If none of your free customers are willing to pay, then it might be time for a pivot. Such as licensing your app to financial providers as a value add.
Once they're paid down their loans (and even before then) you should have a pretty good picture of their financial situation. What are they going to do with that extra cash they have now that their loans repayments are done?
* Take out a loan for a car/holiday?
* Open a share trading account?
* While they're paying down their debts can you get them a better deal on their credit card?
Pitching additional product for me is troublesome because of the intrinsic fees associated with them. I look at my service as something that accelerates debt repayment in the most efficient way. But to encourage customers to roll-over into a cc balance transfer, mortgage refi, or student loan consolidation, it just pushes their obligations further out in the future. Now, this might not be a bad thing for some people. But ultimately you could get a lot of people into the fee roulette game and it becomes a never-ending cycle where every economic peak and trough of high->low interest rates creates a new incentive for a financial services company to pitch new product.
So, I struggle with this. Do I want to maximize my revenue, or do I want to just provide a really good service for the small group of people willing to pay for it...
As a first-time founder and relatively new developer, I could never really tell when the time is right to stop creating and start pitching. Looking back, I definitely went too far with the build, but better late than never to snap out of it and start soliciting.
> The way I look at it is that any feedback with a free plan is better than zero feedback with a subscription.
I wouldn't be so sure. My experience has been that I get very different kinds of feedback from free users versus paying users. Often times even opposite feedback.
Be careful listening to people who are not, and will likely never be, your target paying customers.
> I'm hesitant to give that up by switching back to a subscription plan and watching new signups die again.
Freemium can work reasonably well for this. Takes less courage, and you ideally get some paying users in the process. Not sure what the best pricing breakdown would be for your app specifically though, as I'm not too familiar with the industry.
Alternatively, you can do free trials (2 weeks, 1 month, or 3 months). Take a credit card up-front if you're feeling brave, or defer if you're not. If people don't convert, contact them personally and find out why. Offer a "no questions asked money-back guarantee", it'll probably make you feel comfortable more than your customer. If you really want, you can give them some customers free accounts anyways.
Best of luck! :)
In that case, perhaps an alternate revenue system can be found. Maybe something like Mint.com.
I read (listened) to Chris Anderson's book Free: The Future of a Radical Price [1], which tackles this very subject of creating revenue from free products. (Chris Anderson is the founder of Wired.com and this book debuted as #12 on the New York Times Best Seller List.) You may find his book useful too. I highly recommend it. Best of all, the book is priced appropriately: Free.
Lower income earners, with primarily unsecured credit card debt for example, are basically faced with two options - spend less or earn more. There's no panacea that software can provide, other than increasing awareness of costs and consequences.
Thanks for the link - I'll check it out.
[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/2012/pdf/scf12.p...
So how do you attract high earners with a lot of debt (but still low debt-to-income)? That sounds extremely difficult.
Everyday, I question if the Internet is the best place to market something like this and if a price point in the $5-$15/month range is too low. Eventually you start to creep up towards the level of service that a personal financial advisor would offer. But, I have limited desire to support the asset-side of household balance sheets (401K, stock investments, cash, etc). It's not that I don't want to go down that path, it's just that there are many more variables once you start to incorporate investment objectives, risk tolerance, return forecasting, and stochastic outcomes.
The other marketing challenge is how to cater towards people outside the US. In Europe especially, there are some crazy forms of credit made to people which have all sorts of embedded optionality. I used to work for a bank, building models to forecast this kind of stuff and it was such a challenge looking at it from the lender's perspective, I can only imagine the confusion from the borrower's point of view.
The way I look at it is that any feedback with a free plan is better than zero feedback with a subscription. I gain a lot of valuable insight observing how users actually use the service. I'm hesitant to give that up by switching back to a subscription plan and watching new signups die again.
I know there's no magic bullet. I suppose this could be solved quickly if I had more time to devote to selling and marketing - admittedly I've been slacking in that department.
Any words of wisdom would be much appreciated.
[1] https://beanjockey.com