How to give
away your services
Users’ time is valuable!
It’s a funny thing, but many people today don’t know how to give services away. I don’t know how often it’s happened to me that I go to a site that offers a service I want. They’ve got a free trial period! Awesome! Let’s just sign up!
Oh. Wait.
It’s a 14 day free trial. Do I have enough free time the next two weeks to justify taking advantage now, or should I wait?
This week my wife is likely to give birth to our fifth child.
or
It’s almost the end of the day, maybe tomorrow.
or
Maybe I’ll need this service more in the future than I need it now . . . I’d better keep my powder dry.
And I leave the site for a competing site. Maybe I plan to come back. Maybe I don’t.
What happened? The guy trying to give something away just lost me! What are the odds that I come back to check this thing out later? Not good.
Giving services should always be easy if people want what you’re offering. Here are some tips:
- Offer it for cheap or better yet, free! If your service doesn’t have a long track record, but is more than $0 to get started, I’m not using it. Period. I want to know what I’m getting. My time is valuable! I have a wife and kids. I don’t have time to waste paying people for the privilege of testing their software.
- Don’t offer a short trial period. I know you need money, and you need it now. We all do. But if you offer a short trial period, it’s not going to help. People who already know they want your stuff will still buy, but the rest will walk away. If we don’t know that your software will work for us, a short timeframe is rarely enough to convince us. Offer enough time to get us hooked.
One of my favorite pieces of software is called BeyondCompare by Scooter Software. It’s an amazing piece of software that gets this trial period exactly right: They offer a 30 day trial . . . with two huge caveats: 1. If you don’t use the software that day, it doesn’t count as part of your trial. 2. When you’re done with the trial, they give you another few days to activate. By this time you’re hooked. I’ve worked at three different jobs where I’ve talked my manager into buying me this software. I can live without it, but I’m way more productive with it, and after 30+ days of use, I can offer a persuasive argument about that.
3. Make it easy to start using. This should go without saying. But for some reason it doesn’t. If my five year old can’t figure out how to sign up, it’s not going to happen. If your signup process takes more than 30 seconds, that’s too long. Find a way to trim it down.
4. Stop asking for personal information! I’m not giving you my credit cards; I don’t know you! No, you can’t have my address or phone number! I’m not even sure I want you to have my spam email address . . . you need to prove otherwise.
5. Lastly, don’t offer a limited time up front where everything is free. I know you want to introduce your users to the awesomeness that is your program. That’s great. But users have lives! We can’t absorb all the features at once! Let us dip a toe in, and understand what we have. Then when we understand that, let us temporarily activate your paid services when we want them.
A case in point here is Amazon Web Services. They are unbelievably cheap. They do almost everything right. But I refuse to sign up for an account with them. Why? Because they have a trial period where almost everything is free! It’s a really long trial. They’ve almost got me. But, they have tons of features! I don’t have time to learn how to use their system today! What if I don’t have time to learn those features now but need them in the future? I’ll just wait until I’ve got time to devote to them before I sign up.
Well guess what? I don’t have time. Nobody has time. So just assume that you have to hook us on those awesome features on our schedule. Then we’ll pay you to keep the spigot on after we’re hooked.
And my wife just called. That little bit of time I wanted to use for testing out your software? It just got spent ranting about how much time I don’t have.
