Would be great to see how this translates into actual $ for the business. Is this mentioned somewhere else? The high CPCs indicate that there IS some value. But in general some people/businesses can make a living with an audience of 100 and others not with an audience of 100k.
That's super situational and really depends on the keyword you rank on. Can't give you the numbers, but yeah, the high CPC keywords are usually the bread-winners.
Monthly subscriptions churn on a monthly basis. Yearly subscriptions accumulate over time and usually remain active the whole year (IOW they churn on a yearly basis).
What's shocking to me is the $2 monthly tier. At that rate you're spending >25% on payment processing fees. Imagine a quarter of your subscribers just donating their money to MasterCard instead.
the ironic part of offering discounts for yearly subscriptions, is that it gives customers an idea of what profit margins you have for the monthly plan. usually not something you want to do.
that's not necessarily true. Yearly subs give a business some additional benefits which can help to offset the 'lower' margins. There is some correlation, sure, but its not 1:1.
I'm mostly thinking of in home delivery for e-commerce. There was a company called Latch that was acquired that was more or less a smart lock for this purpose. You can see fairly regular news stories of Walmart/Amazon attempting this sort of thing. I believe amazon has some way to put items in the trunk of your car, but I don''t have a link handy.
Have you experimented with removing your free plan? Curious to know what your support-time is in relation free:paid plans. Just from my anecdotal experience free-plans attracted the wrong type of customer for me, switching to paid with a free trial worked much better. When you have a large team and can built fancy funnels to make freemium work it seems like a great idea from a marketing perspective but for small(ish) companies I really doubt the numbers (% of upgrades from free to paid after a certain period of time) make sense in a lot of cases.
I think this is one of things where my Business Brain 100% agrees with you (the majority of my customer support burden comes from free plans, though it's worth pointing out something like two-thirds of my paid cohort converted from free) but my Hacker Brain things this project _should_ have a free plan, because free plans are nice and good and neat.
>my Hacker Brain things this project _should_ have a free plan, because free plans are nice and good and neat.
I agree free stuff is neat. I think the other side of the hacker ethos is "figure it out yourself", so I would never expect someone who hacked something together and shared it for free to then provide support for said thing. That's cool if you want to do it, but seems like asking for burnout unless you really like the support side or perhaps are looking at turning it from a free thing into a business, as you seem to be.
Depends on the person providing the thing. If you're ready to build some revenue from your thing, then yeah, upselling free customers when they need support seems like the natural thing to do.
However, there's another breed of hackers that enjoys making things more than they enjoy making money from things they make (which involves a different set of skills and interests). In which case, it's also valid to just say, "Sorry it's hard, but I can't commit to formal support."
Yeah, I think you did a better job of describing my dichotomy than I did. The galaxy brain corollary, though, is that if I get _too_ many folks who are asking for free-tier support, it means I can't support everyone at the level I'd like to; sort of a microscopic version of the OSS labor crisis.
I addressed this with my side business by keeping the free option pretty limited. Only a very small set of my potential customers qualify for free (very small, volunteer orgs, with very small problem spaces), so their support burden is kept pretty low. I still feel good about being able to offer something free to folks that get some value but can't afford to pay anything, but I'm not overwhelmed by ungrateful masses.
A little second-hand anecdata: my sister works for one of the big email marketing companies and from what I've heard from her the tagging features are a _big_ thing for customers. You could perhaps try shifting "tagging" to the paid subscription or somehow constrain the tagging on free plans?
You could run an experiment and track the data. Three cohorts: paid, free, trialing. Data points per cohort: customer support tickets per 100 accounts, conversion rate, ARPU, LTV, churn %.
I think you'll be surprised at the results. At the very least your hacker brain will be more informed, especially if you put a dollar figure on your customer support time. Doesn't have to be anything fancy, it could even be minimum wage.
this is obviously my cheap opinion and I am looking to get to the point where you are with my side project: I think you could have the best of both worlds by getting rid of your free plan. The key would be to wind down your free plan in a way that is respectful to your current users and you could do this by offering them a steep discount on the first year's terms or giving them ample time to make a decision once you discontinue the free plan.
You have probably enough word of mouth now and establishment to build off of with your product that you can get some new customers without it. You can always do trials or free POC periods.
Looks cool! Reminds me of (YCs) Station with a focus on online communities. Hint: Says "0 beta users signed up since August 1st 2019" in the bottom left corner. Maybe refresh the cache?
thanks for the feedback. Yep, currently looking into the issue. There're over 1.5k beta testers so far.
Didn't know Station was from YC. Yack is a native app with a custom UI/UX built specifically for browsing online communities. As far as I remember, Station was another wrapper that points to actual websites, no?
ZipKey develops modern visitor management solutions for high-security environments (e.g. data centers). Our current offering is centered around an iPad version with deep integrations into the customers IT and building infrastructure. We just launched our ZipKey Kiosk, which is a self-check-in terminal placed on premise at our customers with facial recognition and ID checks.
We’re looking for a great engineer to help us in pushing forward our kiosk project, the base version is already done and running (using React Native Windows with WPF & UWP) with all native bridges in place for a C# / WPF / UWP implementation.
Email us at phil@zipkey.de and I (Phil @ product) or Chris (CTO) will respond to you promptly. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your knowledge regarding Windows application development.
Just one example: GoDaddy bought the HostEurope group for €1.6B [1]. They own one of the largest domain-registers (and cloud providers) in the DACH region called Domainfactory. They reside on df.eu
Wasn't there OmniGraffle on the Mac even before Sketch? Seemed to me in the beginning that Sketch was an exact clone of OmniGraffle with a little nicer interface. Sketch evolved a lot from that point on.
Edit: OmniGraffle 1.0 launched 2001 [1], Sketch started 2008
