Product Upsell: Usage-based Trials

My last blog here was about the great first-use-experience in using the Action Method online personal management tool. This new blog will be about how they did an excellent job of up-selling me to actually PAY for the product!

There are a few widely used business models out there today employed by web applications designed to get users to 'try before you buy' the product. The two that come to mind most are:

• Freemium - offer a scaled back version of a product with limited functionality - when users want to make use of higher-order functionality, they can choose to pay for the premium version of the product
• This is great for incumbent companies, as it basically gives away a low-level version of the product which in some ways 'fends off' or 'crowds out' smaller startups that might start with basic functionality and build more stuff on later
• Examples of this include: TurboTax, Pandora, Flickr, Skype, LinkedIn
• Time-based trial - offer your product with full features for a set period of time (e.g. 30 days)
• This a nice way to show off all the bells and whistles of your product and get the user hooked. The issue here is that the time based approach may not give the user enough time to try it out and fully give it a test spin... maybe they don't get to it in that first 30 days?
• Examples of this include: Basecamp (37 signals), Apple's iWork... many others
• The giveaway - Sometimes companies simply give away credit to their services - example Google Adwords... they love to give away $100 or $200 of free advertising.. great model.

Action Method employed a unique approach in that they let me use the full functionality of the product, but cutoff my use not based on time, but rather based on usage! This makes a tonne of sense, because in a way, once you set a 'usage' limit, it ensures that users have taken full advantage of the product and gotten hooked. I didn't feel any time pressure to use the product and instead just tried it out risk free. This type of upsell I refer to as 'Usage-based trial' and I hope it gets applied more broadly.

Of course, each of these models has their merits depending upon the actual product being sold - you always need to balance giving your users a chance to try the product with simply giving away your product that you should rightfully be charging for!

Best of luck!
1984

A great first use experience

I recently joined a site called 'Action Method', and I was wowed by their startup / first use experience. It was really easy, intuitive and instructive. In product management / design, the first use experience of a product is critical - it is the point where you'll hook a user or lose them forever... there are countless applications that I've checked out but abandoned because I couldn't navigate the product or understand its benefit to me quickly enough. This is sad if you've gone through all the effort to create a great product / service, but then the product falls down on execution because people can't actually get over the hurdle of initial investment. Some of the great strategies that Action Method used were as follows:

1) Offer a video summary of the application (I discussed this in a previous post as well)


2) Take you through a quick tour of the different screens - they laid out the steps that you would take in the order that you would likely do them. It was pretty intuitive.

3) The part I liked the most was the way they included a brief written description of a given screen with the option to close that description and never see it again... this was really helpful for me and not too invasive

Just a few good things to consider when building a first-use experience. What also shouldn't be forgotten is that the user flows need to be SUPER-INTUITIVE... i.e. the click flow should be exactly how the user would be thinking about things, and aligned with the way they would discover the different functionality of the application.

All for now,

1984