The Psychological Difference Between Freemium & Free Trial Plans

dchuk

dchuk

Senior Botter
Oct 30, 2008
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The Psychological Difference Between Freemium & Free Trial Plans

Going to start blogging again, have been journaling for months regarding everything I've learned running serpIQ and hoping I can share a lot of that with everyone. This is my first post in regards to that kind of stuff, would love your guys' feedback on this.

(Free Trial in this sense refers to software as a service, not rebill physical products or anything).

Also, any upboat love would be appreciated:

The Psychological Difference Between Freemium & Free Trial Plans | Hacker News

The Psychological Difference Between Freemium & Free Trial Plans : startups

The Psychological Difference Between Freemium & Free Trial Plans | Inbound.org
 
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Great info, I've been dealing with my own billing model conflictions and this set a very clear path.

Upvoted at HN.
 
Bofu does marketing. Evernote does marketing. 37signals does marketing.

Free accounts work if you are marketing your brand. That means leveraging those free users to fill the market space top and bottom with people who are not only familiar with your product, but they recommend it. Those recommendations and referrals create a viral effect.

Then each piece of content becomes more effective and each investment in the software leads to more sales.
 
guerilla said:
Bofu does marketing. Evernote does marketing. 37signals does marketing.

Free accounts work if you are marketing your brand. That means leveraging those free users to fill the market space top and bottom with people who are not only familiar with your product, but they recommend it.
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not really sure how this relates to what I wrote in this blog post?

I'm not arguing that the free trial is always better, just that there's a specific psychological effect that occurs with freemium accounts that needs to be thought about before marketing your product using freemium versus free trials.
 
You forgot to mention things like market share.

Some people are cheap bastards, but wouldnt you rather have them using your product and spreading the gospel of your product?

Maybe they use it for free indefinitely. Does that mean they dont have value to you?
 
secretagentdad said:
You forgot to mention things like market share.

Some people are cheap bastards, but wouldnt you rather have them using your product and spreading the gospel of your product?

Maybe they use it for free indefinitely. Does that mean they dont have value to you?
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sure, I agree with you. Freemium is how we got our mailing list to over 10k users. But you have to be able to quantifiably prove that your free users are improving your conversions overall via market share.

When there are direct costs involved in operating your product, and when you can directly monetize your product substantially better by targeting a specific type of user, you have to decide if your current marketing methods need to be dropped in favor of something more preferable to your market.

It really all boils down to your market, your product, and your goals. You can make freemium work, you can make free trials work, it just depends on the circumstances of your specific situation.
 
dchuk said:
I'm not arguing that the free trial is always better, just that there's a specific psychological effect that occurs with freemium accounts that needs to be thought about before marketing your product using freemium versus free trials.
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Sure there is, but that's like saying we have a different psychological response to any two different things.

Some products lend themselves to freemium, some lend themselves to free trials. Some do both like 37signals.

The reason why you might have buyer's remorse about freemium may have less to do with the psychological response of your users, and more to do with what your freemium offering is, and how you market to your users.

A passive marketing strategy doesn't work with freemium. It also doesn't work with upsells. Bofu gets that. He's a jew. He's not afraid to ask people for money and tell them why they absolutely MUST have his product.
 
If anyone has suggestions/requests/ideas for next post I'd love to hear them. Gonna get some beer and chill this afternoon so I can jam on my next post then
 
I'd like you to write about your hardware, your hardware partners and scaling issues.

I'd like you to write about your thought process as you iterate your software.

I know one of the more interesting things about DFB was the process we went through trying to scale up and all of our trials with solving scaling issues.

There were some good stories in there. We probably should have told those stories. The compulsion is always to avoid letting our your "secrets" but the truth is, the less you promote your success and failures, the less attachment people will develop with your brand.

Also, by focusing on tech stuff, you're playing right to the hackernews audience.

Keep it in your ken and the content will be very good.
 
guerilla said:
I'd like you to write about your hardware, your hardware partners and scaling issues.

I'd like you to write about your thought process as you iterate your software.

I know one of the more interesting things about DFB was the process we went through trying to scale up and all of our trials with solving scaling issues.

There were some good stories in there. We probably should have told those stories. The compulsion is always to avoid letting our your "secrets" but the truth is, the less you promote your success and failures, the less attachment people will develop with your brand.

Also, by focusing on tech stuff, you're playing right to the hackernews audience.

Keep it in your ken and the content will be very good.
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that's actually perfect timing as we're going to be relaunching the entire product in the next 4 weeks or so, including a whole new backend processing system with caching and faster processing, etc. Plus we're redoing the front end to be much more "app-like".

I'll start outlining a few posts for that stuff. Thanks for the suggestions.
 
I'm glad at least some people here get what fremium means and how it works.

Enjoyed the read.
 
dchuk said:
that's actually perfect timing as we're going to be relaunching the entire product in the next 4 weeks or so, including a whole new backend processing system with caching and faster processing, etc. Plus we're redoing the front end to be much more "app-like".
Click to expand...
This is gold content, totally unique to your company and brand, and is something that a lot of people will get value from.

No one knows the topic of how SerpIQ is evolving and the decision making behind that evolution better than you do.
 
I would love to see all the data you got as Google was scaling out panda/ penguin and all the updates on a time table or something.

I would also like to see information about how to get up a noobs coding skills so maybe some day create something half as cool as serp IQ


have a few beers on me Darrin
cheers man!

thanks for starting this thread
 
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