The Problem With $1K Free Signups

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I accidentally launched this product on Friday.

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I went through the onboarding with Tate, probably like 10 times last week.

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And then I wanted to just send the web page to like five people so that they

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could go

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through the the self-serve onboarding also.

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And then Unbinoceds to me, Alec was posting something that had RB2B.com in the

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headline

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of the LinkedIn post and it went viral.

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It's up to like 550,000 impressions.

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So we've had 650 people sign up since that posted on Sunday.

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And we're not ready for it.

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Like we don't have any messaging going out, explaining to people what's going

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on, helping

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them onboard or whatever.

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We don't have any analytics to figure out what people are doing.

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Only one person has just like signed up and paid by themselves.

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And it was a 295 plan.

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So I don't know what a freemium motion is supposed to look like, but there's a

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lot left

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to be desired, right?

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Like on one hand, obviously this is amazing that effectively for free.

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I mean, it's not for free because it's the result of a year of compounding a

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link in

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audience, but like by accident, we can get close to a thousand sign ups or

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whatever for

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a free tool.

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On the other hand, it just reiterates how much of a sales motion PLG is, right?

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Because like I'm thinking of like, Robly was my first company and started sort

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of like

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this.

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You know, we had the software and we launched it and like we were okay at

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getting people

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to sign up for free trials, but then like they weren't converting like at all.

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Like I had no idea what the right conversion rate was.

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Like I had deduced that it was like 30% and we were like nowhere close to that.

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Eventually we got really good at converting people, but it just was an

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incredibly thought

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out deal that had just a lot of touch points and hand holding and it's just

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clear that

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this is going to be also.

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Long story short, long road ahead with figuring this thing out and where we are

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right now,

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we think we want to simplify it to like two plans.

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One is like free where you get everything in Slack app and then like once four

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hundred

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ninety five a month and you get everything and that's just it.

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We have six hundred fifty five free users and only seven paying.

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Like what are we going to do about it?

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We definitely want to give people like all of the value of the product for some

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period

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of time, right?

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When they start.

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So we're adding on some sort of a free trial also or like not free trial, but

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just like

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full featured free version that goes to just the Slack app.

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I'm not even that worried about charging people initially.

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I think we should give people a way to get it free for like a year if they do

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stuff for

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us.

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So like post on LinkedIn, post on Twitter, give us a G2 review, refer five

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people or whatever.

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I think there's two audiences here.

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One is the audience that is will always use it for free and will be like our

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virality

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audience and the other other audience we hope to charge someday.

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It's kind of like the people who we hope to charge someday are very unlikely to

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complete

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the virality tasks.

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You know, so it's like we just have to treat them and it's like when we're

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building stuff

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to try to get people to like do stuff for us for free in order to like not pay

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or whatever.

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That is one buyer or segment that we're building for.

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Don't be surprised if this other group of people does not do that at all and it

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just

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like goes right out of their head or whatever.

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It's kind of two totally different things.

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