Why we don't offer free trials for our AI Tool contea.ai

Most tool providers think they HAVE TO offer free trials - especially startups because no one knows about or trusts them yet.

So they give their product away for free and take losses for one major objective: #Scale.

Scale is one of the most essential objectives initially (and honestly, it's what we are currently struggling with).

BUT:

The second major objective for early-stage startups is #Validation. Before you go all in, you want to know if you are onto something!

And those two objectives - scale and validation - are contrary and have to be balanced against each other.

Customers who sign up for free will help you scale but are NO validation. They may be curious but don't have any purchase intentions.

You may have 1.000s of free users and believe you are sitting on a pot of gold. But as soon as you switch to a paid version, your scale disappears.

The only validation is money: Are they actually willing to PAY for it? That's why we decided not to offer free trials.

We want to see if our offer is a nice-to-have or must-have. And the only way to figure this out is by making people pay for it.

If you give somebody a free Pizza, they won't complain when it is cold. But they will complain if you serve a cold pizza to a paying customer!

Instead, we offer a 100% money-back guarantee. This way, we have validation and make it easier for curious buyers to purchase.

What is your advice on how to reach scale and validation? Honestly looking for any good advice here!

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Have an opinion on it? Share it under my LinkedIn post!

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Update 16.08.2023 I got a lot of constructive pushback on my post. thats why we decided to launch a free-trial version of contea.ai, limited to a few functionalities. You can check it out under try.contea.ai