This is such a cool idea. I cannot believe this is 7 years old and implemented already. Well done and best of luck to your company !
Thanks for the kind words and for the best wishes. I agree: cannot believe it's been 7 years already!!
Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even a $1 fee scares off 98% of users. The friction between FREE and ANYTHING BUT FREE is really really high, and a lot more than the friction between $1 and $2. I think for many SaaS platforms it wouldn't be worth it. If you are doing a free tier, the next level up likely should be at least $5-$10 a month. Or you are overcoming a giant hurdle of getting someone to pay, only for $0.55 after payment processing fees. *…
Following logic like this is why so many aspiring entrepreneurs don't have more paying customers, and it's _the_ source of ad-supported everything. Want a healthy online economy of individual consumers that isn't bifurcated between people who might pay because it's related to their one main hobby/business vs the masses who do everything else on Facebook and YouTube? Then let them have a way to give you 20 bucks for w…
> Following logic like this is why so many aspiring entrepreneurs don't have more paying customers, and it's _the_ source of ad-supported everything.
It has the merit of being true, however.
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the note and for your interest in what we do! You can use the templates freely to design emails and pages on beefree.io. If you want to embed our visual builders in your application (i.e. you want to use BEE Plugin), and you also want to create a template catalog within your application, you can purchase our template catalog (all of it or a portion of it). I would recommend getting in touch with our team f…
The problem here is that I don't know what the limits are to communicate them to others. In the UI, I can design a free email and export it. The UI doesn't allow me to remove the BEE attribution, but I could easily remove it after exporting. Is that allowed? Am I allowed to modify the design outside of the beefree.io interface? If we're offering a product that sends emails for people, can I build a generic email off…
Your question seems to be along the line of "you do know I can use this to make money for free?"
Their goal as I understand it is "yes, but we will make it so cool and easy and reliable after a while you will want to pay for the extra to make even more money"
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried Matrix[0], out of curiosity? I see quite a lot of FOSS projects on that (with the users to back it up too, obviously) and it seems to work quite well. I'm in quite a few established projects on there. You can bridge your Discord channel(s) to Matrix rooms, so it's basically win-win unless you rely on some proprietary custom verification system (e.g. Reactiflux's complex system), although with a little…
Is there a way to use Matrix without signing up for it? That’s my main problem right now You can usually get some use out of Discord by just clicking an invitation link, but for Matrix it looks like I have to create an account with some shady unknown social networking entity
right now most matrix servers have guest access disabled due to spam risk.
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#55Could anyone share the economics of letting people use it for completely free? Do you charge a lot for the people who do convert to subscription? What kinds of things can you withhold for the paid version? I’m just curious if there’s any research on say charging everyone $1 vs charging 1/10 people $10.
BEE editor is a part of Growens. I believe key to the business model is upsell to other Growens services (MailUp, Datatrics, etc.) And your usage is probably going to ingested by Datatrics (their marketing predictive platrform).
No, the model is the product-led growth model. For example, take our BEE Pro product: we do tens of thousands of monthly users of the free editor at beefree.io, of which over 10,000 become free trial users of BEE Pro every month, and of them hundreds convert into paying customers, every month.
Similarly with our embeddable visual builders: you can get started completely free of charge, then move up to a paid plan when you need more. And with this product there are actually many that "need more" from the get-go, so they get in touch with our sales team to make sure that the product is a good fit, do a proof-of-concept at no charge, and then go live.
Some more thoughts on being product-led here, if you are interested, here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/product-led-vs-product-focuse...
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Month vs year, closer to 0.11?
Ahh and annual revenue.
Yes, you're right on. But in those 5.2 million sessions there's everything, including the many applications that use our embeddable editors free of charge.
So, it's a cool metric, but it doesn't tell the complete story.
Actual monthly ARPA at BEE is around $27 for our BEE Pro product (hosted email & page design suite) and over $600 for our BEE Plugin offering (embeddable email, landing page & popup builder).
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried Matrix[0], out of curiosity? I see quite a lot of FOSS projects on that (with the users to back it up too, obviously) and it seems to work quite well. I'm in quite a few established projects on there. You can bridge your Discord channel(s) to Matrix rooms, so it's basically win-win unless you rely on some proprietary custom verification system (e.g. Reactiflux's complex system), although with a little…
Do you get paid for pushing matrix?
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and for posting too many unsubstantive comments.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#58Could anyone share the economics of letting people use it for completely free? Do you charge a lot for the people who do convert to subscription? What kinds of things can you withhold for the paid version? I’m just curious if there’s any research on say charging everyone $1 vs charging 1/10 people $10.
Even a $1 fee scares off 98% of users. The friction between FREE and ANYTHING BUT FREE is really really high, and a lot more than the friction between $1 and $2. I think for many SaaS platforms it wouldn't be worth it. If you are doing a free tier, the next level up likely should be at least $5-$10 a month. Or you are overcoming a giant hurdle of getting someone to pay, only for $0.55 after payment processing fees. *…
I like your thoughts on how the freenotFree is the large hurdle, and that's why incremental cost increases are absorbed
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even a $1 fee scares off 98% of users. The friction between FREE and ANYTHING BUT FREE is really really high, and a lot more than the friction between $1 and $2. I think for many SaaS platforms it wouldn't be worth it. If you are doing a free tier, the next level up likely should be at least $5-$10 a month. Or you are overcoming a giant hurdle of getting someone to pay, only for $0.55 after payment processing fees. *…
Following logic like this is why so many aspiring entrepreneurs don't have more paying customers, and it's _the_ source of ad-supported everything. Want a healthy online economy of individual consumers that isn't bifurcated between people who might pay because it's related to their one main hobby/business vs the masses who do everything else on Facebook and YouTube? Then let them have a way to give you 20 bucks for w…
I definitely can think of examples of free -> paid being enormously expensive (Dropbox?). But is it a required result of bifurcating the customer base?
Re: Thank HN: 7 years and $7M later, it all started right here
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
BEE editor is a part of Growens. I believe key to the business model is upsell to other Growens services (MailUp, Datatrics, etc.) And your usage is probably going to ingested by Datatrics (their marketing predictive platrform).
No, the model is the product-led growth model. For example, take our BEE Pro product: we do tens of thousands of monthly users of the free editor at beefree.io, of which over 10,000 become free trial users of BEE Pro every month, and of them hundreds convert into paying customers, every month. Similarly with our embeddable visual builders: you can get started completely free of charge, then move up to a paid plan whe…
Thank you so much for sharing the ballpark numbers/percentages of the free->paid funnel. I'm not starting a competing mail application (haha) so my use case might be different but it's very useful for comparison.