Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The 30 day free trial is mostly broken

blog.clinchpad.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 45 posts

Re: The 30 day free trial is mostly broken

#31

Post by gsharma »

crazygringo wrote: post #26
chaz wrote: post #7

Another thing I don't like about 30 day free trials is that they usually start right away. Before I know it, I'm getting an email saying that the trial is almost over, and I've barely used it. It takes time to develop a new habit and explore a product or service. This is worse if it requires some integration, setup, training, or data import. I wouldn't say the 30d free trial is broken, or even mostly broken, but it's…

Yeah -- I really thought about providing a "4 hours of actual usage" trial instead of a 14-day trial for a product of mine -- thinking that they could sign up immediately , not worrying that they don't need to fully try it within the next 14 days. But the problem is, users don't understand it. The think it's 4 hours from when you sign up. The amount of text it takes to explain that it's actual cumulative usage, is so…

Here is an idea - Pause/freeze the trial period. Initially give a 14 day trial period. If the user does not come back after 2-3 days, send them an email that you have paused their trial for now and it will start running again when they login next time.

Re: The 30 day free trial is mostly broken

#32

Post by cyberpanther »

I definitely agree that you should have some kind of usage limitation so that if the person doesn't decide in 30 days they can come back and try the product still. However, what I've done for my product is given away the full product for 3 weeks and then limit usage after that. What I've seen, is more people buy my pro version instead of just the basic because they can test out all the features. They can also still come back and test the product and aren't shut out if they miss the time trial window.

Re: The 30 day free trial is mostly broken

#33

Post by pbreit »

30 day trials are prospect-hostile because they force customers onto the service provider's timeline, not the prospects. That said, I'm sure time-limited trials do force the decisioning process in a way freemium does not.

My opinion on SaaS plans is that the no/low-cost plan should be more or less fully functioning, without even some sort of limit such as number of leads (ex: Yammer, Zendesk, Eventbrite). When companies really start using your product, the features that make up a paid tier will become obvious and said companies will be more than willing to pay up.

Re: The 30 day free trial is mostly broken

#34

Post by losethos »

God says...

30:14 And I will make Pathros desolate, and will set fire in Zoan, and will execute judgments in No.

30:15 And I will pour my fury upon Sin, the strength of Egypt; and I will cut off the multitude of No.

30:16 And I will set fire in Egypt: Sin shall have great pain, and No shall be rent asunder, and Noph shall have distresses daily.

30:17 The young men of Aven and of Pibeseth shall fall by the sword: and these cities shall go into captivity.

30:18 At Tehaphnehes also the day shall be darkened, when I shall break there the yokes of Egypt: and the pomp of her strength shall cease in her: as for her, a cloud shall cover her, and her daughters shall go into captivity.

30:19 Thus will I execute judgments in Egypt: and they shall know that I am the LORD.

Re: The 30 day free trial is mostly broken

#35

Post by mtitus16 »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #29
edhallen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are great points, and speak to why measuring the impact of email is really, really important. Until you're holding your emails accountable to performance (whether it's getting someone to come back or to buy), you're just throwing darts in the air and potentially annoying someone. At Klaviyo (I'm one of the co-founders, so note bias), we've helped many web apps and ecommerce sites setup full email strategies - a…

How do you measure how pissed off I am? From your side of the table a lack of positive action is indistinguishable from absolute apathy, passive interest without action, undelivered mail (most tracking widgets fail in webmail), etc. I've observed that some less-savvy people don't know how to unsubscribe from emails, or fear doing so will "upset someone" and so grin and bear an otherwise annoying deluge of email they…

Did you ever think that if you don't want their emails, you're not their target audience? And so they don't give a fuck how you feel?

Re: The 30 day free trial is mostly broken

#36

Post by kintamanimatt »

mtitus16 wrote: post #35
kintamanimatt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you measure how pissed off I am? From your side of the table a lack of positive action is indistinguishable from absolute apathy, passive interest without action, undelivered mail (most tracking widgets fail in webmail), etc. I've observed that some less-savvy people don't know how to unsubscribe from emails, or fear doing so will "upset someone" and so grin and bear an otherwise annoying deluge of email they…

Did you ever think that if you don't want their emails, you're not their target audience? And so they don't give a fuck how you feel?

Wow

Re: The 30 day free trial is mostly broken

#37

Post by jevanish »

gsharma wrote: post #31
crazygringo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah -- I really thought about providing a "4 hours of actual usage" trial instead of a 14-day trial for a product of mine -- thinking that they could sign up immediately , not worrying that they don't need to fully try it within the next 14 days. But the problem is, users don't understand it. The think it's 4 hours from when you sign up. The amount of text it takes to explain that it's actual cumulative usage, is so…

Here is an idea - Pause/freeze the trial period. Initially give a 14 day trial period. If the user does not come back after 2-3 days, send them an email that you have paused their trial for now and it will start running again when they login next time.

The problem with this is that we're all in the business of making money. You want to put constraints on your customers to give them urgency to complete their trial, so they can then become paying customers...thus keeping you in business.

With any business that requires configuration (like setting up tracking on your site or entering candidates in a CRM), you need to push your users to get over that initial hurdle. A short time constraint forces them to act quickly to try to get value out of your product. They can always sign up for the trial at another time if they're not ready to really commit to setting it up and using it right now.

The added benefit of all of this is your sales team then works with more qualified leads and spends less time talking to people that would fit into your "paused" category, which can often become a deadpool of unactivated users.

Re: The 30 day free trial is mostly broken

#38

Post by chc »

tgrass wrote: post #21
kintamanimatt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you define as helpful? Just as a data point, let me tell you how my mind works because I'm the person your raw numbers won't tell you about: Just getting the emails is likely to annoy me unless it's really, really earth-shatteringly useful and I've yet to ever see an example of this. I'll likely open the email and give it 1-2 seconds of scanning time to make sure I'm not missing out and to find the unsubsc…

This is my gut reaction. And yet time and again you hear from the likes of patio11 et al that one should leverage email as an engagement tool. For anyone with experience in this, does it just come down to weighing the benefit of gaining a customer against the risk of losing two?

It comes from the benefit of gaining 10 over the risk of losing one. There exist people who vehemently hate receiving email but for some reason refuse to just opt out, and you will lose them. But they are not the common case. Remember that unless your target market is "a handful of people on HN," you should not place much faith in a self-selected sample of vocal HN users expressing their personal feelings.

Many people here will also tell you that $100 a month is an outrageous price for a service that saves time for software engineers. It is true that they feel that way, but it's a mathematically false statement.

Re: The 30 day free trial is mostly broken

#39

Post by chc »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #29
edhallen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are great points, and speak to why measuring the impact of email is really, really important. Until you're holding your emails accountable to performance (whether it's getting someone to come back or to buy), you're just throwing darts in the air and potentially annoying someone. At Klaviyo (I'm one of the co-founders, so note bias), we've helped many web apps and ecommerce sites setup full email strategies - a…

How do you measure how pissed off I am? From your side of the table a lack of positive action is indistinguishable from absolute apathy, passive interest without action, undelivered mail (most tracking widgets fail in webmail), etc. I've observed that some less-savvy people don't know how to unsubscribe from emails, or fear doing so will "upset someone" and so grin and bear an otherwise annoying deluge of email they…

Why should they measure how pissed off you are? Why is that data point interesting to them if it doesn't affect any of the metrics they're actually interested in, such as making more money and satisfying a higher percentage of users?

It doesn't feel great to be told you're unimportant, and no company owner will say that to their own customer, but really — you and I are not that important. I do not expect McDonald's to abolish all their meat products because they offend me as a vegetarian — the rest of their customers manifestly do not share that opinion, so it would be a dumb choice if they killed the Big Mac. Similarly, it is not in a company's best interests to terminate an objectively successful email campaign just because some random guy got pissed off but was unwilling to click Unsubscribe. Successful companies lose customers all the time for all kinds of reasons — they would never get anything done if they tried to personally appeal to every single person on earth.

Re: The 30 day free trial is mostly broken

#40

Post by andrewflnr »

patio11 wrote: post #18

Test against your own audience, but I would bet heavily against the conclusion "Usage limited trials outperform free trials" for the majority of SaaS apps. Dropbox's case is different with a capital D because the trial/invite mechanic is code to their viral adoption. One powerful reason why you generally want to avoid having a meter running is you are really making two related but distinct sales: you are trying to co…

How much better is a free trial for making that harder sale? If I know that any work I put into switching to your thing might get destroyed after thirty days, I'm less likely to bother at all. Whereas if it's a partially-free-forever thing like Dropbox, I don't have to commit as much to either the new way or old way. If I hate it, I don't have to rush to get out before the trial ends, I can just wait until I can't take it anymore.

Partly it depends whether I actually need the "full version" just to evaluate, or if I can get by on the free version, for now at least. Didn't you have a similar issue with BCC, where people would get all they needed from the free trial? I don't remember how you resolved that.

Post reply on HN