Quoted by Matt on December 3 2009:
Charging for your product helps you find out who your customers are…We had all different types of people sign up for free [ScreenSteps Live] accounts including bloggers, educators and small businesses, but the only type of customer that signed up for paid accounts were those who were doing tech support. They were businesses and organizations that were in the middle of tech support nightmares. And ScreenSteps Live made the nightmare go away so they happily paid the monthly subscription fee. We instantly knew who our customers were. This guided both our marketing and development efforts.
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9 comments so far
Jamie, Baymard Institute 03 Dec 09
Interesting story and ties into something I believe in very strongly – get the numbers and then let them guide (not control) your decisions.
Andre 03 Dec 09
TRUE dat.
Blue Sail Creative 04 Dec 09
Right, there is something about asking someone if they’d buy your service, and there is another thing about actually asking them to purchase your service.
This subtle difference goes a long way and is important.
Ryan J Naylor 04 Dec 09
Great reminder, just what I needed. Now to put into practice!
Michael Sliwinski 04 Dec 09
Tim Ferris in his “four hour workweek” said that asking for users how much they’d pay for something is useless, until you actually pull up the product and say – OK, sir, you said you’d pay for this kind of device 10 bucks – well here it is, how about buying now?
They you’ll know if the potential client is in fact.. a client-to-be or just a person who’s being nice to you.
Anyway, 37s advice on charging for things from day 1 is a great one and I intend to follow it with every product I’ve got… having people pay for your stuff makes the commitment on both sides a lot better and tighter. And is very rewarding for both parties, too. And as in this article – you get to know your real clients right away :-)
tathagata 04 Dec 09
Also tells you why you should create products which do only one thing, rather than too many things. Difficult to figure out who your customers are if you have too many features.
Even charging doesn’t help if your software does too many things.
Locksmith Dublin 04 Dec 09
I agree that numbers shouldnt guide what you do.
Craig Pickering 08 Dec 09
This response in an interview with the president of Cultured Code, producer of the app “Things”, when asked How do you justify the price of Things (or any app)?
“From a developer point of view it is important to be able to have a strong development and support team. This means that selling a product at too low a price will eventually kill it.”
A fundamental reason easily overlooked when starting out.
Funu 08 Dec 09
When are you guys going to write a post explaining how it is better to learn from one’s successes than from one’s failures?
Comments are closed