Deciding whether a free trial, freemium, or hybrid model will work best for your business is challenging — especially as choosing the wrong one could potentially dent your business’ performance.
In this course, you’ll learn:
Wes Bush:
And so if you are right now thinking to yourself, I'm going to have a free trial, I just know it, I know this is the case. Here's some considerations I really encourage you to go through. The first one is how long should the free trial be? When we think of a good rule of thumb, a lot of people just go to their competitors or they look at the typical free trials they've signed up for, they all go there's some are seven days or 14 days, 30 days, how long does it really matter? And there's been a lot of research on even just 30 day free trials.
Wes Bush:
A lot of people think they're too long and they write good, well documented research on this, and I can point you to some of it if you want to read to it, but a lot of it at the end of the day, it just depends. It depends how long does it actually take for someone to experience the value of the product? So forget the statistics, just monitor how long does it on average take for someone to experience the value of your product.
Wes Bush:
And that all comes down to measuring. You need to be measuring this, and we'll get to that in future modules as well around how do you measure this user success? But the trick here is measure how long on average it takes for someone to experience the value of your products and set your free trial along those lines, and a little bit longer than that, so that the majority can complete that and get the value to the product.
Wes Bush:
So the other thing too, when you're thinking of a free trial is is the user going to be waiting on other people to see value? So I gave two examples here, there's Appcues and Amplitude. Both of these products, a lot of product folks reach out and sign up for their free trial [inaudible 00:01:53] models, and so what they noticed was when they sign up, even for Appcues to go through this example, they noticed that a lot of people got stuck and it wasn't necessarily because the product was super complex. No, they got stuck because they had to work through someone else to get the product and get to the value in the product.
Wes Bush:
So in Appcues case, if you are going to create guides and guide people through your product, you most likely will need to interact and talk to your development team to get the code on that live production site. And so you can interact with users at that point, but until you do that, the product doesn't have any value. You can't see any value, and so what they realized was a lot of people who were signing up were signing up for their free trial, which was time-based at that time but they weren't able to actually experience the value of the product.
Wes Bush:
So they were upgrading in the first month and downgrading in maybe the second or third month once they realized the product either did or didn't solve their problem. And so what they ended up doing is more of a usage based free trial. So they allowed people to use their product indefinitely for a certain amount of users where they could show it on a production site, get some real feedback, see how it really interacted with the users, get some basic results on how it really worked, how it helped them. And so usage based free trials work very well when other users are waiting on other people to help them see the value in the product. And so that's just something to keep a note in some of these fringe cases.
Wes Bush:
And so the other thing you can tell when if you've already rolled this out and have a free trial is if you start realizing like, "Hey, a lot of people are always reaching out for more time. Why is that?" And if users are churning out after the first or second billing cycle, both of these are good signs that maybe a usage based free trial will be a better fit because they're probably waiting on someone for something in order to see the value of your product. And it's just a telling sign that okay, this isn't actually showing people the value of the product because why are they churning out so quickly at the end of this first or second billing cycle? Most of them are just upgrading to see the value to get that extra time, and then once they do figure out it's not helping them or not helping them in the way they thought it was going to help them, then they churn out.
