Thanks for this response. Right, I don't think I'm at the stage where I need to spend on marketing or heavily market in general - I'm just getting started and just launched a couple days ago.
For now, I have 13 people that signed up for the product that haven't paid or started a trial yet, so my first thought is to talk to customers and figure out what kind of features are missing/why they haven't started a trial yet. I'm doing that later today. From there I'll make some adjustments as noted above and try to make at least a few sales before doing anything "marketing" related.
My thought is: if I can't get even 1 person to pay for the product w/o offering some free tier, it's probably just not compelling enough of a product for people to use. And in this case that's fine because I'll use the product myself for some of my new startup ideas (they all need authentication flows)
The way I like to reframe it is by thinking of a free-tier as a marketing expense.
Serving those free plans costs money (hosting, support, etc) but it leads to word-of-mouth and eventual conversions.
Is your startup at a stage where you should be spending money on marketing?
If yes, then ask yourself "is a free-tier the highest ROI for your marketing budget?"
Thanks for this response. Right, I don't think I'm at the stage where I need to spend on marketing or heavily market in general - I'm just getting started and just launched a couple days ago.
For now, I have 13 people that signed up for the product that haven't paid or started a trial yet, so my first thought is to talk to customers and figure out what kind of features are missing/why they haven't started a trial yet. I'm doing that later today. From there I'll make some adjustments as noted above and try to make at least a few sales before doing anything "marketing" related.
My thought is: if I can't get even 1 person to pay for the product w/o offering some free tier, it's probably just not compelling enough of a product for people to use. And in this case that's fine because I'll use the product myself for some of my new startup ideas (they all need authentication flows)