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Comment by ramykhuffash | Hacker News Reader

Really interesting. I'd love to see some numbers from a site/product that actually A/B tested both options.

If I had to use my credit card to get a free trial with Buffer for example, I would have never tried it (and eventually converted), but I guess it depends on the product.

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There's this report from Totango - http://www.totango.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-SaaS-... (PDF)

Really great report! It's based on 100 SaaS companies, and concludes very differently from this blog post: Requiring credit card for signup results in 50% lower retained users after 90 days.

I'm not sure the conclusions are very different. Yes, in this report, you get more customers if you don't ask for credit-card upfront.

But, those 120 signups you get from 1000 trial signups, meaning, for each signed up customer you need to support over 8 trials (support here means your time and to a lesser extent, your service's resources).

For the 60 signups in the case where the credit card was asked upfront, there were 200 free trial signups, ie a bit over 3 trials per customer.

So which is better depends on how much money (or time) you invested in getting the 10000 interested visitors to site (prior to them signing up), and how much money (ie. time and other resources) you need to spend to get them to become paying customers.

That's a good observation. I didn't consider the cost of converting signups to paying customers though, as in my experience, the cost is little to non (when talking the type of SaaS products in the report). But in a scenario where there is significant cost pr acquisition, then the point is very valid.

I think jasonkester below nailed it when stating if you need to interact individually with customers or in any other way have significant expense supporting trials, then that's really something to address. Again, at least in these kinds of products, obviously it does not apply to enterprise etc.

Right. The conclusions actually seem to be the same. Another point: Having more customers (at any cost, haha) isn't always what you want.

Less customers who are actually happy to pay me money for my product > More customers who don't care about the product as much, or at all.

Conversion rate 100/200 = 50%(cc required) vs 200/1,000 = 20% (cc not required).

As OP mentioned in his post: > Also, as an independent developer, it’s also very important for me to minimize time spent dealing with users who will never give me money for my product.

As an indie dev, it's a big difference.

If your product requires interacting with individual customers during their 30 day trial, that would seem to be something you'd want to work on changing immediately.

The sorts of questions that people frequently ask in the first month, tend to be things that would fit in a FAQ. If you find yourself sending the same paragraph long email more than once, it's probably worth finding a UX tweak to the product to ensure you never have to send that mail again.

For my products, for every 100 trial customers, I'll exchange emails with maybe 5 of them. That mail is usually very short, pointing to the piece of documentation that explains the issue. Only in rare cases is any actual involvement required on my part.

That's baked into the product intentionally.

I'd like to see a "PubMed" of case studies and findings like that.

X-posted on FS: http://firespotting.com/item?id=1144

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