> Showcase tiered features in your trial<p>Story time. When I worked on ESPN.com's Fantasy Football rebuild in 2003, showcasing an upgrade was <i>by far</i> the largest converter of free users to paid. You could play with your N buddies where everybody was playing for free, but you could also individually upgrade.<p>Some context: during NFL games on Sunday your team of players would be playing someone else's in your league. As players on your team did things in the real-world NFL games, your fantasy football team would accrue points. There were two ways to see how many points your team had scored: you could wait until Monday morning when the weekly job ran, or you could pay to see your team's live scoring updates as they happened in real time on Sunday afternoons/evening.<p>Here's what drove the most individual upgrades. Someone on my team got the bright idea to show <i>some</i> players' live updates on your roster as a "teaser". You might have 20 players, and two would show live scores. There'd be a big CTA to upgrade to see the other 18 players' scores. It was admittedly pretty cool - you'd watch an NFL game, see one of your players score a touchdown, and then seconds later see his score change in your fantasy league.<p>I don't remember the exact conversion rate but IIRC it was 15%+ (2% is incredible conversion for free to paid).<p>That's one reason why, in my SaaS trial to paid consulting[1], I recommend scattering in-app CTAs to upgrade where contextually relevant. It still converts like crazy (which makes sense - you're trying to do a job, the path forward is right in front of you, and you can pay a few $$ to get the job done).<p>1- <a href="http://www.trialtopaid.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.trialtopaid.com</a>
> Your product's time-to-value<p>This is such a big one for me. At my previous workplace it was fairly low friction to try new tools. I'd often just sign up, start a trial, play around with it, and start trying to get people interested. Eventually we might realise it would solve some problems, we'd then start signing people up and getting data into it. But by that point the 15-30 day trial had inevitably expired.<p>I would often reach out to ask for trial extensions, and was always given these, but that's friction! One thing I loved about Linear was that the trial was pegged to the number of issues you created in it which meant we could take our time and work it into our processes without them dictating a schedule, then only when we were seeing value would we need to start paying.<p>More services, particularly B2B SaaS companies, need to figure out trials that aren't based on time. Some tools took >1 year to go from first person on the team signing up for a trial, to valuable use.
There are lots of instances where I find a tool I want to try, sign up for the trial, see the inside of the tool and think, "I don't have time for this, I'll try it tomorrow". Inevitably, the 2 weeks or whatever run out and I've barely touched it.<p>It seems like it would be better to base the trial on usage rather than time and/or offering a generous free tier with no-brainer upgrades once you're committed.
> The number of users that take part in trials doesn't matter to your bottom line. The percentage of people that convert does.<p>I stopped reading at this point. What actually matters is the <i>absolute</i> number of people that sign up and pay for your product. Making it harder for people to try out your product obviously lowers the absolute number of users who get to know your product, which has knock-on effects that you can not measure in A/B tests.<p>If your product requires me to provide credit card information, or even contact sales, it better be exceptional for me not to bail instantly. If it is exceptional, your marketing probably does not matter much anyway.
"The only people willing to go through the trouble of creating a new email address or listing someone else's address just to get another trial, are people who love your product."<p>Completely wrong.<p>I've seen plenty of cases where initial setup went wrong and there wasn't a way to reset the account to the initial state, so then creating a 2nd one was the only way to actually do the trial.<p>Also, life sometimes gets in the way so that I sign up for a trial and then the 7 days are over before I ever had time to login and look around.
For our own SaaS[0], we provide a timed trial. But we regularly provide trial extensions because reality of business is that it takes time to get everybody on board and onboarded.<p>Reading this post, I suspect '30 days of use' would result in less 'please extend the trial' emails and would mean less friction during the trial.<p>However, there is a tradeoff: when somebody reaches out for a trial extension, it may be their first contact, where having a fast and effective response gives them a sense of the level of service we provide. Sometimes it also results in further conversation about how we can help them make a stronger pitch to whoever internally is approving the purchase. So a looser trial would mean less of these conversations.<p>Would have to test :)<p>[0] - <a href="https://enchant.com" rel="nofollow">https://enchant.com</a>
Thanks for all the comments and for sharing your experiences as well.<p>We are writing up some content about free tiers as a follow up based on the feedback we got from this thread. Looking forward to sharing it.<p>We just shared a follow up article on how to deal with repeated trials that expands up on what we included in this article<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696631" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696631</a>
<a href="https://upollo.ai/blog/when-users-repeat-trials" rel="nofollow">https://upollo.ai/blog/when-users-repeat-trials</a>
How about a multi-tier trial approach?
1 day without sign-up
3 days with sign up and contact information
30 days with credit card on file<p>I could see a few scenarios where this might be a useful approach.