Ask HN: How do you monetise or shut up free-riders? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you monetise or shut up free-riders?

3 pointsDrNuke1 comment

In the last five years, my modest attempts at internet B2C met an increasing number of vocal, self-entitled or just angry free-riders that added a lot of noise without providing any value. I understand free-riding is just another social expression these days and cheeky devs can just exploit that by offloading beta-testing to them. In the mid-to-long term of the life of a service, though, free-riders inevitably become a nuisance. How do you keep that noise under control? The simplest way is to fence your service by just giving one or two features for free without any assistance, while charging for the core, that is a paywall. Any other way? More subtle strategies to convert at least a part or have some acting as evangelists in disguise? Thanks.

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Don't think of it as "free-riders". I had a person who would idle in my service for free. They had a small bankroll and my system required $30K and my service is rather expensive compared to my competitors, which would have eaten up all their money.

The person would initiate discussions with new people and helped foster a healthy discussion in our chatroom just by asking questions which were of importance to them. Further, they would ask me more questions about my system, which I never thought about because my account size was significantly larger and it never dawned on me. I was able to create a Discord channel with all the answers to the questions they asked and that helped convert new users who joined the channel at a faster rate.

Some people have capital to spend, some have time to spend. Oddly enough this person was so encouraged they posted about my service on their own social media accounts without me asking and it helped grow my community of followers much faster. However, I don't have a "free" tier only a trial tier, so maybe that is what allowed me to not spend too much time on catering to people without the required capital to spend. In fact, many people don't sign up for the trial and are waiting to grow their accounts before they exhaust the free trial. So maybe, you can do the same, allow the "free" features as a trial. I do post some plans in the #general channel for free for stocks that someone with a small bankroll can get in on, but that's on a random basis.

I am curious to hear what people's opinion is of the evangelist perspective.

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