Who came up with free SaaS trials, and what were they thinking?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that people don’t know what they want.
(I won’t quote Henry Ford. Or misquote him. You’ve heard about horses vs cars before.)
We all know people don’t know what they want.
That’s why, when we’re developing products for a market, we don’t ASK them what they want or don’t want. Nope, we observe them. We listen to them. You can’t solve a problem until you’ve identified the problem. So we listen to identify.
Listening to real people is so ubiquitous a part of the solution-ideation process that it’s hardly worth stating here — you’ve heard it here here here here here here and here, to list a teensy fraction of the nearly 1 billion Google results for “problem discovery,” “validated learning” and “minimum viable product.” It’s an idea that’s shaped every startup since The Lean Startup was published in 2011, if not earlier than that.
Startup rule: Do not ask people what they want you to build for them.
That said, once you’ve listened to and built Product X for a market… and once you’ve worked to attract them to it… here’s what suddenly gets kinda weird in Startupland. The aforementioned universal-truth vanishes, and the startup rule disappears. For no apparent reason, we smart SaaS companies present our they-don’t-even-know-what-they-want prospects with — wait for it — a free trial of Product X.
“You don’t know what you want! Here! See what you can do with this for a few weeks.”
Now that the product’s built, we suddenly believe people do know what they want…
…and we suddenly believe they know how to use it? — even though it’s different from what they’ve been using?
When the trial starts, we trust the persons we previously didn’t trust. (Awfully convenient timing.) We trust them to make the best of their 15 to 30 to 60 days of 100% free, unlimited and unsupervised trialing. Because of course they’ll make the best of it. Because that’s just how people are built: we’re ruthlessly efficient, we always work toward our own best interests, we never forget why something was once important to us, and we’re more than willing to invest time into learning how to use a new solution that will dramatically improve our lives and shape the future. Obviously. #sarcasm
If Henry Ford had said, “Here are the keys to this Model T — you’ve got 30 days to use it to replace your horse,” how many cars would’ve made it off the lot?
People want to try something free the way they’d have wanted a faster horse.
They think they want it.
But that’s because they don’t know what they want. ← always a rule
Now, okay, sure, if the idea of the free SaaS trial was born out of a follow-me-home or a series of user tests, I’m guessing the observation that drove it was a good one. A user is presented with a sign-up form and a credit card field, and they get as far as completing the form only to stop at the CC field. You observe this happening again and again, user after user. And you and your team go, “Hey waaaaait. What if we just, like, didn’t charge them right away?” The CRO team likes this idea but adds that you ought to measure success against the trial-start metric, not paid acquisitions.
Everyone high-fives.
The free trial is born.
But does that mean the free trial is an actual solution to the problem that is that friction-filled moment of entering one’s credit card information, aka paying? This quick list of data about the failings of trials suggests otherwise:
- As many as 60% of users who sign up for a free trial of your SaaS app will use it once and never come back (source)
- Expect only 15–20% of your free trial users to become paying customers, and even that percentage will drop off after 90 days (source)
- 66% of SaaS vendors report trial-to-paid conversion rates of less than 25% (source)
For argument’s sake, let’s say that half the people who sign up for your free trial aren’t actually good prospects — they’re not built to activate. K, then that leaves (lemme do the math) 50% of trial users who should be using your trial and, by the end of it, converting.
After all, you built the product after listening to them.
You did the work to attract them to it. They started a trial.
So it follows that those who enter your trial ought to use your solution daily, right? And happily hand over their CC details when the trial ends — right?
Yet sadly, 50% of your trial users are definitely not converting. (If only!)
Fifty-percent of my trial users are definitely not converting. (If only!)
We’re all lucky to get a 20% paid conversion rate.
Handing over the keys to a faster horse
At Airstory, we’re building a LaFerrari in a world of ponies, donkeys and horses.
And, like every other SaaS, we have a free trial.
And, like every other SaaS, our free trial is converting abysmally.
Why? Because large percentages of trial users aren’t activating. Why? Because they don’t know what to do. Why? Because their pony, donkey or horse actually trained them, not the other way around. They know how to use their horse. They have low expectations of it, and it meets those low expectations in a non-disruptive, life-is-safe kinda way. This LaFerrari we’re creating for them? They have to imagine a world in which they’d make it work at least as well as their horse does, and even then they’d still have to give up their horse. (#lossaversion)
When they take off their 1908 hat and step inside our LaFerrari, they’re looking for the reins, not the push-start ignition.
Will a two-week trial move them from feeding hay into their gas tank… to turning heads as they rumble down Brompton Road in London? If we gave them 1000 days to try it free but no real help fitting it into their lives, would a trial work?
Trials exist not because they’re good for users or for conversion rates — but because they’re cheaper than a sales force
We’ve doubled our paid users every month since we launched Airstory in February. We’re growing.
But is it because we offer a free trial?
Might we grow without a free trial? Might we grow even faster without one?
Here’s what I’ve observed since Feb: cohort analyses show that, every time we demo Airstory’s value to larger groups (which we do weekly in Tutorial Tuesdays), those users convert better than those who don’t see our tutorials. When we private-demo Airstory to business consultants and NYT bestsellers, we hear “I’m sold” and we see them create cards and projects in Airstory day after day, week after week.
Demos help us convert users.
People need to see how Airstory will uniquely improve their unique lives. Maybe they won’t always need to. But today they do.
For all the hype around reciprocity (bah!) and the insistence that every SaaS offer a free trial, I don’t have strong reason to believe that we should keep offering free trials. Or, put in a way that won’t freak out my team, why are we offering a free trial?
The growth opportunity for us is not in letting users try Airstory but in demonstrating to them how it will kill “content pain” in their lives
A free trial of any length puts the burden on the user to integrate our solution into their lives.
But that’s not their job.
Just like it’s not their job to identify what they want, it’s certainly not our user’s job to spend 15 days shoving, cramming and stuffing our solution into their specific problems. Better onboarding might help, but that’s assuming we’ve brought trialists back to the app to go through onboarding, and it’s also assuming our onboarding hits the notes of each user’s unique life, pain and need. So perhaps the better play is education. Better education of our trial users could help with activation, but can any SaaS realistically deliver an education in 15 or 30 days of trial time? — with users having so little on the line given the free-ness of it all?
Seems to me that demos are the cleanest, clearest way for us to showcase to a team 1) how their current solution is sucking the life out of their content team and 2) how Airstory will help them breeze through content creation.
But demos don’t scale well.
And demos are hard AF to get right. (More on this in ze future.)
Regardless, demos let us listen to our prospects and, after listening, share with them the solution to their expressed problems. So it’s not about what they think is the right way (i.e., their current way) — instead, it’s about their pains and how our solution solves that. It’s not about what they think they want as they struggle through a trial; it’s about what they show and tell us they’re struggling with.
Sound familiar?
If customer interviews are the cornerstone of the product development process, they should factor in more heavily in the product sales process, no? That’s our strategy, at least.
