The problem about drawing any broader conclusions here is it appears to boil down to "Don't offer a 90 day free trial in the podcast hosting business because most customers run their course in 56 days" Not sure it really tells us anything about the effectiveness of a free trial for x days and pay vs a charge now with a 30 day money back guarantee
SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
11–20 of 49 posts
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#12I think he was right to offer the trial and then right to change strategies after the product got more refined. Can't jump to the top of the mountain in one leap. Still interesting data point!
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#13The problem about drawing any broader conclusions here is it appears to boil down to "Don't offer a 90 day free trial in the podcast hosting business because most customers run their course in 56 days" Not sure it really tells us anything about the effectiveness of a free trial for x days and pay vs a charge now with a 30 day money back guarantee
true! i tried to make that point at the very end of the post... maybe should have emphasized it more
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#14I think he was right to offer the trial and then right to change strategies after the product got more refined. Can't jump to the top of the mountain in one leap. Still interesting data point!
good point. maybe a shorter trial to start with, for the early version though :)
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#15About to launch a Saas here as well and have been struggling in regards to the free trial thing.
I think it depends on the market and the business tastes of the founders/owners.
I've ran a couple of businesses, and I tend to agree with Derick that I'd prefer to get my money now, rather than at some point in the future.
This can be off-putting for some potential customers, but then again this depends on the market.
If I'm creating a vertically integration Saas in a very niche market, I think it's appropriate.
If I'm doing a social app, then you basically have to give it away to increase user acquisition, and book the cost of the new user as part of the user acquisition cost equation.
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#16I'm currently thinking that for my next SAAS project it's going to be pay up front with a 30 day money back guarantee. I've done freemium and 30 day trials and the data I got early made me think that people would convert and they didn't even though they would use the product every day. Maybe my pricing was bad or my sales technique was terrible. I don't know. What I do know is if you price something up front you'll k…
This is a good compromise -- certainly better than the take-your-credit-card free trial that surprises you with a charge. 'Money back guarantee' has worked for a long time, particularly in pre-internet days.
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#17I'm struggling to see why bandwidth is costing you so much. We have a dedicated server with 10tb bandwidth on 1gbps port for under $100 a month. Also, if the podcasts are failing they can't be using much bandwidth? I think this is cognitive dissonance, you're complaining about free users costing you a lot of money in bandwidth yet apparently they are all failing (very few listeners?)
I'm serving files from Amazon S3. This gives me the benefit of world class storage and streaming, without having to own / run the servers myself. Bandwidth from them is "cheap" at $0.12/GB... but with an average podcast of 30 minutes being 25meg file, an episode with 1,000 downloads is 2.5GB of bandwidth.
i have a customer that averages 20,000 downloads per episode, and a bunch of others with close to 1,000 downloads per episode. it adds up fast.
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#18SaaS business is not based on some random failed example, but A/B testing, marketing, product development, and more. Any business come with risk and SaaS is the same.
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#19I think the big caveat here is that the space you're in makes it particularly dangerous to offer a free trial.
In other words, there are spaces where those costs are far more negligible, such that you could certainly afford 500+ abandoned free trials to convert 1 paid customer.
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#20I'm currently thinking that for my next SAAS project it's going to be pay up front with a 30 day money back guarantee. I've done freemium and 30 day trials and the data I got early made me think that people would convert and they didn't even though they would use the product every day. Maybe my pricing was bad or my sales technique was terrible. I don't know. What I do know is if you price something up front you'll k…
If people use it every day and aren't interested in upgrading, I'd look at it and say you offered too much to the free option.
You don't want something completely limiting, but you need a carrot there, and if you offer "enough" to a free user they'll lack an impetus to upgrade.
I don't think there's a lot of risk in changing the freemium terms down the road if that's the case.