SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
derickbailey.com
SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
1–10 of 49 posts
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#2It's interesting that this was a "failure" because it was supposed to be a customer acquisition strategy/business plan. I wonder how the math would shake out if you looked at it as a market research expense.
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#3It 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 price point. I think for free trials to work, the person has to have a recurring use for the product, and can easily get value after a short and simple install/initiation session.
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#4It 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.
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#5Thanks for the info! So many people are fooled into parting
with their hard earned money, and time. I guess that's capitalism?
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#6I'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 know right away if your sales pitch works and if your pricing is remotely reasonable.
I know the conversion rate without a free trial won't be maybe as high, but when you are looking to just validate a product and a marketing strategy, you need to know if it will turn into real sales. You don't have to have a free trial to sell a product.
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#7I am a huge fan of the unlimited (duration) free trial. How many of us sign up for something, poke at it, forget for a few weeks, and then go back again more seriously? I'm sure I do it all the time. By the time I remember, I am most of the way through a trial period and haven't actually evaluated wether the product is a good fit for me or not.
Regardless of how long your trial runs, people really need to bake in resource limits. I assume most SaaS companies have offered (or will offer) tiered rate plans based partially on consumption, so if you are starting as a free-only beta, why not bake in some sane resource limits from the start? Some ideas for this might be:
* maximum podcast size/duration (10 min or 3MB free?)
* 4 free uploads, then you pay
* Retention period - free accounts only store data for 30 days from upload
Sure, you are still technically paying for the free folks, but you greatly limit the cost damage while providing reasonable motivation for people to move to a paid tier when they are ready.
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#8I strongly suggest you don't take ANY business advice from someone who decided to get into the podcast hosting business in 2013.
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#9Anyone 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.
Re: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
#10I'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?)