You Can’t Make Money Charging $1 Per Month • Hacker News Board

Re: You Can’t Make Money Charging $1 Per Month

#61

Post by decadentcactus » Tue, Jun 28, 2011, 6:06 PM UTC

wisty wrote: post #53

patio11 wrote: post #2

It is exceptionally difficult to run SaaS businesses with low price points, principally because you'll often be cash flow negative with regards to marketing spend. e.g. even if the LTV of a customer is a few hundred dollars, to scale the business, you may well be paying $200+ in customer acquisition costs. (Check the price for AdWords clicks on e.g. project management or invoicing sometime. Oofdah.) If you quickly re…

Yeah, teachers are stingy, compared to most other B2B. A project manager will spend thousands of dollars on something that most of their team won't even use, it's just company money. Teachers typically have to beg for photocopy use. However, college students, gamers, and programmers (i.e. HN readers) are some of the stingiest people on the planet. Github charges $7/month for repo hosting, and still gets customers. Th…

There's also Steam, which makes a bunch of sales off gamers, the notorious pirates they are.

Re: You Can’t Make Money Charging $1 Per Month

#62

Post by paganel » Tue, Jun 28, 2011, 7:04 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #41

paganel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would it make sense to have an automated email to the effect of "Thanks for contacting us. Here are the frequently faced problems." ? It depends on the target audience. If it consists of geeks/people familiar with computers from an early age, then, yes, they might read that, otherwise you're going to do what MicahWedemeyer does (and what myself I'm doing, for a Groupon-clone website targeted to women): emailing you…

This is not a good solution. If you're emailing them generated passwords, you should immediately route them into a password-change workflow on login. You shouldn't be "hoping" anything.

I'm not selling diamonds, only spa-coupons, so it's not the end of the world is someone-else somehow cracks other user's account (we don't store or process CC information on our side).

> you should immediately route them into a password-change workflow on login

We already have that by default (we're using Drupal), but, as I said, most of our target audience finds it too complicated.

Re: You Can’t Make Money Charging $1 Per Month

#63

Post by WA » Wed, Jun 29, 2011, 7:10 AM UTC

ahoyhere wrote: post #60

WA wrote: post #4

Obviously, the main argument against a $1 per month is the fact that you need to provide a lot of support. From my experience, this depends heavily on the target audience I guess, but I completely disagree. I ran a website for a couple of years without thinking about turning it into a business. Finally, shortly before I graduated, I decided that I need to make money from it, otherwise I can't sustain it any more. Ove…

You made the first move - good job. Now, it's time to consider the extremely likely possibiliy that you could charge 5x the amount and without decreasing conversion by 5x. Which means you could probably be earning 5x than you are now (or more) without any extra work.

Thank you. Do you have an idea how I could increase the rate without pissing people off? Would you increase the rate for everyone or only for new customers? How do you justify an increase from 1€ to, say, 5€?

Re: You Can’t Make Money Charging $1 Per Month

#64

Post by kelnos » Wed, Jun 29, 2011, 6:03 PM UTC

MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #38

kelnos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that your login UI (including the "forgot password" feature) isn't intuitive enough for your audience? We take a lot of things for granted as programmers/techies. Beyond that, I think I'd start "firing" customers who are a huge support drain like that, especially those who are non-paying customers. Unless your site depends heavily on network effects, and a large percentage of visitors have passwor…

Easy to say, tough to do. I feel personally beholden to all our users, and I want to make sure they can use the site effectively. To that end, I try to help as best I can. It's a drain, but I feel guilty just ignoring someone who is begging for help.

It really isn't that hard, especially given the relative anonymity of the internet. I've done it before, and while I'm not going to say it's a good feeling actually doing it, I feel so much better afterward knowing that my overall stress level is going to be lower. Some people are just poison when it comes to providing support, and they're not worth the time, money, and stress.