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I Eliminated the Free Plan from my Web App for a Month: Here’s What Happened.
- judofyr 16y ago503 Service Temporarily Unavailable is what happened? :-) Mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache:www.mattmazur.com/2011/01/i-eliminated-the-free-plan-from-my-web-app-for-a-month-heres-what-happened/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cac...
- matt1 16y agoOh wow, never had that problem before. I'll work on it -- in the mean time thank you for posting the cache (sorry guys!). Edit: Apparently the maximum number of connections for a GoDaddy Linux shared hosting account is 50 [1]. http://blogulate.com/content/godaddy-503-error-service-temporarily-unavailable/ http://blogulate.com/content/godaddy-503-error-service-tempo...
- cromulent 16y agoThanks for sharing, good post. While you are working on things, I got a javascript alert on your homepage: SyntaxHighlighter Can't find brush for: vb
- matt1 16y agoNormally I don't have a problem with it so I think it's related to the current traffic. I deactivated the plugin until things slow down a bit. Thanks for pointing it out.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bkorte 16y ago"Here's what happened." A 503 error? ;-) Hopefully the article is available soon, I'd really like to read it.
- JeffJenkins 16y agoThis is a good idea to try, but November and December are weird months and it might not be reasonable in your space to assume they are comparable. I work in comparison shopping where it's really not true. You mentioned A/B testing, and I think you should try this again as an A/B test so that you can eliminate seasonality.
- dmix 16y agoWhy are November and December weird months?
- requinot59 16y agoholidays, christmas & new eve
- Khroma 16y agoI noticed that you changed your colors to a lighter color. From what I see, many logos can be modernized so easily by switching to "pastel colors", or colors with more white in them. These are duller, but in my opinion, much more modern.
- yesimahuman 16y agoJust curious, what is your reasoning behind requiring a username and an email? I've been experimenting lately with super minimal signups and the two seem more and more redundant for most web apps, but I want to hear your thoughts (and maybe it's a potential optimization point?).
- matt1 16y agoIt was a part of the restful authentication plugin I originally used to set it up [1] :) For this app its necessary because I allow users to share the timelines they create and I display their user names on the shared timelines. Your train of thought is good though. [1] https://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication https://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication
- yesimahuman 16y agoYea public facing stuff seems like the only time it's really needed. One way is maybe to defer that until they actually share something and then have to pick. I sometimes take their username from the email (before the '@') and use that if necessary but it's not a great solution. Good luck!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- kevin_morrill 16y agoWe just did phone number + password only for our SMS app textweight.com and the sign up rate is pretty amazing. I need to do some A/B testing with requiring e-mail.
- yesimahuman 16y agoCrazy thought: phone number only, then after they are in, require they enter one? If they don't set one or forget, they just get a text and reset it? The psychology of this is interesting because on one hand they might feel less safe but on the other they might not care and just want to jump right in!
- revorad 16y agoI'm pleasantly surprised to see a good percentage of your free users upgrading to the paid version. Why don't you test a time-bound free trial before switching back to freemium?
- matt1 16y agoGreat idea -- I'll consider it and may give a try in the future.
- StavrosK 16y agoRather than doing this, I opted for a resource-based trial for historious. Free users get 300 bookmarks, if that's enough for them, that's great, if not, they can pay to get more. This way they don't put very much strain on the service but can still use it. Another good idea, if your app can work with it, is to not let free users create any data. For example, for a website screenshot service, you could let free users access screenshots that paid users have created, but not create any of their own. This makes free users almost free to host but doesn't work for many apps.
- dmix 16y agoI would be interested in a experiment comparing resource based limitation vs a time-based trial. For ex. "upload 20 screenshots before paying" compared to "try the app for 14-days before paying".
- kevin_morrill 16y agoThanks for writing up this analysis and sharing.
- idlewords 16y agoI think all you've discovered here is that users find it annoying to be taken through a bunch of signup screens before finding out a website is not free. You've drawn a lot of conclusions out of a very small experiment with a lot of uncontrolled variables. I'm glad to hear you're thinking of testing again more carefully.
- dmix 16y agoIf you have a paywall with no-trial, you must very clearly demonstrate the value proposition on the sales website. Hiding the price until after the user enters their email is also bad UX. Not everyone is going to the pricing page before clicking sign up.
- swombat 16y agoThat's a terrible analysis. I don't see how you can come to those conclusions at all from the way you conducted this "test"... My deconstruction of this "analysis"'s mistakes here: http://swombat.com/2011/1/2/data-is-dangerous http://swombat.com/2011/1/2/data-is-dangerous
- sjtgraham 16y agoYour points are valid, although I fail to understand why you feel it's necessary to adopt such a condescending and superior tone both in your comment and in your article.
- swombat 16y agoIt's hard to tell someone they failed at something basic without coming off as condescending or superior. I'll try to do better next time, though. I don't like posting negative/attacking stuff, generally. :-/
- Mz 16y agoInstead of "terrible analysis" you could talk about where it has "room for improvement" -- you know "Glad to see you making an effort to figure out how to improve the site. That's a great start. I know you already know (because you said it in the article) that it wasn't a very well designed test run. Some suggestions on how you can do it better the next time around: (blah de blah, all kinds of intelligent stuff here). Thanks for sharing." Or something like that. I'm fond of the quote "I'm too truthful to be good". But I also am fond of the remark about how folks who "love the brutal truth love the brutal part more than the truth part". So I've spent a lot of years working on trying to develop some desperately needed velvet gloves. If I can manage it (er, at least somewhat -- though this post might not exactly be a good example), surely you can. :-)
- aaronblohowiak 16y agoHaha, you responded before my post, saying roughly the same thing. Cheers. The "too truthful to be good" has a bit of danger in it; it seems to juxtapose goodness and truth, and I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I could just be misinterpreting it, though.
- andrewljohnson 16y agoYou need more data. This is not particularly significant.
- aaronblohowiak 16y agoI think your example timeline doesn't show off a lot of the cool features you have, and that is unfortunate. In your future A/B testing, you may want to explore a timeline that includes pictures... perhaps of something like the Homestead Act or such.
- astrange 16y agoWhy would I want a web-based timeline? Isn't that just something you put in a PowerPoint slide and then nobody else cares so they don't read it?