Launching and growing a SaaS product
Today I had a user (anonymous) post a suggestion about a “per use” payment plan for Bidsketch.
They state that certain designers just don’t write enough proposals to pay on a monthly basis. This makes sense in a way, a lot of people starting out might not use it all that much.
This would be similar to how MailChimp’s pay-as-you-go plan works. I may try it out in the next couple of weeks 🙂
Ok so I’ve been live for about 3 weeks now and I have over 250 users on Bidsketch. About 20% of those are paid accounts, most are on the premium plan.
I’ve introduced a Basic plan but I’ve received very fews signups on that plan even though I had people say they were going to sign up.
Currently trying out some A/B testing to see what the difference between 3 plans (Premium, Basic, and Free) vs. 2 plans (Premium and Free) is like. So far the numbers indicate their isn’t much of a difference at all. Not what I expected!
Next up, I’m going to do some A/B testing with the Free plan. Certain SaaS based apps have taken away the free plan (or hidden it). I’d like to see what the impact of this is on sales.
The reason why I’m trying all this stuff out? Sales have slowed dramatically in the last couple of weeks. I’ve been working on a couple of features people have been asking for which might help with that.
My plan to help keep things moving on the sales site:
Unfortunately, this isn’t all I’m doing. I have to show activity by releasing new features at least every other week — activity early on is critical.
I’ll follow up in a couple of weeks with an update on what I’ve gained with my efforts 🙂
So it’s been a week after launch, and I’ve not had much time to do any development. Most of my time has been taken up responding to emails, hacking my sales website, introducing a new plan, and sending emails out to my lists.
Today I introduced a $9/month pricing plan. Now I have the following plans: Free, $19/month, and $9/month.
One surprising thing about increasing the Premium Plan price to $19/month is that I’m still making sales. I honestly thought they’d stop coming in after that. I haven’t had a great deal of them, but much more than I thought I would.
I feel like I’m underpriced here, but I recently launched and I’m more interested in getting enough users to see patterns in the feedback that I’m getting. So far so good 🙂
I’m still very cautious, and I expect to hit tough times any day soon, in the meantime I’m enjoying getting sales! 🙂