Saw a new scheduling product launch on PH today, which basically offers a free version of Calendly's paid features.<p>Founders - how do you think about "free" product launches? I'm testing an idea now, would like to launch it along with pricing so I can validate the pricing/willingness to pay along with the idea, but feel like there's a lot of pressure to launch new products for "free".<p>Thoughts?
I find it is very rare that I actually complete a free trial, particularly for something I use for software development at work.<p>(1) It takes a lot of effort, maybe one day to one week, to really evaluate a product and know if it is worth it.<p>(2) That evaluation will feel like wasted time if, at the end, I find the product isn't worthwhile<p>(3) It will also feel like wasted time if I decide I like it but my employer decides not to pay for it.<p>If somebody gets paid $100,000 a year and spends a week evaluating something, the "free" trial costs $2000.<p>Thus I am not a believer in free trials.
I'm not a "founder" in any real sense of the word but my feeling is that it depends on what market you're targeting. If your goal is to become a billion dollar unicorn, then yeah it's going to be tough to beat free because you're going to need a huge number of users. On the other hand if you're OK with building a small sustainable business to support yourself, family and maybe a small number of employees then I think it's possible to target niche markets of people who are willing to pay for a high quality, well designed product that does exactly what they need.<p>For now this is just my working hypothesis, I'm still far from being in a position to test it.
Launching a free (often restricted by number of users or "beta" for a limited time) version is a way to get users to experience your product and possibly get hooked.<p>It makes the most sense where you expect your actual hosting costs to be symbolic for small-scale users and hope to earn from bigger customers.<p>This practice has been present since the dawn of (software) time — even Microsoft never really bothered with private illegal copies of Windows (or DOS), knowing it will get future customers into the Windows world and they'll want Windows at work too.<p>However, going straight up with the paid model has been there forever as well: it mostly depends on your individual market evaluation and existing entrentchment.
Nothing beats free. Stallman wrote a great essay on this called "Who does that server really serve?", decrying the redundancy and ultimate futility of building software-as-a-service. You will always be at-risk of being undercut by a free alternative. Selling software is an anti-pattern of computing, you have every right to be afraid of cheaper/better products wrecking your shop.<p><a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...</a>
In the same frustrating sense that one broken down car on the highway
can ruin everyone's commute, one vendor giving away free product can
ruin a market. You can blame Stallman, Torvalds, the Java consortium,
etc., who realized the only way to compete against Microsoft was price,
or more precisely the lack of it.<p>As painful as Microsoft's dominance was, the era of shrinked-wrapped
cdroms represented a more honest time when what you got was commensurate
to what you paid. Now the only game in town is dangling the carrot and
selling your customers' info to advertisers.
I simply refuse to play their game (free/race to the bottom). This isn't always a viable strategy (see stable diffusion vs OpenAI), but when I find myself in one of these situations I shoot for quality instead. The customers will pay, but I will do everything I can to give them a higher quality experience, whatever that entails.
The only thing that beats 'free' is 'quality'.<p>Your product has to be so good that people will clamour to buy it.<p>If your product's quality is 'meh', 'free' will beat that every time.
This is a bit business-model dependent.<p>If you don't intend for your product to be free for the rest of its lifetime, don't launch it as free.