Comment by rsobers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsobers | Hacker News Reader

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Wow, this is the absolute wrong way to ditch a free plan. Holy shit!

The post comes off really condescending towards the beta users that helped get the product off the ground.

Sure, the business lessons are valid and helpful (despite being a complete regurgitation of advice espoused by people like Rob Walling and Patrick McKenzie), but IMO they don't belong in the same post that tells a cohort of your very first users:

"Yeah, we needed you in the beginning to test our idea and product, but now you're a burden. Get lost."

Grandfather your free plan beta customers in. It's the right thing to do. The free plan, IIRC, had a really low ceiling in the amount of data that could be collected--like 150 people or something silly.

Lessons for SaaS founders: 1.) Don't have a free plan. 2.) Don't set an expectation that there will be a free plan to get more early testers. 3.) Don't ever refer to any of your customers (free or not) like they're a number in a spreadsheet.

(Is it just me, or is the trak.io blog theme eerily similar to Signal v. Noise?)

This happens so often.

It's not just in the freemium space either. I've seen companies use affiliate programs and low-ish prices in their early days, only to dump the affiliate program and price model after they have garnered enough success and momentum.

The pr they put out will chime about creating a sustainable business and it being good for the users. They will harp on how it's impossible to run the business without making the changes. Ideally, they try to play on guilt for haven given their userbase such a good deal or how bad affiliates had given them so much trouble.

They do not talk about the fact that the strategies they employed that helped them be successful early on weren't dumb "mistakes", but simply ways to get momentum. In other words, they were using the users to propel a business. The right thing to do is to reward your early users (and affiliates if that is the case). Making parts of your userbase out to be a 'freeloader' just exposes a certain mindset some entrepreneurs have toward their users.

Hey, original author here.

Haha Thanks for the point of view - yeah it's a big splash but there was no hiding the fact so we just wanted to be totally transparent about it.

So far the replies from all our beta users has been exactly what we hoped for (expected), either "Thanks for the honesty" or "Cool, we were just checking it out, we're not in a position to need something like this now" or a few "Yeah screw you guys, delete my account I'm not using you anymore".

I understand a lot of your points, but I strongly disagree that we're regurgitating other peoples advice. This is taken exactly from our experiences.

And we're not telling anyone to get lost. We're explaining why we had to evolve and change our assumptions. If we carried the burden of every mistake we'd made as a startup, within a year we'd be so heavy we wouldn't be able to move anywhere!!!

(Oh and the blog theme is following a trend of about 20+ major startup blogs who switched to a typography led, single column design. We rebuilt the design a few months ago and tried to make it as much about the content as possible. I personally think the end goal was more like eerily similar to reading an eBook?)

Why don't you grandfather in your current free users and shut off the plan? That seems totally fair.

At present, it seems like bait and switch. You say it yourself in the post:

"One of the most prominent details we emphasized to everyone we spoke to in the early days of Trak.io was that we would offer a super generous Free plan."

So you got people to try and test your product based on this attractive premise, and now the ones who are perhaps too early stage to switch to a paid plan are stuck. With an analytics app, switching costs are pretty high.

Of course you have the ability to iterate, increase prices, etc.--and you should--I just think it should be done with a little more tact.

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