
Paying Users Are Your Nicest Users - MicahWedemeyer
http://agileleague.com/2012/08/paying-users-are-your-nicest-users/
======
patio11
You wouldn't expect D&D players to have much psychological overlap with
elementary school English teachers, but in this regard _they totally do_. And
this gets repeated over and over and over again in the experience of a lot of
companies, B2B and B2C alike. It's like the iron law of customer support: non-
paying users consume the most support for the worst reasons and constitute the
overwhelming majority of abuse of the support staff. There's a quantum leap
getting even to $1, and after that, you tend to see a less-dramatic-but-still-
remarkable increase in general satisfaction, decrease in customer-has-unique-
understanding-of-how-reality-operates, and decrease in abusiveness as price
paid increases.

~~~
glimcat
I'm thinking that some monkey software buried in the human psyche is
interpreting giving someone money as an act of submission, while another bit
is assuming that free is a promise of all-you-can-eat and thereafter
interprets limits to that as cheating.

Someone with actual professional psychology experience could probably shoot
that full of holes.

~~~
twiceaday
Are you implying that a person behaves differently whether they paid or not? I
would instead guess that paid apps attract a generally nicer subset of people.

~~~
dllthomas
Both seem reasonably plausible - can we get some empirical data?

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mootothemax
One of the reasons I recently shut down a free tool was due to the frankly
horrific comments I received from users if it didn't work just exactly as they
expected. Whilst it _did_ worked, and I probably could have explained things a
bit more clearly, I don't understand the mentality of users sending messages
like "WHY THE [nsfw filter] ISN'T THIS WORKING YOU [nsfw filter]? I HOPE YOU
DIE." They put me off checking emails for that account, and Twitter via
TweetDeck as a whole.

None of my other - paid with no free option - services suffers from this,
despite similar numbers of users trying them out. In fact, I don't think I've
_once_ received an email with a swearword in it from one of the paid tools,
whether from users on the free trial or fully paid-up.

~~~
doktrin
_One of the reasons I recently shut down a free tool was due to the frankly
horrific comments I received from users if it didn't work just exactly as they
expected. Whilst it did worked, and I probably could have explained things a
bit more clearly, I don't understand the mentality of users sending messages
like "WHY THE [nsfw filter] ISN'T THIS WORKING YOU [nsfw filter]? I HOPE YOU
DIE." They put me off checking emails for that account, and Twitter via
TweetDeck as a whole._

This is horrifying, and only further dissuades me from ever pursuing a venture
built around the freemium model.

Frankly, I'm not a fan of it as a concept to begin with. The fact that it
contributes to the mis-guided sense of entitlement of (in the words of Louis
CK) non-contributing zeros only adds insult to injury.

~~~
mootothemax
_This is horrifying, and only further dissuades me from ever pursuing a
venture built around the freemium model._

Heh, to be fair it's not all doom and gloom, I can't see how so many people
would offer it if it was. Even with the paid tools, you will still receive the
occasional bewildering email, such as this gem which arrived over the weekend:

 _Dang!! I love this app sooooo much. I thought it was free. Until i looked
over and saw it was only a trial. I'm no longer using this site until it
becomes free_

Sigh.

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silverbax88
This has always been my experience. I will go even further in my retail
outlets - my worst customers are the ones who 'think' they spent a lot. But my
best customers - by far - were the ones who can walk in and write a $64,000
check on a Wednesday, and any Wednesday after that. Those customers account
for 90% of my business and are almost no hassle.

~~~
vecinu
I don't think I understand your $64,000 example. Are you being sarcastic or
are there actually people who spend that much money week by week?

~~~
silverbax88
There are people who spend that much week to week. This is dependent on a
specific type of retail - our average sale in these stores is $30. But some
customers can spend $50k or more in one visit. And those customers are the
easiest to deal with - very few complaints, no arrogance, easy to please.

~~~
BryanB55
That is quite a gap... Average sale $30, but people spend $50,0000?

~~~
silverbax88
Yes. That's the difference between the people who try to bully a clerk and
claim they are a big spender and someone who is actually a big spender. There
are lots of people who think they spend a lot of money and that it affords
them special privileges. But the people who think that have no idea that the
scruffy guy in jeans and sneakers standing next to them is about to drop cash
like that.

I think about this when I go to a trendy place like Buckhead in Atlanta. There
are some big money players walking around - but they generally aren't the
young people who look like a million bucks and look like they are loaded.
Those people are broke.

But, I digress.

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IanDrake
I was running a product with a freemium model for a while and I can say
without a doubt that this is true.

~~~
boomzilla
Of course, if you add value for the users or solve their pain point, they will
be willing to pay. I personally think that one month free trial model is
better than freemium. It sets the users' expectation from the beginning. I
always thought Freemium is sort of sleazy.

~~~
aidos
Can you explain how you find freemium to be a sleazy model? That's a genuine
question - I run a freemium service and I'd hate for there to be a perception
that we were in any way sleazy.

~~~
doktrin
Intuitively, we know it's fairly rare for _something_ to be provided for
_nothing_. Therefore, it's often assumed that the business model of freemium
ventures is either :

1) purely ad-supported (increasingly difficult, imho)

2) generating (at least some) revenue by harvesting user data

3) running at a loss with the _goal_ of being acquired as soon as feasibly
possible

2 & 3 specifically could in various contexts be viewed as sleazy. This isn't
my personal indictment, but they do represent views I've heard bandied about
on a semi-consistent basis.

~~~
aytekin
What you are describing is the "free" services, not "freemium" services.

Freemium means trialing a product based on usage as opposed to trialing it
based on time. Once your usage goes over a threshold you are an active user
and you start paying for the service.

That's our model on JotForm and it works well for us.

One of the best examples of this model is evernote. I remember they were
saying something like if the users stays active on their product for n months,
they will almost certainly become a premium user.

------
danielweber
At a start-up many years ago, one of our principals gave a free copy of our
($1000 and up, Windows-only) software to a colleague, a college professor.

College professor tossed it to a grad student, who proceeded to install it on
a virtual computer instead of an actual PC. Virtual computers were _very rare_
in these days. The student then complained to us that the software wasn't
working right in their emulator. And why didn't we say that our software
required a serial port (which was impossible to _not_ have on a PC in those
days) in our requirements list?

Give a man a fish and he'll bitch at you it's the wrong one.

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atruepoint
At one point it says, "Asking for payment does not fundamentally change your
relationship with your users" but I'm not sure I agree with that. Asking for
payment DOES change the relationship, but it changes it for the better--there
is a more equitable sense of trade or exchange, where both parties feel as
though their contributions are valued.

------
xiaoma
If I pay a LOT for something and get poor results, I'll be pretty critical.

If something is cheap I don't expect much of it.

If something is free, then my instinct is to focus on the cost of my _time_ ,
which in many cases makes me demanding.

A perfect example of this would be Facebook. If it suddenly ate of my photos I
would be _furious_ because of all the time I'd spent tagging them. Similarly,
I haven't really used Reddit since 2007 due to the fact that it once tricked
me into wasting a lot of time writing comments that were invisible to everyone
but me. Even thinking about it now I'm angry. Money is money, but time is the
stuff my _life_ is made of!

<http://toshuo.com/2007/reddit-deceived-me/>

On the other hand, if my $20 Nokia phonosaurus died, I wouldn't exactly be
broken up about it.

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kinleyd
It's nice to know that this has been your experience. It's possible that
paying users have generally become paying users only after more careful
evaluation of a product, and hence are already pretty satisfied users. That
would explain some of the niceness.

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Fargren
Wouldn't it be reasonable/acceptable to deny support to those that use
expletives when asking for it? Assuming you forewarn in your contact form or
in your terms. Specially for non-paying users. Those people are not going to
be paying for the product anyway, they probably wouldn't be insulting it/it's
developers otherwise.

~~~
mootothemax
_Wouldn't it be reasonable/acceptable to deny support to those that use
expletives when asking for it?_

I have a pretty thick skin, but after a while it is _tiresome_ to receive such
emails. Draining, boring and tiresome. I wouldn't offer support to any user
who wrote such an email, but the bigger problem was having to read their filth
in the first place.

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slantyyz
I would go a little further if you're an app store seller that the higher the
price you charge, the more reasonable your customers are. Case in point -
Sparrow ($2 on iOS and $10 on Mac -- inexpensive for each category) generated
a huge uproar when Google bought them.

~~~
twodayslate
I disagree with your Sparrow example. People were upset that Sparrow was
ceasing development after having a sale one week before it was announced that
they were bought by Google. That is just bad practice on Sparrow's part.

For myself, if I pay for an app I expect a lot more from that app. I expect a
quality apps with updates and support. There was an article I read (can't find
it now) that a developer said he doesn't do payware due to the fact that he
doesn't want to give support.

I have no problems with free apps ceasing development - they were free! It
would be nice if they released the source code though so someone else could
take charge of the app.

~~~
Retric
That seems like an unreasonable expectation for 2$.

~~~
jasonlotito
If $2 for an update is unreasonable, maybe they should have charged more?

~~~
Retric
"For myself, if I pay for an app I expect a lot more from that app. I expect a
quality apps with updates _and support"_

So pay 2$ and get updates for free.

~~~
jasonlotito
Oh, you are one of those "Well, actually" people. Gotcha. I can do this.

> So pay 2$ and get updates for free.

No, that's not what he said. He said he expects update and support. He didn't
say that those updates and support should be free. Merely that updates and
support is available. It's akin to paying for anything, really. I expect if I
pay for a computer, for example, that they make available to me updates and
support.

So let's not play the "Well, actually..." game, and discuss things like an
intelligent adult.

And, even if he did mean that he expects updates and support for free for the
rest of his life, does that really warrant a response or consideration?

------
dotcoma
no doubt.

