Dabbleboard Pro now available | Hacker News Reader

Dabbleboard Pro now available

22 pointszhyder29 comments

http://www.dabbleboard.com/pro

We'll be sending the mass email soon, but I wanted to tell you all first. (Dabbleboard had also launched on HN first.) We'd appreciate any feedback about free versus Pro differentiation, pricing, promotion, or anything else.

Happy new year!

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Congratulations, zhyder!

I know that this has been a work in progress for a while. It's good to see you roll out the premium version. I hope it takes off.

I'm getting leery of this pricing scheme, and wish there was an pay-as-you-go option; what keeps happening to us with ASP products like this is:

* it sounds great in week 1,

* so we shell out (say) $30/mo for it,

* life intervenes in week 2,

* we've totally lost our groove with the product,

* we forget about it for 2-3 months,

* and the next time we notice it is when we notice the invoices ---

* --- which don't look so cheap anymore, since we haven't been using the product.

Private shared whiteboards, an awesome idea; I wish I could just pay per whiteboard or something.

A price per drawing (or even a price per minute, since we encourage unlimited drawings) might make things more complicated for people too tho. As a user, I think I'd go mad constantly doing the math for how many cents the next few minutes are costing me.

Dabbleboard is not really meant to be something you'd use just once. If it's not something people would use regularly, then we probably just need to improve it further.

A lot of things that are great ideas that deserve continuous use are not instantaneously adopted by your customers; until they're adopted fully, the sponsor at those customers has to deal with the risk that they're requesting budget for something nobody's going to use.

But, not criticizing; just giving a data point.

I know you're not criticizing, and I appreciate the feedback :). I'm hoping these would help with reducing the risk: 1. (Uncrippled) Free version 2. Ease of upgrade/downgrade/cancellation 3. 30-day-free-trial (not yet available) on the Pro versions

The above is pretty standard faire among freemium apps. What makes Dabbleboard different from Basecamp et al (apart from 37s's incredible brand)?

I have exactly the same problem with Basecamp, which you can take in one of two ways:

(1) "having the same issues as 37signals is one of those good problems to have"

(2) "if this causes problems even for Basecamp prospects, maybe there's an issue with the model"

We bought Basecamp a while ago, and while we haven't chucked it yet, we're not happy with the purchase, and knowing that we're dropping money on it every month doesn't make us more forgiving.

Maybe you could do risk-free one month trial thing?

ON THE OTHER HAND

Maybe (in all seriousness) people like us are just the wrong customers for you at this moment, and there's 5,000 companies who will be less high-maintenance, and you should just write us off.

Yep, I don't expect you (and other HNers) to be the right customers, but you're the best feedback-ers!

This really should be a per-whiteboard, not "x amount of people".

One of Dabbleboard's unique features is the personal library. We want to encourage users to save stuff to reuse later, and charging per drawing would go against that.

    > * it sounds great in week 1,
    > * so we shell out (say) $30/mo for it,
    > ...
    > * we forget about it for 2-3 months

The harsh reality is that if it wasn't for people forgetting/ignoring monthly subscription charges ASPs would be significantly less profitable. I think the pay as you go model can be even more profitable for certain services, but not for most ASPs.

s/forget/aren't psychologically equipped/g

Like the gym memberships, eh.

Recurrent billing model has multiple benefits when viewed from the perspective of maximizing profits and managing the customer base.

In marketing/sales terms the service subscribers are more "engaged", meaning that you can cross-promote and up-sell them. Also, if they decide to cancel, you can be down-sell them, issue a credit or keep them bound to the company in some other fashion.

The very situation you described is also an important property of the model that makes it not just work, but work great. A lot of people are just too plain lazy to cancel the subscription and their fees add up to more than profits lost due to not having a pay-as-you-go option.

I signed up. My use case is probably different from your larger corporate or workgroup users since I want to use it with clients and prospects so pay per whiteboard or some other scheme that doesn't have me buying the 100 user model would be worth a discusion. But it's handy and it feels like a white board (once I get used to drawing with a mouse). Happy to see you turn pro.

I should definitely clear this up on the webpage (and I'll be putting a video up as well), but you could certainly manage with even an Individual Pro account.

Update: I've clarified this (together with redesigning the page). Let me know if it's clear now.

Congrats, zhyder!

A few quibbles from someone who likes free things :~):

SVG download & more document formats: make these available for the free accounts. All the other bullet points are things a cheapskate like me isn't concerned about not being available in the free version.

SVG download is important as a Pro feature coz it enables data portability, which I expect businesses to care a lot about. The document-format limitation you can work-around by printing to PDF first.

But hey, you've been a supporter from the start. I'll send you a promo code for a free account (once I can do that).

Thanks!

You might want to swap the "Not a registered user? Sign Up" with "Already a registered user? Login". Depending on how people get in there. Or maybe there's an even better solution that handles both scenarios better...not sure.

I think the /pro page is overly verbose. But you could probably keep all the same info if you organized it better. You almost can't spend too much time on this page because any improvement is going to result in significantly increased revenue over time. http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1496-design-decisions-the...

Thanks, agreed on both points, will improve it. (It's currently sufficient just for the existing users we'll be emailing now.)

Update: just redesigned the page as you suggested. Also changed the flow so that it goes to "Sign Up" rather than "Log in" after you pick a plan.

I think it's still a bit too verbose and long (off the fold at 1024x768 I think). But huge improvement. Nice work.

Congrats on the progress so far. However, I think you really need to focus on making the purchase page more structured towards helping the buyer make a proper decision. Right now it's a sea of text and a row of prices. I'm inclined to ignore the text and choose the lowest price, even if it's not in my best interest.

This post at 37 Signals is a great reference for you: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1496-design-decisions-the...

Just updated the webpage ( http://www.dabbleboard.com/pro ). Looks better than before, but will refine it further. If you still get to read this, do let me know what you think of it now. Thanks!

We don't have the payment system setup for discount codes yet, but send me an email if you're interested, and I'll send you an HN-only promo code when the system can accept it.

Wow, I guess I completely missed Dabbleboard to begin with, but it looks pretty sweet! Kudos on creating a product -- and actually having a way to monetize it ;)

Kudos on the cool project and +1 for the New Years launch time.

Congrats! I continue to be impressed with this product...

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