Pulling the plug on your User - Building a free to paid model for a SaaS product
I was planning on writing about one of my projects at Betafi but wasn’t able to find the right value proposition for others so decided to rather document it.
I was planning on writing about one of my projects at Betafi but wasn’t able to find the right value proposition for others and eventually decided to rather document it. I recently worked on creating an upselling/free-to-paid model for Betafi and have talked about it in this article and have also added some personal beliefs and thoughts as well.
For any business to survive, the eventual goal is to get your users to pay. In my opinion, often people have a misconception about good users, people think that if someone is using my product and is talking nicely about my product, then that is a good user(they are good but secondary good), but the only good users are the ones who are willing to pay for your product or can refer you to users who will pay at the end of the day(secondary good customers).
In one of Sajith Pai’s recent PMF Convo, Abhishek mentioned an insightful way to look at PMF.
We were doing a lot of unbiased user calling. We were coming from the notion ki this app is not good for you or maybe you’re not liking this app so, what happens when the app does not exist in your life? Kal agar ye app chale jaayega to kya hoga. And we were recording those responses kitne log na bolte hai, ya problem nahi hai bol rahe hai, ya problem hoga bol rahe hai aur kitne log intensely bol rahe hai ki Sir please aisa mat kariye. (We were asking what if this app doesn’t exist tomorrow and tracking their responses, including intensity with which they were saying please don’t remove the app).
I am only mentioning this article because the thought process that was in my mind implementing the project was how I can help them transition from a free user to paid user without taking away Betafi’s free benefits from them, a somewhat extended chain of thought on Abhishek’s take on PMF here.
Building an upselling journey at Betafi is one of my favourite things I have ever worked on mainly because of two reasons - a) I was doing this for the first time, and I had never considered the aspect of monetisation for any of my previous projects certainly not at a scale which we were doing at Betafi. b) The impact this was going to have not only on user experience but also on Betafi’s direct revenue was huge as this was going to be one of the key drivers and I was getting a chance to do this as an intern which was very exciting.
The framework for this was pretty clear in my head → relive the user journey step by step as many times as possible, and understand the trigger points in a user’s workflow where you can nudge them without disrupting their workflow. The result was going to be a new pricing approach integrated with a free-to-paid model.
Approach and Implementation
My first thing was to do deep dive into research mode to understand how other products do this not only in the user research space but products that are widely used and are on the freemium approach. I looked at well over 50+ products and documented the journey of around 15 products to understand how their triggers and messaging work. If you’re planning to do this or want to learn more about it, would recommend checking out Loom, Evernote, Canva and now Betafi as well.
Next was to come up with a user journey for Betafi and for this, after spending some time on research and reliving the user journey again and again, we decided to go through 4 individual workflows which constitute your Betafi experience
Session Usage-Based Nudges
For any product, more importantly for a product like Betafi, it’s important to reach a point where it’s not only easily integrated into your users’ workflow but becomes an integral part of it. Betafi was built to simplify user research, so naturally people were going to use it to talk to their users and session hours was the one workflow which any user was not going to miss. Nudging users based on session hours sounded very easy, but the most tricky part of it was to find the sweet spot, where we are not only able to integrate Betafi in their workflow but the users are also able to explore all the necessary features which may be beneficial to them, and spend enough time on the product to gather some qualitative and quantitative research data.
With a decision of giving 5 free session hours to users, we implemented nudges on the user dashboard, session creation modal and a prompt for return as soft triggers when you have more than 3 hours remaining, with hard stop nudges when you’re nearing the end of your free session hours. This was not only a generous free plan in this space but also gave the users enough sessions to explore all the different workflows they might use in post-session and enough sessions to gather preliminary qualitative data to look at.
Feature Gating
Betafi is filled with so many interesting features, which were built because they not only felt necessary or were constantly asked by users, but in our opinion significantly improved your whole user research and product feedback process. We didn’t want users to form an opinion without trying out the features and seeing if they are useful or not whether it was exporting your notes and clips to Miro or Figjam, having the ability to transcribe and translate your call in 130+ languages or just simply using Google Meet and Zoom Integration.
Even though the approach for feature gating was lenient, there were some features that didn’t feel like an absolute necessity to free users like the ability to download a transcript or session recording or upload your recording up to a particular size, and there we put hard stops.
Workspace and Active Contributor based Monetization
Betafi is built for different sorts of user personas, whether you’re a user researcher, a product designer, a product manager, a founder, or any other member of the team and all of these personas will not only have different projects to work on but with different requirements and will be collaborating with different contributors, hence the need for different workspaces for one company. A workspace is a repository of all your projects with the owner having the access to add or remove contributors as well as manage their permissions at the workspace level.
This was going to vary for all users, based on the plan they’re on they will have a fixed number of workspaces allotted to them which they can increase by adding extra workspaces or moving to a higher plan.
While both of these workflows were crucial, they weren’t something a user was going to do often and constant nudging them didn’t make sense. We implemented an n, n-1 reminder for the workspace, asking to move to a higher plan or buy another workspace and an n-2, n-1, n reminder for active contributors where n is the number of contributors/workspaces allowed on a particular plan.
With this, we eventually crafted an upselling model for Betafi keeping in mind that the User Experience isn’t changed much and they are still able to enjoy and benefit from Betafi.
Betafi is a pretty young startup which had a very generous free plan and didn’t restrict any usage on the platform whatsoever to implementing a well-rounded upselling/free to paid model with hard limits was something very excited to work on and I am glad I got a chance to work on it. I obviously couldn’t have done it without Arjun and Priyani’s(shoutout) guidance throughout the project, refining the ideas, the messaging, and everything.
If you’re looking for a tool to do User research or gather user feedback, do check out Betafi, you can do User Interviews and Usability testing, also we have amazing integrations with Google Meet and Zoom, with the ability to export your insights to Miro/Figjam, transcriptions and translation and much more.
PS - I have recently started to take my digital imprint more seriously and will be sharing more here regarding my work, what I am doing, what I am planning to do, projects, philosophy and some more ramble do subscribe to the newsletter if you’d like to see me ramble every few days in your inbox. More importantly, this is my first article, I would love to get some feedback.