Skylight · B2C · digital family calendars and frames
Test a free trial, with and without asking for a credit card
No extra subscribers; trial takers were people who'd have subscribed anyway
What they did
What happened
- Effort
- One test with two variants; no dedicated growth PM, no iterations
In their words
How Skylight Balances Growth and Profit for Sustainable Success – Michael Segal & Mark Ungerer, Skylight
David BarnardWow. Yeah. That's great. So, what was the biggest fail of the year? The experiment that went off the rails, the product change that pissed a lot of people off. What was the biggest fail of the last year and what'd you learn from it?
Mark UngererI'd go with the free trial test. We tried to do a free trial where we would take a customer's credit card. And we did one with not taking the customer's credit card. So we did both variants and that was not successful in getting us any additional lift. It was more or less the people who opted into the free trial was roughly the same as the people who just would've subscribed. And so, this goes back to our need for a real growth PM to tell us how this should actually work. I'm sure there's an unlock there, but that was unsuccessful.
Michael SegalThat to me is actually a resourcing fail. You can't moonlight growth PMing when you have 5% of your roadmap available to do it, because the first test is going to fail and you need to run eight more. And we didn't have the time to run eight more. So, basically, it was a little bit of a Hail Mary, which is not how you want to be running your efforts.
David BarnardI had the chief product officer of Duolingo on the podcast recently. And it was surprising to me that for them a free trial was super successful, because I mean, your product, it's a freemium product. You're getting to experience so much of the value already. And so, once you've made the decision you purchase, but for them the free trial was super successful. So, maybe there is some way to revisit that experiment and make it work. But it's like …
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- Raise the yearly plan from $39 to $79, not the $99 tests favoredMinimal loss of subscribers or retention; ARR curve 'transformative'; no exact numbers
- Keep old customers on the old price, and honor it for anyone who asksGave up an estimated couple million dollars for goodwill; no measured effect
- Send the device's QR code to an Apple in-app purchase instead of a web checkoutOver 100% more conversions, on a small slice of users
- Knock money off the device when people buy it with the subscriptionMuch higher subscription attach on the own website than on Amazon or in stores; no numbers
- Make every first purchase cover what you paid to get the customerEvery order in company history paid back on day zero; grew without VC money
- Borrow from risk-tolerant lenders at 15-20% to buy holiday inventory, not raise VCStayed bootstrapped and profitable; paid 15-20% a year at times
- Keep what people bought the device for free; charge for new add-ons like meal planningPhotos-on-calendar paywall 'just worked' for years; now some customers want it free
- Don't mark which features are premium once someone has subscribedRenewal rates high even for light users of paid features; no numbers
- Survey customers on whether the product is life-changing, and build to raise that shareAbout 20% say life-changing today; goal is 50%
- Push marketing spend on a new calendar product before the product was goodDidn't work; nearly killed the product; took off only after product fixes in fall 2022
- Sell the device everywhere: your own site, Amazon, Costco and Best BuyCalled very successful; retail acts as a quality stamp, but lowers subscription attach
- Change how you show what's in the subscription bundleRarely moved the share of buyers who subscribe
Tags: free-trial, credit-card-required, no-credit-card