lot of effort, maybe one day to one week, to really evaluate a product and know if it is worth it. (2) That evaluation will feel like wasted time if, at the end, I find the product isn't worthwhile (3) It will also feel like wasted time if I decide I like it but my employer d…
But out of curiosity, what is the alternative?
Blindly buying (or subscribing to) something because it looks cool in a 5 minute overview of its features?
And how would you convince your employer to pay for it?
As painful as Microsoft's dominance was, the era of shrinked-wrapped cdroms represented a more honest time when what you got was commensurate to what you paid. Now the only game in town is dangling the carrot and selling your customers' info to advertisers.
For now this is just my working hypothesis, I'm still far from being in a position to test it.
I find it is very rare that I actually complete a free trial, particularly for something I use for software development at work. (1) It takes a lot of effort, maybe one day to one week, to really evaluate a product and know if it is worth it. (2) That evaluation will feel like wasted time if, at the end, I find the product isn't worthwhile (3) It will also feel like wasted time if I decide I like it but my employer d…
If you don't intend for your product to be free for the rest of its lifetime, don't launch it as free.
I'm not a "founder" in any real sense of the word but my feeling is that it depends on what market you're targeting. If your goal is to become a billion dollar unicorn, then yeah it's going to be tough to beat free because you're going to need a huge number of users. On the other hand if you're OK with building a small sustainable business to support yourself, family and maybe a small number of employees then I think…
No one's calibrating their prototype roll-out according to how big or small they think they're going to be. That'd be a bit like turning down a soap commercial because it'll be embarrassing when you join the MCU, although to be fair, an unknown Gwyneth Paltrow did turn down "Cool as Ice" (1991).