You should reconsider this pricing model because a client of any considerable size is both able and willing to pay for a product that is financially stable. $49 won't keep the lights on, and the fear of investing time and data into a system that won't survive financially due to poor pricing might scare off some potential customers.
People who spend time worrying about what could go wrong don’t make good business operators. The truth is, when you get a business off the ground so many things go fantastically wrong and so many go fantastically right and you’ll have not anticipated any of it.
Let the person who built this CRM focus on the only thing they really need to worry about: building an awesome product and getting people to pay them for it.
Don't you think it's a just little premature for that scale of thinking? I mean, they just got the thing posted on HN.
$49/m is just so obviously underpriced that it rings alarm bells - how could that possibly be sustainable, will it still be around in 6 months?
The company is just me and I'm not trying to land huge customers. Therefore I need no marketing or customer support team. I'm building it for myself and other small businesses. I think I can make that sustainable. I also have no interest in being acquired so you won't have to worry about that either :).
CRMs are usually ridiculously overpriced.
Setting expectations and putting people in the right funnel is not. Especially if it’s a cheap change like adding a button.
I built an eBay feedback reminder (that's had over 15,000 paying users over the course of its life).
Here's the thing: eBay already sends feedback reminders and people pay to use mine anyway because of some minor differences (and then there are customers who don't know eBay sends feedback reminders).
Pretty much every nay say anyone who hasn't succeeded in business could give you is total fluff.
1. up to 10 users: $49/mo
2. 11–25 users: $99/mo
3. 26–100 users: $199/mo
4. 101+ users: call me
EDIT:
As anyone who has tried to buy a CRM will know, these prices are crazy low. Which is a good thing!
No, no it's not. CRM is incredibly valuable to any business and if your software provider can't sustain it's own businesses because they charge too little, the last thing you want to deal with is switching costs (direct costs and hassle) when they go under.
a lot people seem to forget that there's a lot of b2b on the small-to-medium size.
Better make sure they don't then so you won't have to support a large company that signed up because of the low price.
I was first introduced to this concept by a colleague who was going to serve customers manually instead of us programmers automating it. I said he was going to have a major issue when lots of people sign up. He replied "That is definitely a problem I want to have, I hope I get completely overloaded, because then we have the money to automate it".
I guess it is related to Paul Grahams "do things that don't scale", but "problem I want to have" is broader.
Since then I always evaluate if certain problems are the ones I want to have, because then I know I can postpone them.
I think you are missing the point that in this case you _don't_ have the money.
And they don't sign.
And it turns out what you worked on for them isn't something other customers of their size really quite want. But if you jump through these hoops...
If they are your customer, there's no more hoops to jump through.
I don't see the problem you are describing here.
You don't renegotiate from $49 to $60,000...
They blogged (alas can't find the link now) they did that deliberately in order not to be beholden to larger customers, they wanted to treat all customers equally.
From memory, their logic was that even if you decide to treat all customers equally, if you have one customer with 1k seats paying $30k, and another with 1 seat paying $30, you'll just end up treating the customers differently, it's just human nature, and there's nothing you can really do about that.