S2E17 You Pay Peanuts, You Get Monkeys

Resources mentioned

• How to survive a 510,000 launch on AppSumo

About this episode

15 years ago, Dropbox spread like wildfire with their freemium product and that gave us the impression that free = more users. It deluded companies to think that giving something away for free is a go-to-market strategy, when it’s far from that.

Giving away something for free has many negative implications that aren’t often talked about. The most irritating one being the fact that it attracts the worst customer profiles. The people who are least tech savvy, most time consuming on support, and never end up converting.

On this episode, Melissa and Todd share stories about the different campaigns they tried to get users into eWebinar and why removing price friction is one of the worst things you can do for your business..

Takeaways:
• How price perception affect how people evaluate products 
• Types of users who have never activated on our platform
• Why free users are the worst and suck all your time and energy
• Reasons we no longer offer discounts, no exceptions
• What happened when we charged more and shortened trial period

Connect with Melissa

• Follow Melissa Kwan on LinkedIn where she share stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.
• Find her on @themelissakwan on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube where she shares short videos of business advice and other truth-bomb sound bites.

About ProfitLed

On Season Two of ProfitLed, Melissa (CEO and Cofounder of eWebinar) and Todd (COO) goes in-depth on one topic per episode on their "Journey to $1M" at eWebinar.

They share war stories, mistakes, and lessons learned as they grew the company to a million in ARR over 36 months. Their goal is to demystify bootstrapping by sharing their experience of it, and tell you what it’s really like to figure things out as you go.

ProfitLed is a podcast by and for founders brave (and crazy) enough to grow their startups to profitability without venture capital.

Learn more about the ProfitLed Podcast and tweet us at @profitledfm.

Learn more about eWebinar.