9 ms·

Paying Users Are Your Nicest Users

86 points by MicahWedemeyer 14y ago

dotcoma 14y ago
no doubt.
IanDrake 14y ago
I was running a product with a freemium model for a while and I can say without a doubt that this is true.
- boomzilla 14y ago
  Of course, if you add value for the users or solve their pain point, they will be willing to pay. I personally think that one month free trial model is better than freemium. It sets the users' expectation from the beginning. I always thought Freemium is sort of sleazy.
  - aidos 14y ago
    Can you explain how you find freemium to be a sleazy model? That's a genuine question - I run a freemium service and I'd hate for there to be a perception that we were in any way sleazy.
    - doktrin 14y ago
      Intuitively, we know it's fairly rare for something to be provided for nothing. Therefore, it's often assumed that the business model of freemium ventures is either : 1) purely ad-supported (increasingly difficult, imho) 2) generating (at least some) revenue by harvesting user data 3) running at a loss with the goal of being acquired as soon as feasibly possible 2 & 3 specifically could in various contexts be viewed as sleazy. This isn't my personal indictment, but they do represent views I've heard bandied about on a semi-consistent basis.
      - aytekin 14y ago
        What you are describing is the "free" services, not "freemium" services. Freemium means trialing a product based on usage as opposed to trialing it based on time. Once your usage goes over a threshold you are an active user and you start paying for the service. That's our model on JotForm and it works well for us. One of the best examples of this model is evernote. I remember they were saying something like if the users stays active on their product for n months, they will almost certainly become a premium user.
    - boomzilla 14y ago
      Maybe the word choice was not right (I am a non native speaker). What I think is the users should always be treated with respect and transparency: everything is laid down on the table upfront. A lot of freemium services are implemented in a way that kind of deceives the users to sign up and grow dependent on the service before letting them know that a lot of things won't work or stopping working if you don't pay.
  - MicahWedemeyer 14y ago
    I think there are a lot of services where a 1-month free trial will prevent the kind of growth you need to sustain yourself. For a perfect example: LinkedIn. It's a freemium service where recruiters and other big-players pay for increased access. Another example is Flickr: There are so many photo-sharing sites that who would sign up for a paid one with so many others for free? Running a freemium site requires walking a line between the free and paid users. It can be sleazy, but it doesn't have to be, and there are definitely models where it makes sense.
slantyyz 14y ago
I would go a little further if you're an app store seller that the higher the price you charge, the more reasonable your customers are. Case in point - Sparrow ($2 on iOS and $10 on Mac -- inexpensive for each category) generated a huge uproar when Google bought them.
- twodayslate 14y ago
  I disagree with your Sparrow example. People were upset that Sparrow was ceasing development after having a sale one week before it was announced that they were bought by Google. That is just bad practice on Sparrow's part. For myself, if I pay for an app I expect a lot more from that app. I expect a quality apps with updates and support. There was an article I read (can't find it now) that a developer said he doesn't do payware due to the fact that he doesn't want to give support. I have no problems with free apps ceasing development - they were free! It would be nice if they released the source code though so someone else could take charge of the app.
  - Retric 14y ago
    That seems like an unreasonable expectation for 2$.
    - tehwebguy 14y ago
      The scales could be tipped in the case of Sparrow because paid email clients / services tend not to be default. Nearly every OS seems to come with its own client.
    - shurane 14y ago
      More volume, cheaper per unit pricing, same support overall, more or less. Cheap app prices are certainly setting the bar higher.
    - jasonlotito 14y ago
      If $2 for an update is unreasonable, maybe they should have charged more?
kinleyd 14y ago
It's nice to know that this has been your experience. It's possible that paying users have generally become paying users only after more careful evaluation of a product, and hence are already pretty satisfied users. That would explain some of the niceness.
silverbax88 14y ago
This has always been my experience. I will go even further in my retail outlets - my worst customers are the ones who 'think' they spent a lot. But my best customers - by far - were the ones who can walk in and write a $64,000 check on a Wednesday, and any Wednesday after that. Those customers account for 90% of my business and are almost no hassle.
- vecinu 14y ago
  I don't think I understand your $64,000 example. Are you being sarcastic or are there actually people who spend that much money week by week?
  - silverbax88 14y ago
    There are people who spend that much week to week. This is dependent on a specific type of retail - our average sale in these stores is $30. But some customers can spend $50k or more in one visit. And those customers are the easiest to deal with - very few complaints, no arrogance, easy to please.
    - BryanB55 14y ago
      That is quite a gap... Average sale $30, but people spend $50,0000?
      - silverbax88 14y ago
        Yes. That's the difference between the people who try to bully a clerk and claim they are a big spender and someone who is actually a big spender. There are lots of people who think they spend a lot of money and that it affords them special privileges. But the people who think that have no idea that the scruffy guy in jeans and sneakers standing next to them is about to drop cash like that. I think about this when I go to a trendy place like Buckhead in Atlanta. There are some big money players walking around - but they generally aren't the young people who look like a million bucks and look like they are loaded. Those people are broke. But, I digress.
mootothemax 14y ago
One of the reasons I recently shut down a free tool was due to the frankly horrific comments I received from users if it didn't work just exactly as they expected. Whilst it did worked, and I probably could have explained things a bit more clearly, I don't understand the mentality of users sending messages like "WHY THE [nsfw filter] ISN'T THIS WORKING YOU [nsfw filter]? I HOPE YOU DIE." They put me off checking emails for that account, and Twitter via TweetDeck as a whole. None of my other - paid with no free option - services suffers from this, despite similar numbers of users trying them out. In fact, I don't think I've once received an email with a swearword in it from one of the paid tools, whether from users on the free trial or fully paid-up.
- relix 14y ago
  Seconded. I don't have paid services I can compare too, but the free service I'm running generates some feedback that make me lose hope in humanity. Some people feel so entitled for something free, it's as if I killed their first-born baby when something goes wrong. On the other hand, getting sweet soundbites like "I love this!" or when a polite person sends suggestions starting with "I'm really sorry to bother you, but I think if you did X it would really improve Y!" my hope is restored.
  - mootothemax 14y ago
    On the other hand, getting sweet soundbites like "I love this!" or when a polite person sends suggestions starting with "I'm really sorry to bother you, but I think if you did X it would really improve Y!" my hope is restored. Agreed, those are the emails that leave a smile on my face and lift my mood far beyond what such a simple email should do. I've also found that they tend to happen on a regular basis from the paying customers. The free ones, much less so.
- doktrin 14y ago
  One of the reasons I recently shut down a free tool was due to the frankly horrific comments I received from users if it didn't work just exactly as they expected. Whilst it did worked, and I probably could have explained things a bit more clearly, I don't understand the mentality of users sending messages like "WHY THE [nsfw filter] ISN'T THIS WORKING YOU [nsfw filter]? I HOPE YOU DIE." They put me off checking emails for that account, and Twitter via TweetDeck as a whole. This is horrifying, and only further dissuades me from ever pursuing a venture built around the freemium model. Frankly, I'm not a fan of it as a concept to begin with. The fact that it contributes to the mis-guided sense of entitlement of (in the words of Louis CK) non-contributing zeros only adds insult to injury.
Fargren 14y ago
Wouldn't it be reasonable/acceptable to deny support to those that use expletives when asking for it? Assuming you forewarn in your contact form or in your terms. Specially for non-paying users. Those people are not going to be paying for the product anyway, they probably wouldn't be insulting it/it's developers otherwise.
- mootothemax 14y ago
  Wouldn't it be reasonable/acceptable to deny support to those that use expletives when asking for it? I have a pretty thick skin, but after a while it is tiresome to receive such emails. Draining, boring and tiresome. I wouldn't offer support to any user who wrote such an email, but the bigger problem was having to read their filth in the first place.
- king_jester 14y ago
  > Wouldn't it be reasonable/acceptable to deny support to those that use expletives when asking for it? People that engage in hostile and harassing emails are the kind of people you won't want to engage at all. This is true for personal communication and also for business. Dealing with that kind of harassment is really draining and handling one person like that won't be the end of it, as there are more such people waiting in the wings to send their expletive filled mouth vomit. The best way to handle these people in business is to ignore them or to outright ban them from your service. Of course, ditching freemium creates a de facto ban on users won't sign on to a paid service, so there is that approach.
danielweber 14y ago
At a start-up many years ago, one of our principals gave a free copy of our ($1000 and up, Windows-only) software to a colleague, a college professor. College professor tossed it to a grad student, who proceeded to install it on a virtual computer instead of an actual PC. Virtual computers were very rare in these days. The student then complained to us that the software wasn't working right in their emulator. And why didn't we say that our software required a serial port (which was impossible to not have on a PC in those days) in our requirements list? Give a man a fish and he'll bitch at you it's the wrong one.
patio11 14y ago
You wouldn't expect D&D players to have much psychological overlap with elementary school English teachers, but in this regard they totally do. And this gets repeated over and over and over again in the experience of a lot of companies, B2B and B2C alike. It's like the iron law of customer support: non-paying users consume the most support for the worst reasons and constitute the overwhelming majority of abuse of the support staff. There's a quantum leap getting even to $1, and after that, you tend to see a less-dramatic-but-still-remarkable increase in general satisfaction, decrease in customer-has-unique-understanding-of-how-reality-operates, and decrease in abusiveness as price paid increases.
- glimcat 14y ago
  I'm thinking that some monkey software buried in the human psyche is interpreting giving someone money as an act of submission, while another bit is assuming that free is a promise of all-you-can-eat and thereafter interprets limits to that as cheating. Someone with actual professional psychology experience could probably shoot that full of holes.
  - twiceaday 14y ago
    Are you implying that a person behaves differently whether they paid or not? I would instead guess that paid apps attract a generally nicer subset of people.
    - dllthomas 14y ago
      Both seem reasonably plausible - can we get some empirical data?
- Ralith 14y ago
  As an aside, you may want a new metaphor--"quantum leaps" are actually extremely small.
  - theorique 14y ago
    Small, compared to what? I understand the metaphor as a leap with an impossible gap in between, rather than a very large leap.
atruepoint 14y ago
At one point it says, "Asking for payment does not fundamentally change your relationship with your users" but I'm not sure I agree with that. Asking for payment DOES change the relationship, but it changes it for the better--there is a more equitable sense of trade or exchange, where both parties feel as though their contributions are valued.
xiaoma 14y ago
If I pay a LOT for something and get poor results, I'll be pretty critical. If something is cheap I don't expect much of it. If something is free, then my instinct is to focus on the cost of my time, which in many cases makes me demanding. A perfect example of this would be Facebook. If it suddenly ate of my photos I would be furious because of all the time I'd spent tagging them. Similarly, I haven't really used Reddit since 2007 due to the fact that it once tricked me into wasting a lot of time writing comments that were invisible to everyone but me. Even thinking about it now I'm angry. Money is money, but time is the stuff my life is made of! http://toshuo.com/2007/reddit-deceived-me/ http://toshuo.com/2007/reddit-deceived-me/ On the other hand, if my $20 Nokia phonosaurus died, I wouldn't exactly be broken up about it.
- ranit8 14y ago
  HN has been doing that to a lot of people as well, myself included.

dotcoma 14y ago

no doubt.

IanDrake 14y ago

I was running a product with a freemium model for a while and I can say without a doubt that this is true.

boomzilla 14y ago
Of course, if you add value for the users or solve their pain point, they will be willing to pay. I personally think that one month free trial model is better than freemium. It sets the users' expectation from the beginning. I always thought Freemium is sort of sleazy.
- aidos 14y ago
  Can you explain how you find freemium to be a sleazy model? That's a genuine question - I run a freemium service and I'd hate for there to be a perception that we were in any way sleazy.
  - doktrin 14y ago
    Intuitively, we know it's fairly rare for something to be provided for nothing. Therefore, it's often assumed that the business model of freemium ventures is either : 1) purely ad-supported (increasingly difficult, imho) 2) generating (at least some) revenue by harvesting user data 3) running at a loss with the goal of being acquired as soon as feasibly possible 2 & 3 specifically could in various contexts be viewed as sleazy. This isn't my personal indictment, but they do represent views I've heard bandied about on a semi-consistent basis.
    - aytekin 14y ago
      What you are describing is the "free" services, not "freemium" services. Freemium means trialing a product based on usage as opposed to trialing it based on time. Once your usage goes over a threshold you are an active user and you start paying for the service. That's our model on JotForm and it works well for us. One of the best examples of this model is evernote. I remember they were saying something like if the users stays active on their product for n months, they will almost certainly become a premium user.
  - boomzilla 14y ago
    Maybe the word choice was not right (I am a non native speaker). What I think is the users should always be treated with respect and transparency: everything is laid down on the table upfront. A lot of freemium services are implemented in a way that kind of deceives the users to sign up and grow dependent on the service before letting them know that a lot of things won't work or stopping working if you don't pay.
- MicahWedemeyer 14y ago
  I think there are a lot of services where a 1-month free trial will prevent the kind of growth you need to sustain yourself. For a perfect example: LinkedIn. It's a freemium service where recruiters and other big-players pay for increased access. Another example is Flickr: There are so many photo-sharing sites that who would sign up for a paid one with so many others for free? Running a freemium site requires walking a line between the free and paid users. It can be sleazy, but it doesn't have to be, and there are definitely models where it makes sense.

slantyyz 14y ago

I would go a little further if you're an app store seller that the higher the price you charge, the more reasonable your customers are. Case in point - Sparrow ($2 on iOS and $10 on Mac -- inexpensive for each category) generated a huge uproar when Google bought them.

twodayslate 14y ago
I disagree with your Sparrow example. People were upset that Sparrow was ceasing development after having a sale one week before it was announced that they were bought by Google. That is just bad practice on Sparrow's part. For myself, if I pay for an app I expect a lot more from that app. I expect a quality apps with updates and support. There was an article I read (can't find it now) that a developer said he doesn't do payware due to the fact that he doesn't want to give support. I have no problems with free apps ceasing development - they were free! It would be nice if they released the source code though so someone else could take charge of the app.
- Retric 14y ago
  That seems like an unreasonable expectation for 2$.
  - tehwebguy 14y ago
    The scales could be tipped in the case of Sparrow because paid email clients / services tend not to be default. Nearly every OS seems to come with its own client.
  - shurane 14y ago
    More volume, cheaper per unit pricing, same support overall, more or less. Cheap app prices are certainly setting the bar higher.
  - jasonlotito 14y ago
    If $2 for an update is unreasonable, maybe they should have charged more?

kinleyd 14y ago

It's nice to know that this has been your experience. It's possible that paying users have generally become paying users only after more careful evaluation of a product, and hence are already pretty satisfied users. That would explain some of the niceness.

silverbax88 14y ago

This has always been my experience. I will go even further in my retail outlets - my worst customers are the ones who 'think' they spent a lot. But my best customers - by far - were the ones who can walk in and write a $64,000 check on a Wednesday, and any Wednesday after that. Those customers account for 90% of my business and are almost no hassle.

vecinu 14y ago
I don't think I understand your $64,000 example. Are you being sarcastic or are there actually people who spend that much money week by week?
- silverbax88 14y ago
  There are people who spend that much week to week. This is dependent on a specific type of retail - our average sale in these stores is $30. But some customers can spend $50k or more in one visit. And those customers are the easiest to deal with - very few complaints, no arrogance, easy to please.
  - BryanB55 14y ago
    That is quite a gap... Average sale $30, but people spend $50,0000?
    - silverbax88 14y ago
      Yes. That's the difference between the people who try to bully a clerk and claim they are a big spender and someone who is actually a big spender. There are lots of people who think they spend a lot of money and that it affords them special privileges. But the people who think that have no idea that the scruffy guy in jeans and sneakers standing next to them is about to drop cash like that. I think about this when I go to a trendy place like Buckhead in Atlanta. There are some big money players walking around - but they generally aren't the young people who look like a million bucks and look like they are loaded. Those people are broke. But, I digress.

mootothemax 14y ago

One of the reasons I recently shut down a free tool was due to the frankly horrific comments I received from users if it didn't work just exactly as they expected. Whilst it did worked, and I probably could have explained things a bit more clearly, I don't understand the mentality of users sending messages like "WHY THE [nsfw filter] ISN'T THIS WORKING YOU [nsfw filter]? I HOPE YOU DIE." They put me off checking emails for that account, and Twitter via TweetDeck as a whole. None of my other - paid with no free option - services suffers from this, despite similar numbers of users trying them out. In fact, I don't think I've once received an email with a swearword in it from one of the paid tools, whether from users on the free trial or fully paid-up.

relix 14y ago
Seconded. I don't have paid services I can compare too, but the free service I'm running generates some feedback that make me lose hope in humanity. Some people feel so entitled for something free, it's as if I killed their first-born baby when something goes wrong. On the other hand, getting sweet soundbites like "I love this!" or when a polite person sends suggestions starting with "I'm really sorry to bother you, but I think if you did X it would really improve Y!" my hope is restored.
- mootothemax 14y ago
  On the other hand, getting sweet soundbites like "I love this!" or when a polite person sends suggestions starting with "I'm really sorry to bother you, but I think if you did X it would really improve Y!" my hope is restored. Agreed, those are the emails that leave a smile on my face and lift my mood far beyond what such a simple email should do. I've also found that they tend to happen on a regular basis from the paying customers. The free ones, much less so.
doktrin 14y ago
One of the reasons I recently shut down a free tool was due to the frankly horrific comments I received from users if it didn't work just exactly as they expected. Whilst it did worked, and I probably could have explained things a bit more clearly, I don't understand the mentality of users sending messages like "WHY THE [nsfw filter] ISN'T THIS WORKING YOU [nsfw filter]? I HOPE YOU DIE." They put me off checking emails for that account, and Twitter via TweetDeck as a whole. This is horrifying, and only further dissuades me from ever pursuing a venture built around the freemium model. Frankly, I'm not a fan of it as a concept to begin with. The fact that it contributes to the mis-guided sense of entitlement of (in the words of Louis CK) non-contributing zeros only adds insult to injury.

Fargren 14y ago

Wouldn't it be reasonable/acceptable to deny support to those that use expletives when asking for it? Assuming you forewarn in your contact form or in your terms. Specially for non-paying users. Those people are not going to be paying for the product anyway, they probably wouldn't be insulting it/it's developers otherwise.

mootothemax 14y ago
Wouldn't it be reasonable/acceptable to deny support to those that use expletives when asking for it? I have a pretty thick skin, but after a while it is tiresome to receive such emails. Draining, boring and tiresome. I wouldn't offer support to any user who wrote such an email, but the bigger problem was having to read their filth in the first place.
king_jester 14y ago
> Wouldn't it be reasonable/acceptable to deny support to those that use expletives when asking for it? People that engage in hostile and harassing emails are the kind of people you won't want to engage at all. This is true for personal communication and also for business. Dealing with that kind of harassment is really draining and handling one person like that won't be the end of it, as there are more such people waiting in the wings to send their expletive filled mouth vomit. The best way to handle these people in business is to ignore them or to outright ban them from your service. Of course, ditching freemium creates a de facto ban on users won't sign on to a paid service, so there is that approach.

danielweber 14y ago

At a start-up many years ago, one of our principals gave a free copy of our ($1000 and up, Windows-only) software to a colleague, a college professor. College professor tossed it to a grad student, who proceeded to install it on a virtual computer instead of an actual PC. Virtual computers were very rare in these days. The student then complained to us that the software wasn't working right in their emulator. And why didn't we say that our software required a serial port (which was impossible to not have on a PC in those days) in our requirements list? Give a man a fish and he'll bitch at you it's the wrong one.

patio11 14y ago

You wouldn't expect D&D players to have much psychological overlap with elementary school English teachers, but in this regard they totally do. And this gets repeated over and over and over again in the experience of a lot of companies, B2B and B2C alike. It's like the iron law of customer support: non-paying users consume the most support for the worst reasons and constitute the overwhelming majority of abuse of the support staff. There's a quantum leap getting even to $1, and after that, you tend to see a less-dramatic-but-still-remarkable increase in general satisfaction, decrease in customer-has-unique-understanding-of-how-reality-operates, and decrease in abusiveness as price paid increases.

glimcat 14y ago
I'm thinking that some monkey software buried in the human psyche is interpreting giving someone money as an act of submission, while another bit is assuming that free is a promise of all-you-can-eat and thereafter interprets limits to that as cheating. Someone with actual professional psychology experience could probably shoot that full of holes.
- twiceaday 14y ago
  Are you implying that a person behaves differently whether they paid or not? I would instead guess that paid apps attract a generally nicer subset of people.
  - dllthomas 14y ago
    Both seem reasonably plausible - can we get some empirical data?
Ralith 14y ago
As an aside, you may want a new metaphor--"quantum leaps" are actually extremely small.
- theorique 14y ago
  Small, compared to what? I understand the metaphor as a leap with an impossible gap in between, rather than a very large leap.

atruepoint 14y ago

At one point it says, "Asking for payment does not fundamentally change your relationship with your users" but I'm not sure I agree with that. Asking for payment DOES change the relationship, but it changes it for the better--there is a more equitable sense of trade or exchange, where both parties feel as though their contributions are valued.

xiaoma 14y ago

If I pay a LOT for something and get poor results, I'll be pretty critical. If something is cheap I don't expect much of it. If something is free, then my instinct is to focus on the cost of my time, which in many cases makes me demanding. A perfect example of this would be Facebook. If it suddenly ate of my photos I would be furious because of all the time I'd spent tagging them. Similarly, I haven't really used Reddit since 2007 due to the fact that it once tricked me into wasting a lot of time writing comments that were invisible to everyone but me. Even thinking about it now I'm angry. Money is money, but time is the stuff my life is made of! http://toshuo.com/2007/reddit-deceived-me/ http://toshuo.com/2007/reddit-deceived-me/ On the other hand, if my $20 Nokia phonosaurus died, I wouldn't exactly be broken up about it.

ranit8 14y ago
HN has been doing that to a lot of people as well, myself included.