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Comment by paulie_a | Hacker News Reader

I love this article. Never give your service away for free. The user has no skin in the game so won't use it. You are not selling if you do all the talking. 90 percent of the conversation on your end should be questions. I am not a sales guy buy I've seen it done right and the wrong way. The wrong way is someone doing all the talking. The right way simply asks open ended questions and listens.

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>Charge more

Agreed. There is this weird psychological trick where if you charge people more they start to value your service more or at least delude themselves into thinking so exactly because they are spending more money, it's a beautiful thing. If it fails, you can always reduce your price again!

>Never give your service away for free.*

* Except if your business model depends on capturing a large enough audience to feed them ads and generate revenue from that (Facebook, Google, Reddit).

Granted b2c is an exception when based on advertising. But I've seen plenty of cases where raising prices resulted in more customers. And quite frankly better customers overall. The ones that get the service for free or an extremely low cost are the ones that bitch the most in my experience. The people paying a decent price tend to be friendly and while might encounter issues, they work with the CSR to solve the problem.

You quote them as saying “charge more”, but I don’t see them say that. Did they edit their comment while/after you responded?

It is in the 'Do you have any advice for founders trying to price their product?' section as a hyperlink.

Ah, so that part of the comment is in reply to the original post. Confusing but I see.

While I agree that charging more is generally a good strategy, not having a free tier discourages product experimentation.

A real life example: I am in search for an api doc solution for my SaaS. A certain "docs" SaaS costs about $1200/year for their basic service, which includes an ad for their service at the bottom of your doc pages. To not have their branding ("white label") costs $4800/yr. That SaaS is certainly taking the "charge more" advice to heart and because of it I will never try their service, and instead am trying open source solutions like docusaurus.

But you're probably not their target audience. If you're charging $1200/year for basic service, the last thing you want is would-be users who try the service unassisted on a self-service basis, fail to use it properly, and decide that no, it's actually not their thing. As a sales manager, what you want instead is to get these users to interact with an account manager and make damn sure they succeed when they decide to try.

Exactly, if people aren't willing to pay for it, what exactly is the point of it? To waste your time? I understand if something is a hobby project, but dumping tons of your own resources just to provide a "free" service is dumb. People are getting more reluctant to upload their lives in exchange for their private information being sold off. I said it before, the next big web is going to be actually good paid services.

> The user has no skin in the game so won't use it.

I agree 100% with this statement. The first startup I was involved with decided to give the product away for free to build an audience, and then attempt to monetize the audience.

The "business" felt more like a "hobby" and our users were not helpful because they had no investment whatsoever in the product.

And at the end - don't think you don't have experience in selling, you already do that when you communicate. Genius.

You also learn how to sell in early childhood...

- No.

- Why?

- It's candy, and we're not here to buy candy.

[...]

- Why?

- [Sigh] Because mum said so, and I promised her not to buy you any.

- But mum doesn't need to know, does she?

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