Ready to save your new work of art?
Or higher resolution?
Or premium features?
You do it when the user is hooked.
I was not advocating for “no revenue”.
Also it seems self evident that such advice does not apply to all software…. Do you think I’m saying this is how SAP should be sold? No…, obviously the advice applies to software suited to this approach.
‘Thanks! Oh wow, this is great!’
‘Glad you like it.’
‘I love how you don’t try to upsell me on things or push any kind of premium paid features, just give me the whole product without limitations’
‘Yeah, that’s our philosophy, let you fall in love with the product’
‘Cool, thanks. Okay, I’m gonna save my work now.’
‘$20, please’
‘I’m sorry what?’
‘$20 to save.’
‘Er… could you have mentioned this earlier? I just spent ages using your awesome product and you just let me in and I didn’t have to sign up or anything, and you never mentioned a premium upsell, so I just assumed…’
‘Yeah, I thought I might be able to trick you like that. We call it “bait and switch”. Isn’t it so much better than all that marketing BS?’
The key realization is that while the unauthenticated open source model works really well for individuals, it’s hard for companies to adopt.
They want authentication, security policies, private spaces to collaborate, access control, search… all of this requires having a company behind it in practice and the open source model doesn’t work as well.
The two versions so far work really well alongside each other right now.
But it's not exactly clear how you plan to turn that into, say, revenue. Build it and they will come, sure. And the more leads you stuff into the top of the conversion funnel, the more conversions, right? What do you mean 'qualified' leads?
If your product's viability will rest on turning some percentage of those free users into subscribers or purchasers, then you have to do some upsell, at some point. And if they can get into the full product without any obstacles within milliseconds, you're going to have a very, very hard job getting those conversions. Meanwhile you're winning over free users who cost you money and time to serve in handling their support and feature requests, and you're bringing in ever more people who are never going to give you any money.
It is viable to build your product this way if the primary product your business sells is 'convincing investors that by building up loyal active users, and developing rich understanding of those users' behavior, you will somehow create a reservoir of value that can be sold for 10x the amount of money you're asking them to put in to keep your servers turned on for another few months'
And it's probably viable if you aren't trying to be a business at all.
But as generic 'this is how all products should work' advice, it's pretty terrible, unless your main advice is 'don't try to make a business around offering a software product unless you're primarily interested in selling engagement monetization fairytales to investors'.