
Show HN: ReleasePage – Better release communication for your software - jivings
Hi HN! I&#x27;m pleased to announce ReleasePage (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;releasepage.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;releasepage.co</a>).<p>We built this app to solve a simple problem we encountered when working on large products; how do we provide a user-friendly list of changes available in each new release? GitHub helpfully provides us with &#x27;GitHub Releases&#x27;, allowing us to track software changes easily, however this is decidedly developer focussed and more than often the repositories are private and these details cannot be shared.<p>ReleasePage allows you to create customised, beautiful webpages to show off your releases and easily share them with your users. It utilises your GitHub releases so that there is no need to duplicate information.<p>We also offer several other conveniences, for instance it&#x27;s common to have several repositories that make up an overall product (we have three core ones that make up our app). ReleasePage can combine your notes for each project into one release. You can see this in action on our own Release Page (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;releases.releasepage.co" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;releases.releasepage.co</a>).<p>We hope that you like our product, and can&#x27;t wait to hear any thoughts and feedback!
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brudgers
[random advice from the internet]

The concern I have is with the pricing and how it positions the product with
the sort of customers that the business probably needs to be sustainable.

1\. The value of the product is anchored to zero dollars.

2\. The high end of the product is <$600/year. That means that landing 100
really good customers is not enough to make the business work. And that also
means that it is not worth the effort to sell to good customers and therefore
it is not worth developing a product that those customers might buy.

3\. Sure there's a $15 plan. Getting to $10k a month for something that might
work as a lifestyle business means retaining about 700 customers which even
with a low churn means more than a thousand sales a day...all while competing
against the company's own free plan..and GitHub...and a developer just making
their own site.

4\. The free plan might provide leads, but it does not provide qualified leads
in the sense that qualified leads are qualified because they are able and
likely to pay. One traditional way that company's try to move unqualified
leads attracted by a free tier to their paid version is by adding 'features'
to the free version that deliberately make it suck over time. The temptation
is always there even though it doesn't work very well even for The New York
Times.

My advice: be fearless with your pricing. The free tier is a way of avoiding
the fact that most people (and possibly everyone) is going to say 'no'. The
middle tier price is a 'recurring credit card charge that hopefully goes
unnoticed'.

The high tier doesn't signal a viable business to customers for whom the
product meets an important business need and therefore suggests it is probably
not worth betting the time and effort to incorporate the product into its
workflow. If eighteen months from now Releasepage is abandoned your customers'
customers will be clicking on a dead link and that will reflect badly on your
customers.

In the end, you want customers who are willing to spend money. Customers who
are always looking to not spend money require tend to be _more_ work and less
patient due to their view of business as a short term zero sum game rather
than long term set of mutually beneficial relationships.

Finally, I'd recommend Patio11's blog and Kalzumeus Podcast

Good luck.

~~~
jivings
Hey, thanks for the advice! Pricing is not something we have a lot of
experience with, so we'll definitely take all that you say on board.

We still need to work out the perfect pricing structure, but as it stands,
once we are out of beta we will not be providing a free plan. I agree with
your sentiment; I don't think offering the product for free gives us any long
term advantages, and risks negatively impacting paying customers.

Thank you for the resources, and for a very valuable comment.

~~~
brudgers
1\. I'm mostly regurgitating Patio11's mantras with my own experience of
trying to sell my services on the basis of saving client's money on the cost
of the services I provide.

2\. When you exit beta and drop the free tier, you are almost certainly going
to create ill-will. A lot of that will be by users who legitimately feel
burned because they invested time and effort in your platform and helped debug
the code. They will feel, not unreasonably, that their trust has been
betrayed.

3\. Beta should be validating the business too. If you can't really charge for
what you're making, it is better to be realistic about that sooner rather than
later. Having a free tier is often a way of pretending that people will pay.
Facebook and Twitter and Google and StackOverflow and Github can be free
because they build on network effects that happen in the real world. I don't
see a similarity in your product.

[http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/26/get-to-no-as-fast-as-
you-c...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/26/get-to-no-as-fast-as-you-can/)

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DTrejo
You'll notice that many companies write an article for each new release with
some feature front-and-center, then they share the article around and it's
like they're launching (again). An example of people using their releases to
drive signups. That seems like the main business outcome of telling people
about a new feature/release.

