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Interesting.

I just flipped the free plan back on over at: http://goodgecko.com

I'll write more about this on my blog soon, but in a nutshell my reasons were thus:

1) It helps mitigate some marketing costs

2) I'd also rather the user tries out my app rather than the competition's :)

3) It shifts the focus of development slightly. I noticed that with the Free Trial (that kicks into paid after 15 days) I was so focused on feeding visitors through the funnel that all my time was being spent on the sales funnel; building a nice sales site, setting up A/B tests, worrying about my pricing etc. Changing to Freemium yesterday, I immediately got a bunch of signups and my mind started focusing on the app again. The onus is now on the app to be as awesome as possible in both free and paid versions. It's exposed to more people. I think this is a better long-term situation as it will help me focus on the right things, not just short-term funneling people into a Free Trial to make $$$.



Slightly OT--but how does your product differ from just creating a survey in Google Docs for free?


Fair question.

In terms of big differences, I'd say that my app offers more ways to get feedback.

You create one survey and then get multiple choices on how to use it:

1) web-based (this is like google docs)

2) mobile (optimised for iphones)

3) website popup - check out http://goodgecko.com/tour/genie for an example

and planning to follow it up with...

4) telephone surveys - created automatically and complete with robotic synthesised voice!

5) ???

That's the philosophy. Create a survey, automatically get a bunch of different ways to use it.

Thanks for the question though! Makes me think I should explain this better on the site.




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