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Yeah, that's the one part of the article that seemed off to me. For my low-touch, no-credit-card-up-front SaaS product we get about 25% trial-to-paid conversion

Yeah, that's the one part of the article that seemed off to me. For my low-touch, no-credit-card-up-front SaaS product we get about 25% trial-to-paid conversion rate. I think it's possible we're above average, but we're not doing 10x better than "extremely good" peers. Maybe there's just so much variance that it's impossible to give a good benchmark, but even still, 2% seems low. I also suspect that marketing has a lot to do with it. A company that's much better at marketing than product will be better at getting someone to sign up for a trial and worse at converting them, so maybe their numbers would be down in the 2% range. I feel like I'm the opposite (bad at marketing, but pretty good at product)

csa 9y ago
Your numbers are great, and congratulations. That said, I will guess that you are leaving money on the table by not having a wider target audience for your marketing. Also, the idea that a company is “better at marketing than at converting” isn’t really the correct way to look at it. Basically the math says that you want to keep increasing the width of the net you cast as long as it is profitable. In some cases, you will find a profitable group to market to, but the reasonable conversion rate for that market (i.e., people who end up loving or product) is just naturally lower than your high-conversion group. As a simple example, someone may have a very technical finance newsletter that they sell to finance professionals, and they covert that group at a high rate (and a high price). This newsletter can probably also target HNW individual investors profitably, but they will not likely have the same conversion rate.