Paying Users Are Your Nicest Users
agileleague.com
agileleague.com
Someone with actual professional psychology experience could probably shoot that full of holes.
However, one thing I noticed is that freemium clients are more likely to click on ads and subscribe to your social networks than others. Some pain for some gain I guess.
What do you mean by "an impossible gap?" If it wasn't possible, it wouldn't happen. Even beyond that, "impossible" does not entail great magnitude, but simply something outside the set of possibilities, which could be good or bad.
In other words, You went from A to B without going through any intermediate steps.
Said yet another way: B is a post singularity relative to A.
It's a very tiny jump in energy according to human perception - the interesting part is that the particle is only in state 0 or 1, never "in between".
None of my other - paid with no free option - services suffers from this, despite similar numbers of users trying them out. In fact, I don't think I've once received an email with a swearword in it from one of the paid tools, whether from users on the free trial or fully paid-up.
My points of reference are http://colorblendy.com/ which gets +6,000 uniques per month and http://tweepsect.com/ which gets +25,000 uniques per month.
If you look at https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/tweepsect you can see that the quality of users is... not of the highest IQ, and yet they manage to figure it out. About once every 3-6 months I'll get someone @mentioning me saying "HOW DOES THIS WORK I DON'T EVEN" or something, but those are extreme exceptions.
When I first launched tweepsect, I had a lot more complaints and questions, but I iterated on it and tried to obsolete any recurring issue. It's been up for multiple years now and requires basically a few hours of maintenance per year. I'm happy to provide utility at near-zero effort for free.
That said, I completely agree about paying users. They're the best. When I was prototyping SocialGrapple, I invited +100 of my peers. The feedback was completely superficial and uncommitted. When I looked at how much time the people spent on the site, I realized that they weren't my target users and that the feedback was worthless. I shut down the beta and a month later I relaunched SocialGrapple with a monthly fee membership. The userbase completely changed--people really cared. I got people whose productivity and business was seriously impacted by the usefulness of my product to the point where I wrote custom views for specific users just to cater to their specific needs (until I could generalize it to everyone).
I've caught users recommending a product of mine (feels awesome), then they turned around and insulted it in the same conversation. Upon a little anonymous interaction, they were upset because the CSS didn't match Google. Users, WTF???
Thank god for A/B testing.
This is horrifying, and only further dissuades me from ever pursuing a venture built around the freemium model.
Frankly, I'm not a fan of it as a concept to begin with. The fact that it contributes to the mis-guided sense of entitlement of (in the words of Louis CK) non-contributing zeros only adds insult to injury.
Heh, to be fair it's not all doom and gloom, I can't see how so many people would offer it if it was. Even with the paid tools, you will still receive the occasional bewildering email, such as this gem which arrived over the weekend:
Dang!! I love this app sooooo much. I thought it was free. Until i looked over and saw it was only a trial. I'm no longer using this site until it becomes free
Sigh.
On the other hand, getting sweet soundbites like "I love this!" or when a polite person sends suggestions starting with "I'm really sorry to bother you, but I think if you did X it would really improve Y!" my hope is restored.
Agreed, those are the emails that leave a smile on my face and lift my mood far beyond what such a simple email should do. I've also found that they tend to happen on a regular basis from the paying customers. The free ones, much less so.
Then the customer comes back with a couple tall Starbucks fruity drinks, gives one to the clerk, pays, collects the piles of clothes and leaves. $2700.
This is not normally part of my universe.
I think about this when I go to a trendy place like Buckhead in Atlanta. There are some big money players walking around - but they generally aren't the young people who look like a million bucks and look like they are loaded. Those people are broke.
But, I digress.
1) purely ad-supported (increasingly difficult, imho)
2) generating (at least some) revenue by harvesting user data
3) running at a loss with the goal of being acquired as soon as feasibly possible
2 & 3 specifically could in various contexts be viewed as sleazy. This isn't my personal indictment, but they do represent views I've heard bandied about on a semi-consistent basis.
Freemium means trialing a product based on usage as opposed to trialing it based on time. Once your usage goes over a threshold you are an active user and you start paying for the service.
That's our model on JotForm and it works well for us.
One of the best examples of this model is evernote. I remember they were saying something like if the users stays active on their product for n months, they will almost certainly become a premium user.
For a perfect example: LinkedIn. It's a freemium service where recruiters and other big-players pay for increased access. Another example is Flickr: There are so many photo-sharing sites that who would sign up for a paid one with so many others for free?
Running a freemium site requires walking a line between the free and paid users. It can be sleazy, but it doesn't have to be, and there are definitely models where it makes sense.
College professor tossed it to a grad student, who proceeded to install it on a virtual computer instead of an actual PC. Virtual computers were very rare in these days. The student then complained to us that the software wasn't working right in their emulator. And why didn't we say that our software required a serial port (which was impossible to not have on a PC in those days) in our requirements list?
Give a man a fish and he'll bitch at you it's the wrong one.
If something is cheap I don't expect much of it.
If something is free, then my instinct is to focus on the cost of my time, which in many cases makes me demanding.
A perfect example of this would be Facebook. If it suddenly ate of my photos I would be furious because of all the time I'd spent tagging them. Similarly, I haven't really used Reddit since 2007 due to the fact that it once tricked me into wasting a lot of time writing comments that were invisible to everyone but me. Even thinking about it now I'm angry. Money is money, but time is the stuff my life is made of!
http://toshuo.com/2007/reddit-deceived-me/
On the other hand, if my $20 Nokia phonosaurus died, I wouldn't exactly be broken up about it.
I have a pretty thick skin, but after a while it is tiresome to receive such emails. Draining, boring and tiresome. I wouldn't offer support to any user who wrote such an email, but the bigger problem was having to read their filth in the first place.
People that engage in hostile and harassing emails are the kind of people you won't want to engage at all. This is true for personal communication and also for business. Dealing with that kind of harassment is really draining and handling one person like that won't be the end of it, as there are more such people waiting in the wings to send their expletive filled mouth vomit.
The best way to handle these people in business is to ignore them or to outright ban them from your service. Of course, ditching freemium creates a de facto ban on users won't sign on to a paid service, so there is that approach.
For myself, if I pay for an app I expect a lot more from that app. I expect a quality apps with updates and support. There was an article I read (can't find it now) that a developer said he doesn't do payware due to the fact that he doesn't want to give support.
I have no problems with free apps ceasing development - they were free! It would be nice if they released the source code though so someone else could take charge of the app.
A $10 Mac app pays for itself within a couple of days of use. People have no issue buying two lattes for $10 and pissing it out, but when it comes to a cheap app, they feel entitled to so much more.
So pay 2$ and get updates for free.
> So pay 2$ and get updates for free.
No, that's not what he said. He said he expects update and support. He didn't say that those updates and support should be free. Merely that updates and support is available. It's akin to paying for anything, really. I expect if I pay for a computer, for example, that they make available to me updates and support.
So let's not play the "Well, actually..." game, and discuss things like an intelligent adult.
And, even if he did mean that he expects updates and support for free for the rest of his life, does that really warrant a response or consideration?
A quality app, sure, but why do you expect updates and support for the few dollars you spent?
I gotta say, Apple's App store model turned consumer software into a race to the bottom, and developers who want to price their software less than $10 had better be aware of what they're getting into from a customer expectations perspective.
After all, isn't that the benefit of being the customer, and not the product? Isn't this what App.net is building itself on?