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A comment on Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products. Parent comment

Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by lettersdigits on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @07:01AM (#13704847)
>Nine years later, and still the stream of customer support requests has not relented!

You gave me an idea for a business model - Let's say you offer a pingdom-like service (to monitor your site availability and reliablity) -

You can just do the following:

1. Offer the service 100% Free, at your own risk

2. Offer a $x/month subscription . if you don't pay - you won't get any customer support.

Or, you can will still offer free support for non-paying customers, but without any priority (their tickets will be handled only after the paying customer's tickets)

Does anyone know of a company that is offering this type of model ?

(edit: added missing words and spacing)

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Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by tomeehan on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @08:23AM (#13705235)
A lot of SaaS businesses offer priority support for paying customers.

As a SaaS founder — I've always felt it's a bit of an odd value proposition — "pay me more, and I'll fix my flawed, buggy software".

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Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by Mathnerd314 on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @10:42AM (#13706305)
It works better with the Red Hat model: "Here's some flawed buggy software I wrote. Pay me and I'll make it work for your use case."

There's a small incentive to write deliberately obscured code, but I think it gets outweighed by maintainability concerns.

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Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by hinkley on Thursday February 23, 2017 @02:02AM (#13712188)
And the Apache Model: Write awful, placeholder documentation, then get an O'Reilly book deal to finally explain yourself and your code.
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Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by DiabloD3 on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @03:11PM (#13708753)
Seems to be better known as the Sun/Oracle model.
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Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by visakanv on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @11:49AM (#13706884)
> I've always felt it's a bit of an odd value proposition — "pay me more, and I'll fix my flawed, buggy software".

Hmm. I think it makes sense if you begin with the assumption that all software is flawed and buggy by default.

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Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by manigandham on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @12:07PM (#13707037)
Support doesnt mean broken software. Many times it's about how to use it correctly to solve a problem, and paying more for response times, customization and general level of work involved makes perfect sense.
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Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by mratzloff on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @09:11AM (#13705578)
It's a good idea, which is why it's common practice. Every Google Cloud service is set up this way, for instance.
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Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by gnode on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @08:15AM (#13705175)
This is a common model for commercial open source software.
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Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by sharemywin on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @08:10AM (#13705151)
pay cancel -> 1yr -> pay cancel.

Also, you'd be incentivizing your company to make support more complex so users call, email etc.

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Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by lettersdigits on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @08:12AM (#13705155)
what ? please explain..

If you cancel the subscription, you won't get support. I don't understand your point :)

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Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by jclardy on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @09:01AM (#13705509)
I think they are saying someone will pay for support, use it, then cancel the subscription. The assumption there is that you offer a refund for the service, which I don't think is necessary (Especially once they have used a support inquiry.)

Apple in-app subs let you "cancel" but only in the way of not paying for the next renewal, so it is a widely used model already.

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Re:Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products by lettersdigits on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @09:09AM (#13705560)
> The assumption there is that you offer a refund for the service, which I don't think is necessary

exactly this. Just cancel his subscription the NEXT month, and you solved the problem, financially and technically :)

And who would HATE this proposition ? the spammers :) now they won't be able to do what the OP has suggested they might do (pay -> get support -> cancel ):)

(edit: spacing.

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