Indie Founder should know: Free Trials
I research SaaS and give you the juiciest details so you can build a stellar product. Report will be published on saasbase.dev.
Free trials is a great way to increase your MRR.
Note: In scenarios where the free trial is not a good fit, try a freemium model.
What is it?
When you give your customer a timed subscription to your product, hoping they would start paying after it ends.
- % Conversion Rates: B2C > B2B
Only do it if:
- Your product is intuitive AF
- If the person using it makes the purchase decision
Create an effective trial by:
- Showing an "Aha moment!" within 15 minutes
- No empty states! Ever! Add sample data, templates, or make entering data part of onboarding.
- Send regular reminder emails about the trial ending
- Nurture them with educational material
- Craft a stellar onboarding experience
The Don'ts
- Don't ask credit card upfront. Use Google Captcha to deter scammers.
- Don't auto-charge people. Customers hate this and Stripe punishes this.
Beware of...
-
You will get a flood of support requests. Have an FAQ, pre-written answers ready.
-
A user on trial is not yet a paying customer yet they'll need storage space, customer support, and onboarding. Be prepared to lose money until enough of them convert. For sustainability, you can price the product to offset this expense.
Final price = Price of product + Cost of covering a trial. This assumes 100% of trials convert to paid. This is not reality. You will have to calibrate the formula with your own conversion rate to stay afloat.
Measure everything
Collect data, regardless of whether someone converted or not. Keep a log of:
- Who the customer is
- What they came for
- What they did
- Did they convert
- What will they do now
If you tracked the customer throughout their trial well, this is what their journey should look like:
User - [email protected] joined on Jan 11 with a primary pain point of - making HQ posts for IG stories is tough. She created three posts during her trial of 10 days and logged in to check how her posts were doing 15 times. One of her posts showed more than average impressions. Post call she mentioned she likes the product but the uploading feature is broken. She won’t be converting to the paid plan. She will continue to use Canva.
Crunch the results
If your conversion rate is:
-
Low: Customer didn't find value, go fix the product
-
High: Pour more resources into user acquisition, bring down CAC
Tools
- User Onboarding - Appcues
- Product Tracking - Mixpanel
- In-App surveys - Hotjar
- Email Campaign - drip.com
Technical Implementation
Implement a trial system for your app:
-
Create a
trial_ends_ondate in the user DB model that saves the day when the user's trial will be over. -
Set this field for 7 days ahead (if the trial is for 7 days) when the account is first created.
-
When the user logs in, check their user object to see if the trial_ends_on has passed. If so, show a payment screen, else let them through.
Opportunities
- If a user can’t pay, do a “Give us a shoutout on Twitter and get $5 off” or “Get $10 off for every friend you tell about our product”. You can make them send you screenshots.
🔥 Roast My Landing Page
Such a great post
Great
This seems on point to me, except that I'd avoid setting a time limit on your free version.
Personally, this when I see a 30 day time limit, I always postpone subscribing. I start to think "I'm not sure I'll have the time to give this product a good try, I'll do it later". And there are probably quite a few products I ended up forgetting about by doing so.
Instead, try and offer all features you have, forever, but limit the number of times they can be used each months. For instance, Mapbox does this with the number of times you can load a map. Last time I checked, you can load maps 50k times per month, and if you need more traffic then you'll need to convert.
For my product polygonjs, where users create 3D scenes with nodes, they can only create scenes with 100 nodes, which is plenty for them to play around. And if they want to create larger scenes, they'll need to convert.
This way, potential customers can take the time they need to explore. They won't postpone trying your product, which is extremely important. Some may need more than 30 days before they want to convert, but that's okay. And the other side of the coin is that some clients may actually convert even faster, which is a beautiful thing when that happens.
I usually have a different problem when I try products - hate giving out my email and creating an account for an unknown service.
As you mentioned, freemium trials (no time limit with limited features) work great for consumers as they can try it out before committing. From the business owner's side, however, you might end up bearing a ton of costs for those non-paying clients.
I agree with using Freemium mode if:
I spent a ton o' time playing around with the polygon demo. The docs are very well written. Where do customers currently use the product?
Oh absolutely. I hate giving my email too. I'd recommend anyone to create an easily accessible demo whenever possible. Even if it's with dummy data.
And it's not just about keeping our emails private, it's also to make it easy for visitors to take a peak with a single click.
And I definitely agree with your points. If having free users take a lot of your resources, that won't work.
Another example that comes to mind as I write this is sparktoro. While I've never been a paying user of their services, I've been on their free plan for a few years and they never pressured me to pay. I think that's pretty cool from them and while I don't have immediate SEO need, they are the top of my list for when I will have such need. But of course, they have to design limits that make sense for them to avoid abuse (I used them very very sparingly for now, maybe once every 6 months).
And thanks a lot for trying the demo out, I really appreciate. I hope that was fun and that it was easy to create something in 3D? Very glad to read that you liked the docs too (even though there is ton of work I want to add to improve them, from basic search to making them even more playful/interactive)
And I'm not entirely sure what you mean by where do users currently use the product? Do you mean where they are geographically? It's mostly US and EU, and a handful of countries as well (and it's not exactly a crowd just yet, it's still early days)
Sparktoro FTW! I use Ahrefs the same way :D
Docs are super. I would recommend adding quick videos. I find them very helpful when integrating API products. Plus you can get some traffic from Youtube too.
For users, I was referring to what kind of clients are using the product right now? Adding use cases to the landing page might help folks think of creative ways to leverage polygonjs in their own products.
ah, I really need to take a look at ahref, I still haven't.
And yes, there are plenty of videos I want to add. I also want to add mini versions of the 3D editor inside the docs, so people can try things out quickly. That would be much more engaging, and it's also something competitor apps that run on desktop cannot do, so it's an edge I should explore.
And my clients are using Polygonjs to create things like product configurators, 3D artworks or virtual experiences. And those experiences can be for museum or to showcase new products. So a mix of e-commerce and art. And some clients use the product directly, without my direct assistance but still with frequent communication, and others hire me directly as a consultant where I will deliver the final work (in which case Polygonjs becomes a selling point more than a product). You can see some more examples on my consulting website if that makes things clearer.
And thanks a lot for letting me know that uses cases are missing. That's a very good point, and a case of me having tunnel vision where I completely overlooked this. My landing page is about to have a proper facelift anyway, so I'm adding that to the list!
Mini demos inside the docs would be very useful.
Checked out the consulting website - Very interesting! When I see the Art Gallery/Lobby Entrance scene, I can fully understand the need for the project. Highly recommend putting a link directly on the landing page :D
Thanks a lot for taking the time to check this as well, I really appreciate.
And yes, definitely agree, that project will go to the front page :)
Great points nailed it.
I'd like to add:
I ask my customers to ask their customers what's their goal with the product. For example, one of our customers runs an ai based ad tool - so it's important to capture what's the customer's goal here? Drive X conversions with a Y ad campaign. Then use email campaigns to visualize progress.
A lot of times if you're using low CAC channels, there's a huge chance you're spending efforts on the wrong customer. Split users into silos - and figure your one ideal customer to double down on a ideal customer profile you can acquire at this stage and figure out who's not worth spending efforts on.
How much are they able to use the product for their goal? Are they using the tool in the first place? What features did they signup for? Are they using those features? If not ask why.
A good SaaS product tries to capture a wide audience but your users signup for one feature they can't live without and other nice to have features.
Before you build a feature make sure you just add a button or a trigger that users may or may not click. When they click it run a bunch of questions of how they'd use the feature (DO NOT DELEGATE PRODUCT BUILDING DECISIONS).
Shameless plug:
I run crewcharge.com, and regularly write about customer success, product led growth, reducing churn at blog.crewcharge.com (and here) with over 1200 subscribers including product managers from Google, SAP.
I think you've summarized what crewcharge.com does instead of using all 4 separate ones. (Pm me for an indiehacker discount)
Hey Bharadwaj, absolutely fantastic points! Agree with all points, especially no 5 where you put a dummy button for a planned feature and collect user data before building.
crewcharge.com is very interesting. I've been using Google Forms and Hotjar surveys to collect user feedback but am not happy with either. Sounds like CrewCharge can help. I couldn't a video/walkthrough of how the product works. Is there a demo I can try before booking the call?
Hey @ssaini, I'd love to hop on a call with you. As you might have guessed, I'm a solo indiehacker as of now - and I got to 10 pre-sales. So my goals is to first ship the MVP to first 10 folks by 22 feb. That's why the landing page is not updated with videos. I'd love to show you the platform and the APIs. You can book a call at https://calendly.com/crewcharge or just ping me on LinkedIn with your email : https://www.linkedin.com/in/goforbg/
Meeting booked!
PS I love the 9 minute limit :D
Awesome! I'd love to say the 9 limit meeting works extremely efficient but sometimes they don't! that's okay. But it's always good to be conscious about time :D
"Only do it if: If the person using it makes the purchase decision"
I disagree with this. The trials are meant to lower the barrier for trying the product. If your product is B2B, the person testing/evaluating the product might not be a decision maker, but they have strong influence on product selection. The larger the company the further the decision maker is from the person researching products and services.
Mixpanel is quite expensive and probably not affordable for most IndieHackers. You can track conversions by channel with Google Analytics, or add some custom code to track conversions on your own.
Hi Lilia, nice to meet you. I agree with your assessment that the person using the trial will be able to rope in the decision-maker if they like your product enough (Similar to how Slack did it for their enterprise clients). This might, however, take longer than the trial duration at which point the user is locked out. Less chance of converting.
A better approach might be to use a Freemium model where the user has an unlimited amount of time to try out the product and convince the rest of the organization to make a purchase. I'm planning to cover this model in the next issue, would love to get your eyes on it :D
Mixpanel's free plan has 100K monthly tracked users which I think might be good for folks starting out; though it might get expensive later on.
I personally am not a fan of GA because it doesn't always report accurate information because of ad blockers. Plausible Analytics also has a similar feature that might work better.
Hmm... my assumption was that you were advocating for free trial vs. no trial. Typically, only 1 model is used - free trial or freemium, not both. So maybe update the intro to clarify that freemium isn't considered as an alternative.
It would be helpful to compare freemium and free trial side-by-side...
A little long but I thought this post was very good at comparing the two sides.
Good note on the intro, will update :D
Thanks for sharing, we are going to look into some of those tools for our own free user onboarding journey.
Do you have data points on
and
Or are those opinions?
There's research here that suggests CC required might have a lower end-to-end conversion rate. Putting the data aside, here's my personal opinion on this:
If you're a new startup with 0 reputation, there's no trust built up yet. I would be hesitant to add in my payment info. This is unnecessary friction to try out the product anyways.
Say you did have my credit card, you can't really do anything with that until the end of the trial anyway. When it ends, there are 4 scenarios:
The last scenario is severely detrimental to your product. Something you want to avoid. This is however my opinion, would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Put out a poll here to see what the community thinks.
M: Thanks for sharing the research, I'll give it a read.
I agree with your sentiment on startups with 0 reputation. You're very likely to turn every potential user away by asking for their credit card before having provided any value.
But I'd argue it's a different story if you are (somewhat) known, have free content available outside your trial/membership that lets users get a glimpse into what you have to offer before they sign up.
In our case for example, we currently offer a free account that doesn't require any payment info and is forever free (so totally aligned with you there) but we are currently thinking about A/B testing our current conversion from website visitor/app download to premium accounts with these 2 models:
CURRENT MODEL
vs.
NEW MODEL
Curious to hear your thoughts on which one you think will do better @sssaini and hopefully we will have the data to back it up soon :D
I checked out your product - fantastic offering! I was positively surprised by the quality of the voices and scenarios.
Very difficult to say but I like the current model because it's easier to use the free episodes as lead magnets on Reddit, IH, and other platforms + there's no overhead of non-paying customers because the content has already been produced.
That being said, I'm super curious to see the results of the A/B test. Please do post the results.
Thank you for your kind words! ❤️
We have an amazing team of writers, voice actors, producers and audio engineers at this point who create our content - the credit goes to them!
We will keep you in the loop on how the experiment goes.
By the way, this week's IH newsletter touches on the whole CC upfront newsletter and features 3 different takes:
I found it a funny coincidence to read the newsletter a few hours after we had this discussion. :D
Do you think a "paywall" is the proper approach after their trial period expires?
Or would it be more user-friendly to allow them to access old data they created previously while preventing them to enter new information, or in general interacting with the system.
Hey Milan! Yep, a paywall that says pay to access your data is the best way to do this.
I wouldn't let users access old data because:
If you want to be helpful, you could send them an export of their data on the last day of the trial. I would do a poll to see if people care about this beforehand though.
What you said makes sense, thank you for taking the time to explain it in detail!
For sure :D
What about the freemium model? Do you have some data on it? I would love to read this kind of information about it.
We are just about to introduce freemium as our model.
Hey Fabri! Freemium is something I'll cover in the next issue. I'm putting together a draft right now. If you're interested in taking a look, leave your email at saasbase.dev and I'll send it over within the week.
Fix: aha! moment should be in 3 minutes, not 15.
Faster the better!
Thanks!
Hope you found some value! :D
What about CC upfront on free trial onboarding?
What I mean
Normally you should be able to crunch results early on.
Higher customer flow reduces the clarity of the results since you can't be sure whether they see the value or a deal.
Does this inflow of customers reduce flexibility, so CC is more appropriate for cherry-picking leads from traction?
Hey Spiros, I understand the question as - How do you know what customers think of the pricing if you don't ask for CC upfront? (Please correct me if this is not it).
I don't think it's wise to ask for CC during onboarding either because the customer is already in your product and is waiting to see the Aha! moment. Any delays will only hurt the experience.
You are right in that if they present their credit card upfront, it might be an indication they are ok with the pricing. That, however, doesn't mean that they paid. It's a flawed metric. I would vary my pricing every month as an experiment and see how many people convert and why.