Ask HN: How do you compete with “free”? Saw a new scheduling product launch on PH today, which basically offers a free version of Calendly's paid features. Founders - how do you think about "free" product launches? I'm testing an idea now, would like to launch it along with pricing so I can validate the pricing/willingness to pay along with the idea, but feel like there's a lot of pressure to launch new products for "free". Thoughts? |
(1) It takes a lot of effort, maybe one day to one week, to really evaluate a product and know if it is worth it.
(2) That evaluation will feel like wasted time if, at the end, I find the product isn't worthwhile
(3) It will also feel like wasted time if I decide I like it but my employer decides not to pay for it.
If somebody gets paid $100,000 a year and spends a week evaluating something, the "free" trial costs $2000.
Thus I am not a believer in free trials.
But out of curiosity, what is the alternative?
Blindly buying (or subscribing to) something because it looks cool in a 5 minute overview of its features?
And how would you convince your employer to pay for it?
Imagine that somebody expects to evaluate 4 products, either because the first 3 won't make the cut, or because they won't feel like they did enough "due diligence".
It may be a safer bet to develop something in house than to spend a lot of time evaluating alternatives. All of the alternative products have a lot more development time in them, but odds are you don't need all the features those products have, UI refinement, etc. You don't have to worry that a vendor will be bought by Google.
For now this is just my working hypothesis, I'm still far from being in a position to test it.
No one's calibrating their prototype roll-out according to how big or small they think they're going to be. That'd be a bit like turning down a soap commercial because it'll be embarrassing when you join the MCU, although to be fair, an unknown Gwyneth Paltrow did turn down "Cool as Ice" (1991).
I don't think that statement is true at all. My impression (mostly from being a long-time reader of HN) is that VC's are primarily/only interested in investing in startups that have some chance of becoming billion dollar unicorns, so if you're looking to get VC funds you pretty much have to set your goals at that level. Some little web app with 10000 paying customers will never get you there, but it might be enough to make a decent living.
It makes the most sense where you expect your actual hosting costs to be symbolic for small-scale users and hope to earn from bigger customers.
This practice has been present since the dawn of (software) time — even Microsoft never really bothered with private illegal copies of Windows (or DOS), knowing it will get future customers into the Windows world and they'll want Windows at work too.
However, going straight up with the paid model has been there forever as well: it mostly depends on your individual market evaluation and existing entrentchment.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
As painful as Microsoft's dominance was, the era of shrinked-wrapped cdroms represented a more honest time when what you got was commensurate to what you paid. Now the only game in town is dangling the carrot and selling your customers' info to advertisers.
This is specifically with regards to Stable Diffusion vs DALL-E. I think OpenAI has plenty of breathing room when it comes to innovation in the broader spectrum of new AI applications. I think there might be some interesting discussions here regarding when it's a good idea to provide a cheap and available version of your offering vs when to provide a quality offering. Both definitely have their place in the market and can result in superior products, but right now to me it's not clear where that distinction should be drawn.
Your product has to be so good that people will clamour to buy it.
If your product's quality is 'meh', 'free' will beat that every time.
If you don't intend for your product to be free for the rest of its lifetime, don't launch it as free.