Needed to update my account details on a tool I use.
Instead of a clear settings button, I was greeted with floating menus autoplaying videos and popups asking me to upgrade my plan. It took way longer than it should have to find a basic link.
The site looked amazing, but the experience was exhausting.
Someone asked here this week how to turn free users into paying ones. The answer I gave was half right, so here is the other half.
The easy half is that a free user has not decided the problem costs them anything yet. So you look for the ones with money already attached. A consultant, a tool they cancelled, someone's hours.
Hours are where it goes wrong. Every project I have been paid for was client work, priced before it existed. An hour saved there widened the margin, because the number on the contract did not move when the work got faster. That is why saving time reads as obviously valuable to me.
An agency billing hourly is the exact opposite. Every hour you save them is an hour they cannot invoice. Same job title, same daily pain, opposite reason to buy you.
I run more than one business, and for a long time I could not have told you, with a straight face, exactly which one was profitable in a given month. I had a general feeling, but no real number I trusted, just totals across bank accounts that never told the full story.
If you are running two or more businesses right now, do you actually know this month's numbers by business, or are you working off a general feeling too? What made you either build a real system for it, or decide it was not worth the effort yet?
Building something in the music space and constantly asking myself did I actually use this tool the way a real customer would? Or did I build for what I thought made sense? Curious what products you've bought recently that felt like the founder was a real user first, developer second. What tipped you off?
I ve been building and preparing multiple products mostly on my own, and I m learning that launching can be just as challenging as building. Between testing, marketing, pricing, finding early users, and deciding when the product is ready, there are a lot of moving parts. For other solo founders, what part of launching has been the most difficult, and what helped you get through it?
After more than three years of observing this platform (mainly in the forums), I can see which posts have helped you the most. [Yes, I can tell based on their performance.] In addition to updated news from the tech industry, you liked the most:
website roasting and
tagline adjustments/improvements for launch day (mostly from @aaronoleary )
We've kept a free tier running as our main growth engine but it's getting expensive to maintain.
While some of our best paid users started on the free plan a huge chunk of our weekly support energy goes toward answering questions for non paying accounts.
Without clear tracking on our exact conversion rates it feels like we're spending valuable dev attention on users who have zero intention of buying.
We're considering switching to a free trial model instead.
