> because it would make it hard to start charging again later if we decided it was the wrong decision.

You don't have to tell people it's free. Tell them it's free for the first year, and don't actually charge them for future years. Automatically extend their subscription at 30 days.

Or only charge some people. Or cut them off when it expires, and then extend them 7 days after expiration.

Lots of options if direct revenue isn't super required and you've got room to expirement.

Great suggestions. We've experimented with a free "student pass" (1/4 our users are university students), but it hasn't had a huge impact. This might be because there's some friction involved.

Our current focus is on revamping our freemium structure, so that instead of 2 weeks of unlimited usage and then extremely limited functionality thereafter, it would instead offer indefinite usage on a limited number of websites (it's a browser plugin that enhances text to make it easier/faster to read). Previously we've (not surprisingly) seen a ton of uninstalls at 2 weeks, and with the new structure we're hoping to hang onto more users for the long haul. Some of them would eventually convert, and some would just continue to think about us and recommend to friends. But another side effect is we could increase the number of 'favorite sites' that people get, up to some arbitrarily large number so it's effectively free unlimited usage.

Interestingly, the development that got us to pull the trigger on this change is the manifest v3 transition, which required us to revamp a lot of stuff about our extension so we figured we'd go for it. If this turns out to be a big plus for adoption, I guess we'll be thankful for being forced into the transition?

An idea about the student pass: The friction you mention is probably to provide verification, right? What if you removed that part entirely, and just trusted the user? There would certainly be customers lying about being a student, to use it for free - but you want more consumers to use your product, and after a few years you can still ask them to provide student verification / start paying.

You're nearly there. You've got a large uninstall base because you're giving two weeks unlimited features and then scaling back, but some specific features are "core" to the usage of the product.

Switch the model, after 2 weeks it is limited to 1-3 sites unlimited and anymore requires upgrading.

You'll retain your students who are probably using it for specific sites to summarize papers or class information. Create the habit over a long period and then people will be willing to pay.

If you want a no code/less code approach allow to opt into an extension of 3-6 months if they click cancel.

Assuming COGS are low and the compute cost is on your side and not third party the goal is forming habits and then converting. The goal is not short term 2 week conversions to profit.

Would you like 25% paying after 2 weeks or 25% paying after 2 weeks AND an additional x% paying after 3-6 months?

Or put an "Early Access" label on that product. This will justify about any change that you do later. Fortnite was "Early Access" until 2020, when it had already made an estimated $15 billion (yes, with a "b") in revenue.

Does that work when the product has thousands of paying customers?

No :)

My two cents is that it feels like you've had an answer to an extreme question, but that answer had more extreme questions that needed to be answered like;

- If your company were to suddenly lose all B2C revenue (without the benefit of increasing your rate of adoption), what would happen? Would your company survive? If not, what would need to be done for your company to survive with only B2B revenue? (More sales training? more enterprise features? resource cuts? or more aggressive growth to fulfill client requirements? etc)

- Compared to those things you said you've needed, how important would be the increased rate of adoption from making your B2C free of charge?

High-risk high-return problems are never easy, but I guess asking these different extreme questions lets you find some low hanging fruits to high-returns or get a plan going to make those moves less risky.

You're right, I didn't ask these follow-on questions, probably because it's scary to think about them! The organization would survive either way, but it would feel like a pretty big failure to have nuked B2C revenue and then regretted it. But making business decisions based on emotional considerations probably isn't the wisest way to go.

I guess what I really need is to talk to someone who's had to make this call in the past and get a sense of how scary this should be, and how to know when I've asked all the important follow-on questions. I imagine it's the sort of thing that one gets braver/better at after having just done it once or twice.

You should look for examples of other companies who did something similar and see how that went. I personally have the feeling that giving away free of charge a previously sold B2C spells the end of that product and is a signal that the product is not commercially viable.

Good point. We don't want to signal that it's not viable, since it absolutely is. We just want to figure out if B2C is a better channel for growth than for revenue, as we'd keep the B2C tools running no matter how much revenue the B2B side brings in. We plan on lowering the price as the B2B side ramps up, but the question we're pondering is whether making B2C free (like we were at launch, when we grew very quickly) would massively accelerate B2B uptake. But we would have to be careful not to send the signal that you mention.

Great questions and discussion, thanks!

Answering the last bit: "What about those ideas ... which carry a significant risk, but also could yield a significant reward?"

This is perhaps the key question for developing any strategy. This dilemma is not limited to this one exercise! It's the classic "risk/reward" question.

There's a lot of literature on this, some of which is conflicting (of course!). One common example is "Three Horizon Planning," which (I'm bastardizing it for the sake of simplicity) asks you to separate work/projects/ideas into three "future horizons": H1=running the business, zero-risk stuff you know is useful, selling the same product to the same customers; H2=new products sold to the same customers and market, so more risk but more reward; H3=new products sold into new markets, new customers, so maximum risk but also maximum reward, potentially entirely new business units. So for example, Google optimizing search is H1, Google adding "Diagrams" to the suite that already contains "Docs and Sheets" is H2, and Google launching GCP or buying YouTube is H3. Then the idea is that you should have proportional investment in these areas; for example 70/20/10 on H1/H2/H3. Finally, you want different processes and expectations for each thing, since "stuff we should be able to predict" should not carry the same expectations as "stuff with high variance that we cannot predict."

Another rule of thumb I like is to find bets that are very asymmetric, i.e. the potential upsides are orders of magnitude larger than the potential downsides. The stock market or VC works like this, because the most an investor can lose by buying stock is 100% of the investment, but there is no limit to the upside. If possible, you'd multiply those by the probability that they occur, but in my experience, we're all very bad at knowing the probability. :-) So, maybe not so much about the specific numbers, but the broad notion that one should be _orders of magnitude_ larger, not just a little larger -- that's something which should be apparent even without a lot of analysis.

In any event, this is a great question, and it's important for any strategic thinking, not specifically connected to this exercise.

You could test it by offering free memberships to a limited country or number if people.

How would one limit a free offer to a certain country? We could definitely to a user-limited free pass, but we'd want to have it exposed only to new users, so we don't lose existing recurring revenue.

"We could definitely to a user-limited free pass, but we'd want to have it exposed only to new users, so we don't lose existing recurring revenue."

That sounds like a recipe for alienating loyal customers, if they find out they still have to pay, but everyone new does not. Then they will just cancel their subscription and also become "new users".

Yeah, it could burn a lot of goodwill. The other option is to tell existing customers that we're trying out something new and pausing everyone's subscription for 3 months while we see what kind of growth we can get as a free tool. That would incentivize people to spread the word a lot, and if it does go well then we would feel comfortable cutting off the B2C revenue. But it would be weird messaging to hear from a company, which could just be confusing to people.

> How would one limit a free offer to a certain country?

You could choose a country with a unique language and limit the free version to that language.

Though I'd question a limitation to a single country itself. Cultural aspects do matter, and by doing so you pin down two variables at once, so the results are much harder to interpret.