This week's post focuses on the perils of giving away your product for free. Free isn't always a good thing, the downsides can often be worse than the upsides
When you're ready to start testing or launching your product, you might be tempted to give away your product for free. There's a lot of good reasons to go this route and it may seem like the easiest way to get it into the hands of users. However, there can be a lot of pitfalls with "free" - here are some of the reasons that might give you pause: You need to test ‘willingness to pay’ early There’s a big chasm between customers willing to use a product for free vs. those who will pay for it. Your biggest assumption is that people will find enough real or perceived value to pay for your product. Waiting to test that assumption will just delay when you address the biggest risk in your business model. Feedback from ‘free’ customers isn’t the same as ‘paid’ customers If you spend too long taking feedback from ‘free’ customers, you may find that they behave very differently than your future ‘paid’ customers. Free customers will take up your valuable time Free customers are still customers, so you may end up spending time servicing those customers. That servicing can end up costing you valuable time for a customer base that isn’t actually generating you revenue. More in this week's substack post https://lnkd.in/ew7499A4
