Switch from a hard paywall to a free plan

David BarnardSo it's great to hear your biggest win is pushing back against the hard paywall and opening it up to more people to create a bigger opportunity. All right. What has been your biggest fail of the year? Or what fail have you seen with clients that, especially something you could learn from?

Phil CarterWell, I'll stick on the hard paywall versus freemium theme because it doesn't work for everyone. And so the other side of this coin is we had another client we work with where we attempted the shift to freemium and the initial results didn't work at all. We saw more than a 50% reduction in subscriber conversion. And so we very quickly pulled off of it after a couple of weeks, but we learned a lot of really valuable information that I think will inform what I hope will eventually be a successful transition to freemium. When I use this checkers versus chess analogy, what I mean is for the vast majority of apps, hard paywall is the right answer.

Phil CarterIt does convert 5X better. And if you're a bootstrap startup or you're operating with limited outside capital, it's a much more reliable and low risk way of growing your business. But if you want to build a billion dollar or a 10 billion dollar or a hundred billion dollar company, there are a lot of examples of apps like Spotify, Duolingo, Strava that have done that through freemium. And it makes sense because you're just going to attract a much …