Elena Verna: recommendation

Transcript context

…Awesome. What an amazing definition. I haven't heard such a clear and holistic definition, so thank you for that. This is also a good segue to chatting about freemium versus trials, which I know you have strong opinions about. I know you're a big fan of freemium models over trials. So I'm curious to hear your first general, I guess, thesis on freemium versus trials, and then I'll have a few questions around this. Sure. So freemium is where you are allowed to use the product in some free capacity and you still have feature walls and you still have usage walls very frequently, but there is some ongoing forever free. Trial is also you're allowed to use the product in some capacity, but there is a time component. It's time bound. Now, freemium and trial at the end of the day are the same thing. They allow for some free usage of the product. It's just trial creates the superficial time bound on top of that usage. What ends up happening with trial, actually, is that the amount of time that it takes for me to try something versus amount of time it takes for you to try something might be very different timeframes. If I'm in a small startup, the amount of time for me to complete a certain project may be 24-48 hours. If you work for a very large enterprise with a ton of dependencies and lots of resourcing to mingle, it might take you a month just because of the scope of the work. So if the trial is seven days, who is it going to actually trial for? It's going to trial for me in the small startup and it's going to completely alienate you, large enterprise. So companies that go with trial models, especially if they go after B2B segment with trials that are time-based, they fundamentally alienate large enterprises of ever truly trying their products, unless they go and start renewing their trials constantly until they get to the point where they need two, three months finally to materialize and get the value in it. So my ask of you is, why create that superficial time component, which is not a good measure of how long it will take me to get the value out of the product, and now why push it into some other usage metric that is not time-based? Great example of this is MongoDB. I advise for them for a long time and I love their freemium, which is really a trial in disguise, but it's not a time-based trial. It's a usage-based freemium. They allow for a free cluster to be developed completely for free, but it's a community cluster. It's a shared cluster. Nobody in their right mind would put a product application on the shared environment. That would be crazy, but if you want to play around with it, then absolutely go for it, and there's no time bound of how long it will take you to prototype something and understand whether MongoDB is the right solution for you. It's a great trial, where any production use case will go into their paid monetization model, but it doesn't give you this weird concept of you only have seven days to do it because we're busy, I'm busy, week flies by, and sometimes I don't have time to invest into discovery of a new product. So don't time bound me in this stressful environment where time is not a usage metric that most customers and most users will appreciate and abide by in the first place. I'm thinking of products like Okta, maybe Zendesk, Looker, where they probably require a lot of handholding and support and they're maybe not ready to be self-serve is your sense they should also be freemium or is it fix yourself, serve product and make that work?…

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