Here's an easy way to start a conversation with new trial users:<p>Send a simple, one-line email that asks them what they hope to achieve with your product/service.<p>"Hi, saw you signed up for Acme, welcome! What are you hoping to get out of your trial?"<p>(I've written about this before: <a href="http://www.gkogan.co/blog/question-for-saas-trial-users/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gkogan.co/blog/question-for-saas-trial-users/</a>)
I'm inclined to disagree with the author's thesis. I agree that talking to users is essential, but I think his heurstic is arbitrary: "You’re doing it right if you can get a third of potential users to pay you money within a month of initial contact."<p>The real number you should be targeting is the number of users you need to pay in order to build a sustainable business, that could be above 80%, it could be below 5%, it could be 0 . . .<p>This is something that varies widely by business and I don't think it's good advice for a company that falls outside the scope I imagine the author is thinking of.
From my experience, I disagree with the heuristic of money paid within the first month for knowing if you are really talking to users, because it doesn't apply especially for enterprise SaaS, where you likely to have a direct sales model, and as a co-founder with no sales experience at the beginning, as you continue to sell subscriptions, let's say the same functionality within a product, you will improve as a salesperson, closing deals earlier and by that heuristic, you know what your customers want.<p>Consistent user engagement with the product is a better metric to build such a heuristic, because user engagement is direct correlated to value IMO. That's why I am a fan of even charging $1 per month for a product, because it easier (relative to having given it away for free) to increase pricing based on the value you deliver to your customer, which can be measured through user engagement with the product.
This post makes no sense to me. The goal of talking to users is not to sell them something. The goal is to better understand their needs/attitudes/pain points/etc. so that you can improve your products and services.<p>That eventually leads to product/market fit (and therefore revenue), but putting a conversion goal on user research sounds more like a sales activity than true user research to me...<p>Did I just miss the point of the post?
I'm not sure about the magic number here, but as a user, I do know that I appreciate hearing from the company.<p>Years ago I signed up for Todoist and I was so impressed by the emails and communication that I got (on top of it being a fantastic product) that I subscribed to premium and have been ever since.
Overall I agree with the spirit of the article but 30% could be too high based on the vertical you are in.
Collecting feedback when you dont have direct connection to your users ( like you don't have email address ) is hard.
Progressively engaging with users and asking/helping them what they want to accomplish will yield lot of insights.