21–30 of 49 posts
Soured me on trying out new platform services pretty damn hard.
I'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.
Surprisingly, in the online world we think everything is different and that nobody buys things without a free trial of some kind, but over and over again I see products and services that sell without a free trial.
I think it's doing early stage products a disservice to assume you have to have a free trial to make money. When you are proving out if a product will sell, you need to know if people will pay you money for it, not if they are casually interested in trying it.
If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense.
It really depends on the market. My prior project went well with 10 day free trials. People installed it, it did what they wanted, so they kept it. Current project...trials are popular, but getting people engaged in the trials is tough. Lots of engagement diet day..then it drops sharply off,many no amount of emailing bumpsup the return rate about a percent or two. I think it depends on the market, the product and the…
Why 10 days, just a nice round number? (don't mean that disparagingly) or was there some statistical basis for it? A lot of trials I see are 14 or 30 day, 10 not so much.
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
true! i tried to make that point at the very end of the post... maybe should have emphasized it more
> "Beware The Free Trial ... SaaS builders! BEWARE!"
I don't think it's just a lack of emphasis... It's the presence of jumping to conclusions and offering that as a general lesson.
I 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.
I 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.
In other words, you need to understand your acquisition costs and your conversion funnel. Then you can decide what form of a trial--if any--makes sense for you.
So if your conversion rate is X and you offer Y and you're losing money, you probably need to reduce what Y costs (or can cost) you.
I'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…
Anyone know a good collection of SaaS articles like this? We're about to launch our first SaaS service and would love some battle hardened good practices.
They make big generalizations (free trials are bad!) based on hindsight reasoning and very few data. For every article you find that says you should do X, you can just as easily find one that says you should NOT do X.
With that said, two good sources of information are Jason Cohen[0] and Patrick McKenzie[1].
[0] http://blog.asmartbear.com/ [1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/
And if you're looking to have someone in your corner who has done this, give me a shout!
An example, eFax: a black hole of pure evil when it comes to cancelling: anyone who ever tried wants to murder kittens afterwards. Whatever you do, never ever ever signup for that thing. Seriously. (At least in the U.S. there is the chat and twitter options, but in Europe, you're basically screwed unless you cancel your credit card).
Anyone know a good collection of SaaS articles like this? We're about to launch our first SaaS service and would love some battle hardened good practices.
As a marketer working with SaaS companies, I would caution you against reading articles like this. They make big generalizations (free trials are bad!) based on hindsight reasoning and very few data. For every article you find that says you should do X, you can just as easily find one that says you should NOT do X. With that said, two good sources of information are Jason Cohen[0] and Patrick McKenzie[1]. [0] http://…