Lauryn Isford: preference

Transcript context

…I guess I have so many of them. You're educating me on my own perspectives today. Freemium and free trials. So, to get on the same page with definitions for all of our wonderful listeners, a free trial is when you can use the product for free for a limited time and then your only option beyond that limited time is to pay for use of the product. Freemium would be when there are multiple options for how to use the product and one of those options is an infinitely free version of the product. So, you can use Airtable for free forever or you can pay some amount and have access to premium features. So, with all that in mind, personally I'm in the camp of offering a reverse trial. Funky name, but what that means is offer a trial but also offer freemium. Do both. The reason why I like this is you get an opportunity when somebody shows up and says, "Hey, I'm going to give your product a try today," to show them everything that's possible. Onboarding is a huge component of that. Help somebody get started, have those aha moments and experience initial value, but also this is your moment to showcase everything that can be done with your really cool product, and you have some limited number of days, maybe seven days, 14 days, 30 days, to showcase all of the cool things that your company is building for your customers. That is the beauty of a free trial. It's not just that someone can try your product without paying. It's that they can try even more of the product, all of the premium, amazing advanced offerings that could be possible if they decide they want to settle on a premium plan. When you are deciding if this is something you want to do, I would actually take a big step back from looking at competitive pricing pages and getting into the details and reading blogs and just think about what your philosophy is as a business on monetizing customers. The reason for this is generally the reason to offer a free plan or a free trial but really a free plan, the freemium type of pricing model is if you value letting millions, tens of millions of customers give your product a try, even if they never pay you a dollar. That shows to me prioritization and value of user grab, brand awareness, and exposure of your product more than just revenue. And if that's the case, a freemium pricing structure can be really great for your product, and it give you the space to see if your product can become that household name that everybody is familiar with and can give a try and get some early value and even experience some aha moments. On top of that, you can offer a free trial to show what's possible with premium value and then that really can just be focused space for you to say, "Hey, look what's possible if you pay us $5 a month, $10 a month," and you might even get some extra conversion out of that and some more paid customers. So, in general, that's how I think about it. , "Hey, look what's possible if you pay us $5 a month, $10 a month," and you might even get some extra conversion out of that and some more paid customers. So, in general, that's how I think about it. I like the reverse trial because user growth is important and if you're in a long game where you're trying to grow a business for a decade or more, ideally you're trying to get millions of people onto your product and you can always have that monetization conversation later, but you only get a couple moments where you can say, "Hey, pull out your credit card or let's get on the phone and talk about an enterprise contract," with a customer before you lose trust or lose patience. And so, that focus on helping them discover value and build loyalty to you is much more important. I really like this concept, a super cool name too. I'm also thinking back to some of the SaaS tools I've used that have had this where I go straight into the pro plan and then I'm like, "Oh, I don't want to lose all these features," and then I actually end up buying it. So, when I'm hearing this, it sounds to me like it's a better version of the freemium approach. I imagine there's still many SaaS tools that are very enterprise-y, take handholding, maybe this goes away. I know Elena Verna who's been on the podcast is just a huge proponent of everyone will be product-led, self-serve eventually, but until that day they're still like, I don't know, I think of Retool I think is very hands-on, handhold-y, front I think is like that. There's all these tools that people don't get really quickly. And so, I guess do you still think there's a need for some of these tools that need sales and customer success involvement to stick with just trial at least for now, or do you think they should all kind of find a way to get to self-serve and a reverse trial?…

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