Charge $10 a month with a 7-day free trial from launch day

David BarnardHow did that go? I know you were charging from the very beginning, which was maybe a little counterintuitive compared to what a lot of venture-backed companies would do, especially at the time in 2021, when money was free and there was still a little bit of a just build it, grow it fast kind of mentality.

Anada LakraMm-hmm. Yeah. The way I think about charging is that ... Especially in the early days, you really want to figure out, who is your customer, who are you building for? Because the tool that you build, although it has a value proposition that could be pretty broad, there will be an ICP that will be your initial target audience that you need to hyper-focus on and make the product better for them before you can think about multiple ICPs. So charging for the product is a way to already figure out who that ICP is. And this way you don't get feedback or worry and get distracted about feedback or usage patterns or issues with people who are just never going to be your ICP, but you can really figure out, who has the willingness to pay? If they have the willingness to pay that generally correlates with, "Okay, this problem clearly resonates with this person. Let's then narrow down and focus on making that person's experiences as great as possible."

David BarnardIt makes a ton of sense. Not everybody does that, but it really does make a ton of sense. How did you structure that? Was it just a standard seven-day free trial to a hard paywall? Did you have any kind of free tier or any kind of free stuff that people could continue doing in the app or was it just pay or leave the app?

Anada LakraAt the time we had a very simple ... I believe $10 a month, that was just the standard paywall. We always had a one-week free trial because we believe that people do need to experience a product before they can commit. We were not trying to stick them with a product and a payment that they regretted. Again, that free trial was still a much stronger signal than just totally ungated. Especially in the YC days, we're not trying to revolutionize the business model. Let's just do the tried and true, just one week trial, simple $10 a month, so that we can focus our energy on actually building a good product experience, building a good onboarding, building the core product. Instead of just having to do a ton of experimentation on the paywall. Obviously that came later.

Anada LakraWe've done a lot of variance on the paywall and the pricing packaging, and today we actually lead with an annual subscription of around $150 a year. And then we also offer a monthly as a fallback option for people who prefer that. And we also have a higher tier that comes with a few additional features, like AI chat, which comes at $200 a year. So we have certainly evolved it, but I still think my philosophy is do optimize the paywall. It's …