Give a short free trial that builds a daily habit, then charge

David BarnardThis being kind of the plutonic ideal of monetization, I know a lot of people would love to get to this, but having advised a lot of startups since your time there, I'd imagine you've started to build some kind of ideas around the game theory of what kind of products this works for and what kind of products it doesn't. Any thoughts

Ravi MehtaThere? One of them is that core question of are you free to play? Do you have a limited free trial or are you paid only? I think that's the first question to ask. And free to play works if you have really significant network effects. A limited paid trial works if you can get the person into a habit loop really fast. You've got seven days to get them into that loop of using your product and you want to limit the friction to actually for them to get in and then get that habit loop built that works. If on the other hand, you need someone to be financially committed in order to really adopt your product. I think an interesting example here are gyms, right? You would never want to do a seven day free trial at a gym. Instead you want to charge people up front and now they have both a financial commitment and as well as a personal commitment to go and to use the gym.

Ravi MehtaAnd so I think that's the first question to answer. And then once you've answered that, then you could figure out, okay, where do we start in terms of a subscription? What's the right price point for the first tier? And then for Microtransaction products, I think it's important to understand how does the value that someone get scale with their usage when they get a lot of value from their product, what are they doing more of in order to get that …

David BarnardAnd you mentioned a lot of founders are under monetized. Any specific examples come to mind where you think if you could go in and apply this playbook to their business, you would two or three x their revenue because they're just currently quite under monetized?

Ravi MehtaYeah, I think granola is a good example. So I use Whisper flow and granola every day. Incessantly Whisper Flow had a limited paid trial, they got me into that habit loop. I started using it and then once it came time to pay, it wasn't even a thought. I was like, I have to, I'm using this every day. I need to keep using this versus granola, they have some sort of free tier, which I don't fully understand what the limits are, but I've never paid for the product even though I use it every day.

David BarnardAnd as we were talking, it came to mind. Riverside is a great example of this. I think we are only paying like a hundred or $200 a month for Riverside, but it's so incredibly valuable to what we do with the podcast. It is such a drop in the bucket compared to my time the production team. We send mics to guests. I mean that's a hundred bucks a pop. We're paying them less than we spend in microphones to send to guests. So that's an example of …