Author’s note
Hi there. Sincere apologies for the radio silence on this side. Things have been very busy at my end and that has kept me out of action in this space. However, I plan to change that. Bizit, the brand/concept, was always about concocting my thoughts about what’s going on in the world of technology.
I describe myself as a student of technology - I study technoogy companies and digital products. And I’ve seen that documenting my observations/learnings in public domains like LinkedIn & Twitter have been positive reinforcement loops. Substack is another interesting medium for me to have meaningful conversations w/ all of you.
With that out of the way, let’s dive into the short piece today. It first appeared on LinkedIn.
📌 It's 2022 & SaaS (broadly) falls under 2 categories - Buy & Try SaaS and Try & Buy SaaS
Let's try to understand them a little bit better -
1️⃣ Buy & Try SaaS - Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, etc
2️⃣ Try & Buy SaaS - Notion, Airtable, Figma, Loom, etc
For the sake of this post, let's try to break down the "Try & Buy" SaaS model 👇🏻
1/ Free trial based on usage: Slack's free up to 10k most recent messages of your workspace is the key example
2/ Freemium: Part of the product/limited feature set is made free forever - Grammarly & Notion are my favorite examples
3/ Sandbox/Playground: Product will work in a demo/sandbox environment w/ some already hosted data that users can interact w/ to realize the product's capabilities
4/ Hosted/interactive demo: It's fairly similar to the above category w/ one notable difference - the data/integration(s) here are static. Think of it as an interactive GIF/walkthrough of the product
5/ Opt-in free trial: A (time-bound) free trial of the product w/o requiring any payment info
6/ Opt-out free trial: A (time-bound) free trial that needs the user to input their payment info (Netflix)
7/ Different product: Here the paid product is different from the free one
🤔 "Why so many different options?" is the next natural question & the answer is simple - they all convert differently.
🏆 Getting users to the "aha moment" is the crux of "Try & Buy" SaaS.
🏁 Let's look at some examples -
1/ Users might need some time to get to the "aha moment" but only need some units of the product, a usage-based free trial is great.
2/ If users can get to the "aha moment" in 7/14 days, a time-bound free trial is an amazing way to get through.
3/ Users might need some features for their own personal needs (free) while collaboration feature(s) is a team use-case (paid).
4/ If the product touches sensitive data or needs extensive integrations to see the value, an interactive demo or a sandbox product might be a great idea.
🚨 The idea of "try & buy" SaaS is to build a customer-centric product.
Put another way, the idea is to help buyers understand how the product works at every potential user touchpoint.
There is no one-size fit approach/tactic but hope this was/is a helpful starting point.
What are some of the tactics/approaches that you have found helpful?
Which among these approaches works best for your product/company/use case?
🙏🏻 Would love to hear your feedback as well.
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Warmly,