>The difficulty is that if you want word to spread among communities of people that contain your power users (and would-be power users), then by charging them m

>The difficulty is that if you want word to spread among communities of people that contain your power users (and would-be power users), then by charging them money, you're constraining growth in those key communities. Any thoughts on how to deal with this specific tradeoff? We gave away premium licenses for free (no strings attached) to some socially active power users. It helped us to increase awareness. Also, I found that premium users are more loyal in general and more willing to share the knowledge about our product. >Do you give away more for free in the early days, to raise more awareness? We surely did give away more for free in the early days. Partly, because we still figured out the product/market fit. As we pinpointed the PMF and added new features we periodically rebalanced the free offering. Since many new features became also available in the free edition we reduced some limits and capabilities of the free edition. >How do you know when it's time to stop giving it away for free? We never stopped. We still have a freemium model [1]. Overall, we try to keep the ratio of premium to free users at around 1:5. With my previous product, the ratio was 1:50 which was too unbalanced as I realized later. [1] Comparison of our free/premium editions: https://easymorph.com/buy.html https://easymorph.com/buy.html.