Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

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Trying to be constructive here but also This is just a common gripe of mine regarding insanely short trial periods for important/key software. What exactly do you expect a user to accomplish in 14 days that would leave them wanting to start paying you? An accounting period is typically a month, minimally. I stumbled on your post and wasn’t seeking it out, so how I have to find time over next 2 weeks to see if I’m interested, etc. The first 14 days are just work for me, no value, just integrating data/configuring things/etc and I have not got any value out yet.

Anyway, I know I don’t have time and I know 14 days isn’t really even enough time to test drive it anyways. So, it is a trial period that really just pushes me away from signing up. Had I signed up and had unlimited time to do all my setup/config/integration works, which I’m in no hurry so may take a few months (of mostly inactivity), then I may close my books in tandem with my current system a couple times and you should reach out to bill me once I’ve closed 2-3 acccounting periods. That would give you a great opportunity to get feedback from me on what I like or dislike having gone through a couple month end reps and sell me on making this my core accounting product. But, since you turned me off initially with the 14 day free trial thing neither of us will ever know.

That's a good point! Happy to offer extended trial. Email me (daniel(at)modernbanc(dot)com) and we'll get something set up for you (if you're interested).

I think you're missing the point. They're not necessarily sold on signing up, because the choice of 14 days for the trial period is off-putting.

It's nice that you're offering a longer trial period for people who specially request it, but what they're saying (which I 100% agree with, and am also not in the market for accounting software, to be clear) is that you're likely to lose out significantly with such a short period. My guess is if you offered a 3-month trial period you'd get over 10 times as many signups.

Just my 2 cents.

The only way the 14-day period seems like a good idea to me from a (short-sighted) business standpoint is if there are significant problems with your software that don't reveal themselves until books for the month are done. That way you can get some conversions (followed by cancellations when they run into those shortcomings) from people who wouldn't convert if you offered a longer period.

If you're worried about large customers taking advantage and becoming difficult to service for such a long period, another model is to offer a free tier with up to X data, Y records, etc. That way you'll be appealing to smaller businesses for whom this is roughly 3 months of accounting services, and perhaps less so to larger businesses who usually take much longer to convert anyway.

This is the correct takeaway from my comment. While kind of you, I wasn't fishing for a longer trial offer or even in the market for this solution. I was pointing out how a short trial preemptively narrows your top of funnel in terms of signup conversion. If you believe in your software/company, you should be prioritizing signups because you believe you will be able to convert them eventually.

If you give the user time to get through all of the integrations/setup steps, you should be even more confident in your ability to convert them as they're invested at that point.

If you're worried about the 'load' of a user on your SaaS, then you have bigger issues to solve because the unit economics of having a low usage/free tier user should be essentially free. If a user does require a lot of human touch/support during their trial, then I feel like you handle that manually on a case by case basis. It's likely going to be rare and you can decide how to handle (eg. talk to them about paying for support / moving to a paid plan / etc). I tend to believe you're missing out on the learning and feedback loop from these types of users even if you perceive them as unprofitable or what have you.

We extended the trial period to 30 days now.

The original intent behind 14 days was to force a deadline onto user to get set-up properly and realize value of the product. (Seeing their financials in real-time)

Though the comment above justifiably mentioned that some folks might want an entire accounting period to run books in parallel while evaluating. We'll keep looking into this.

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