MBA1931 Why We Launched a Free Plan

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Hey oh. Welcome to the 100 Doll RMBA Show. Powerful business lessons delivered on the daily every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's episode you will learn why we launched a free plan. Just a few days ago, our software business, Webinar Ninja released a brand new plan. A free plan. And in today's lesson I want to share with you why we decided to do this. Before this change, we were offering a 14 day trial, but we learned a lot of interesting things about how our customers are using our app, why they're staying, why they're leaving. Which led us to the decision, hey, maybe we should consider offering a free plan now. This is a big decision for any business freemium in general, offering your product or service or a sample of it for free is a big step because there's costs involved, there's a lot of work to make it happen and of course you gotta serve these people because they are potential customers. So in today's lesson I'm gonna share with you that process. How we did it, why we did it, and what do we look to gain from offering a free plan? What's the business logic or the return on investment we're looking for? Can't wait to get into it. Let's get down to business.

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One of the reasons why I enjoy doing this podcast is that I get to share my own experiences and challenges in building my own business with you so that you can learn from my own experiences, from my own challenges, from my own mistakes. I think it's foolish if I just keep it to myself. So today I'm going to walk you through how we came up with this decision to launch a free plan for Webinar Ninja. One of our goals from day one of starting webinar Ninja back in 2014 was that we wanted to empower creators, coaches, trainers to be able to launch and sell their products, deliver their workshops and retain their customers with live and automated webinars. We want to make it as available to as many people as possible, but we're a self funded company. When we first started out, we just couldn't afford to open up a free plan. There's costs involved when you are giving away your product for free. It costs us money to maintain the servers, to run the streaming of the live videos. We pay for storage and database costs. Of course there's costs of customer service serving these customers even though they're free. No money's coming in, but money's going out. So initially we started with a free 14 day trial. One of the things that we really believe in in our company, Webinar Ninja, is that you need to be close to the customer. So we do as many customer interviews as possible. We talk to our customers, we do surveys, we run webinars. And in that process, what we've learned over the years is that people need more time. 14 days is just not enough for them to evaluate their webinar software to figure out if it's a good fit for them to actually get a webinar up and running with their content and their slides and everything. And know, hey, this is a solution for me. And we would get that feedback in our cancellation feedback. You know, when people cancel their account, we have a process where we collect feedback it's like a survey. When they cancel their account in those surveys, many people would say, you know, I, I didn't use it, or I didn't have a chance to do it, or I needed more time, so I'll be back. So we were faced with the dilemma, okay, we have this free trial where it gives them all the power, all the solutions they need, all the features. But they have 14 days to decide. After the 14 days they will be charged for their plan. So hence they might Cancel before the 14 days so they don't get charged for something they're not sure about yet. Sounds reasonable. So what are the options for us? And let me just tell you that successful businesses don't work alone. We learned that we don't have all the answers. So we reached out to people that do have the answers. We reached out to pricing experts and freemium experts like Patrick Campbell from ProfitWell, who was generous enough to coach us on this. We reached out to Marcus Rivera, who is the founder of PricingIO, who also gave us some really solid advice when it comes to freemium. And what they all said, these experts, is that if you're going to go free plan, understand this is a customer acquisition model and not a pricing model. Meaning you got to see this as sort of like a glorified opt in a way to get really good leads. You're paying for these leads by offering your software. And that's really what product led growth is all about. Giving away your software for a price for you to be able to attract targeted customers. And when I say for a price, I mean the cost that it takes you as a company to offer this free account. So we could have extended the trial to 30 days and gave people more time. But again, we had to consider how much that would cost us if we allowed our user, or free user at this point at trial to use our software at its full capacity for 30 days. So this is one of the things that self funded bootstrap businesses have to consider. They can't just spend money willy nilly. They have to really consider what's going to cost the business versus how much is the money is it going to generate. What we discovered through the interviews and in our research is the biggest pain point with the free trial is time. They want more time. And if they can get that, even if the plan, so to speak, has less features or limitations, it's worth the exchange. Enter webinar Ninja's new free plan. It's a real free plan. It's a plan that allows people to sign up and do unlimited webinars. Of course, we gate a few features for the paid plans and have limitations, but we realize that as long as we give them everything they need to try webinar ninja out as much as they like for as long as they like, then it's going to be worth it, it's going to be a successful decision. The thing is, is that when you're making a big choice, a big change, you're not going to be able to solve all your problems. But what you want to do is focus. What's the big problem you want to solve for your customers and just make sure you do that well. So we went to work on drafting and crafting what this would look like. This is a project that took us over a year to really conceptualize, build and launch. And the reason why we took so much time is because we wanted to make sure that it was a great experience. A free user is treated just like a paid user in terms of the customer service experience, the app experience. They fall in love with the product, and when they want more, they pay for more. We also wanted to make sure that whatever we offer, the higher tiers, the higher paid tiers, that they can still take a look at it, play with it. For example, we have other types of webinars. We have live webinars, automated webinars, series webinars, hybrid webinars. With our free plan, our free users can run as many live webinars as they like. When it comes to the other types of webinars, they'll be able to create these webinars, see what it looked like, and once they upgrade to a paid account, they can publish it. Now, the reason why we did this is because people want to try before they buy. They want to see what the whole experience is like. What is it like to use this feature? Is it worth for me to upgrade to this plan or that plan? And this is why we wanted to allow our free users to use these products. And when they're ready to go, they can upgrade. We also want to make sure all the features they need to use to prepare for a webinar before they actually go live is in the free account. So they can customize their registration pages and their thank you pages, so their landing page builders there. They can customize the email notifications and all the marketing. They can upload all their images and videos and assets. They can create polls and offers and all that kind of stuff. They can publish their live webinar, they can go ahead and invite people and they can run A mini webinar. Yep. That's how we are able to keep the cost of the free plan at a price that we can afford. We can't allow our users to have unlimited webinars for an unlimited amount of time. But what we learned in our research is that what's most important to our customers is being able to try and not pay for as long as possible, longer than 14 days. They want to be able to run as many webinars as possible, so they want to do two or three or four or five webinars to show their colleagues. So where we put the limitation is the actual length of the webinar. And this is quite common in live streaming technology and free plans and all that, because that's where the bulk of the cost lies for us. We are so excited about this because we're going to allow as many people as possible to try our product. It took us some time to get to this point because we want to make sure our product spoke for itself. The onboarding is fantastic. The UI is easy to use, and we've been doing this for seven years, so we really perfected it. Also, not a lot of webinar software offer a free plan. So we're really excited about that as well. Now, this is just the beginning for us in terms of the planning and the work of the free plan. We're going to have to tweak and change things as we go along. As we hear from customers, we also understand that this is our new sales model, Meaning getting free users is one thing, but taking those free users and selling them on the value of webinar ninja inside their account, through the experience they're having so they can upgrade to a paid account is where it's at. So we're really selling twice. We're selling them on the free plan, and then we're selling them to upgrade. So it's going to be an interesting journey ahead. Now, when a business makes a decision like this, it's a risk. And we understand that you're changing how you offer your product. The influx of your customers may change. You might really blow up, and you need a lot of support. And that's why we doubled our support team in the last few months and trained them up to make sure we can handle any kind of volume. It also can affect your sales. So I recommend if you're going to make a change in your pricing, your plans, do it when you're in a good spot in your business, where you have some profitability, where you have some Runway, where you can afford to experiment and take a hit in the short term. But I do want to share with you what those experts that we talked to mentioned to us. The bottom line is that every business is going to move to a freemium model of some sort in the future. It's just a matter of time. So do you want to be ahead of the curve? You want to be able to be first to market and take advantage of this type of marketing because it's a type of marketing you're marketing your product with your product? Or are you going to wait until you're forced to go in that direction and you're kind of behind the eight ball?

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Up today's lesson, it's been a fun journey working with my team working on this new free plan with Webinar Ninja. We tried as much as possible to do all the research and the work and the testing and work it all out to launch a perfect plan for our customers. Or I should say our potential customers. But it's nearly impossible to think of every single thing when you launch something new. So don't beat yourself up. If after you launch, you have to tweak a few things, change a few things, you got a couple things wrong, that's okay. You can't be held back by the fear that you might forget something. It's gonna happen. The important thing is that you're aware of this and you are flexible and open to proving and changing as soon as you release. As soon as you launch. Guys, thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're interested in checking checking out Webinar Ninja and our new free plan, just go to webinar ninja.com and click the Start for Free button. Me and my team would love to hear what you think. Don't forget to hit subscribe on this podcast so you don't miss a beat. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes in business, in order to take the next step, the next leap of growth, you're going to have to take a risk. You're going to have to do something uncomfortable. You're going to have to do something that is different from the competition to stand out. Our free plan was one of those moments for us, and we're hoping for the best. And the good thing about business is that nothing is permanent. You can change, you can reverse things, you can pivot, but you just can't continue to do the same thing and expect different results. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of. Hey, Fidelity. How can I remember to invest every month?

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Huh. That sounds easier than I thought.

You got this?

Yeah, I do.

Now, where did I put my keys?

You will find them where you left them.

Investing involves risk, including risk of loss.

Fidelity Brokerage Services, llc. Member nyse, SIPC.