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.
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.
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.
I can attest to this. Having run quiet a few freemium model sites, the time and energy wasted on unwanted support is astounding. God forbid if something goes wrong, some people will take time to email you just to yell at you. Still can't understand how people expect absolute perfection for something they aren't paying a dime for?
However, one thing I noticed is that freemium clients are more likely to click on ads and subscribe to your social networks than others. Some pain for some gain I guess.
What do you mean by "an impossible gap?" If it wasn't possible, it wouldn't happen. Even beyond that, "impossible" does not entail great magnitude, but simply something outside the set of possibilities, which could be good or bad.
In quantum physics, a particle can be found at energy level 0 or energy level 1, but cannot be found at any level in between. (for example, this is a result of the infinite 1D quantum well). That is the impossible that I was talking about.
It's a very tiny jump in energy according to human perception - the interesting part is that the particle is only in state 0 or 1, never "in between".
It has nothing to do with size of the jump and everything to do with continuity along the path. A "quantum leap" from A to B implies that the path from A to B was discontinuous and therefore completely unpredictable given the knowledge you had at point A.
In other words, You went from A to B without going through any intermediate steps.
Said yet another way: B is a post singularity relative to A.
To my reading, OP didn't intend to convey "unpredictable" so much as "large," and if he did, then I'm not sure what he was thinking; "quantum leap" isn't even colloquially understood to mean "unpredictable change".
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.
If you look at https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/tweepsect you can see that the quality of users is... not of the highest IQ, and yet they manage to figure it out. About once every 3-6 months I'll get someone @mentioning me saying "HOW DOES THIS WORK I DON'T EVEN" or something, but those are extreme exceptions.
When I first launched tweepsect, I had a lot more complaints and questions, but I iterated on it and tried to obsolete any recurring issue. It's been up for multiple years now and requires basically a few hours of maintenance per year. I'm happy to provide utility at near-zero effort for free.
That said, I completely agree about paying users. They're the best. When I was prototyping SocialGrapple, I invited +100 of my peers. The feedback was completely superficial and uncommitted. When I looked at how much time the people spent on the site, I realized that they weren't my target users and that the feedback was worthless. I shut down the beta and a month later I relaunched SocialGrapple with a monthly fee membership. The userbase completely changed--people really cared. I got people whose productivity and business was seriously impacted by the usefulness of my product to the point where I wrote custom views for specific users just to cater to their specific needs (until I could generalize it to everyone).
Users make my head explode sometimes, even when I'm expecting it.
I've caught users recommending a product of mine (feels awesome), then they turned around and insulted it in the same conversation. Upon a little anonymous interaction, they were upset because the CSS didn't match Google. Users, WTF???
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.
This is horrifying, and only further dissuades me from ever pursuing a venture built around the freemium model.
Heh, to be fair it's not all doom and gloom, I can't see how so many people would offer it if it was. Even with the paid tools, you will still receive the occasional bewildering email, such as this gem which arrived over the weekend:
Dang!! I love this app sooooo much. I thought it was free. Until i looked over and saw it was only a trial. I'm no longer using this site until it becomes free
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.
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.
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.
I was in a Nordstorms, hanging out on a couch with a sleeping kid while my wife was off looking for a dress for a wedding. So I'm watching the clerk process a bunch of clothes, and I'm thinking, she's doing returns, or something. No customers around.
Then the customer comes back with a couple tall Starbucks fruity drinks, gives one to the clerk, pays, collects the piles of clothes and leaves. $2700.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"ceasing development" - no, they are still in maintenance mode for the app. I just downloaded an update a couple of days ago. Sparrow still works fine and does the job.
A $10 Mac app pays for itself within a couple of days of use. People have no issue buying two lattes for $10 and pissing it out, but when it comes to a cheap app, they feel entitled to so much more.
Oh, you are one of those "Well, actually" people. Gotcha. I can do this.
> So pay 2$ and get updates for free.
No, that's not what he said. He said he expects update and support. He didn't say that those updates and support should be free. Merely that updates and support is available. It's akin to paying for anything, really. I expect if I pay for a computer, for example, that they make available to me updates and support.
So let's not play the "Well, actually..." game, and discuss things like an intelligent adult.
And, even if he did mean that he expects updates and support for free for the rest of his life, does that really warrant a response or consideration?
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.
I worked in enterprise software for a while, and I've seen people react more reasonably for a $20K app going EOL/Maintenance mode than for Sparrow.
I gotta say, Apple's App store model turned consumer software into a race to the bottom, and developers who want to price their software less than $10 had better be aware of what they're getting into from a customer expectations perspective.
Agreed. I actually think the App Store is Apple's biggest problem for future growth, because they're losing developers. I certainly don't want to write an app just to make $0.70 for a couple sales. Or if you're lucky, maybe charge $2.99. Seriously, what ever happened to software selling at $29.95? I'm hoping Windows 8 can bring some of that back.
Exactly, do you want to sell a hundred $1 apps to people who are a support nightmare or a single $100 app to someone who is potentially much more reasonable to deal with? I'll take the latter any day.
Because it's a tool, and people generally expect tools to last a while. No one was asking for free updates for life, but knowing that updates would come, fixes, and features they were talking about during the sale, even if you had to pay for it, is nice.
After all, isn't that the benefit of being the customer, and not the product? Isn't this what App.net is building itself on?
App.net is a subscription. What you describe makes a lot more sense in that context; A subscription automatically implies updates and support. Many consumers associate all purchases with support, but it really shouldn't be implied that spending money on something now implies commitments by its producer in the future. This isn't true because I'm pushing some notion of what rights user have or do don't have--its just not prudent to make assumptions about these kinds of things.
