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Ask HN: How do you experiment to determine the right model w/o alienating users?
We learn a ton by making tweaks and seeing how our potential customers react (pricing, how products are bundled, how trials work, terms of the subscription, etc). At some point though this experimentation process has diminishing returns in the form of alienating users (they get confused or pissed off and we're perceived as wishywashy).
So my question is how do other startups juggle the tradeoff of wanting to rapidly iterate and get to the optimal "configuration of dials" vs. keeping consistency of the offering to earn the trust of users?
TIA
sean
- kaens 18y agoThis is a great question, and something I've been thinking about lately. I assume it's pretty much exactly what you're doing combined with hopefully having people around that already know some reliable methods (that were probably learned through trial-and-error), if such things exist.
- andrewf 18y agoPeople will always react angrily to pricing increases. About the only way to alleviate it is to weight yourself down with support for users on grandfathered/legacy schemes, and announce changes with enough notice to people to buy up at the current price before things change. Pricing decreases you're just doomed. People will resent having paid $40 last week instead of $25 this week. For the other stuff, are you being too noisy? Existing users shouldn't be affected by changes to trials and signup technicalities.