Robbie Kellman Baxter

Don’t worry about nuances like your price being $9.99 or $10…Start with:

• Making sure you have $10 worth of value

• Making sure you have enough value up front to get someone to sign up

• Making the first seconds/minutes/days after they sign up an opportunity for them to recognize value from you and expose them to how they can get even more value

• Keeping them engaged - if you have a 6 months plan make sure that you can offer value for 6 months!

Only reasons to have a freemium model:

• Trying to change a behavior on an ongoing basis: showing them that it will be a habit

• Some kind of network effect: each new person using the product for free creates more value from premium users (e.g. LinkedIn)

• A viral component: making free users a marketing channel to bring premium users

When first adding in a subscription model (e.g. as another product), the first question to ask is what this is doing for your larger ecosystem/business model. Define where the focus will be: awareness, protecting from competitors, for the heaviest users, etc.

The starting point to understanding customers is LTV: find the customers who have stayed the longest and paid the most. Then try to find more of these users by understanding more about them: how did they onboard, what was the source of the lead, and which cohort are they coming from (e.g., season).

If you’re attracting people that have no intention of staying, that is a very uphill climb. Example: streaming service acquiring users by focusing on just 1 movie and seeing poor retention.