On Pricing - Agreed. This pricing mostly came out of a bit of nativity on my part. I assumed that wanting to make something accessible meant being really cheap. But we're very quickly realizing that both we won't be able to sustain this price and also that by having this price, we're basically telling people it doesn't work.
The reason why we haven't done too much on pricing quite yet is because it JUST started working as of a few weeks ago. We technically had it working a month and a half ago, but we messed up heavily with the rollout. Due a bug, it involuntarily canceled everyone on Android and then messed up our attempt at grandfathering existing users as "free-forever."
We might try freemium in the future, but at the moment we don't have the resources. In our past experience, freemium products tend to be basically two products where one is trying to sell you on the other. In a purely-paid model, every hour we spend on making a better product directly contributes to keeping the business alive. Since we're so small, we don't have the hours to spend yet.
On branding - This is super true, but when we tried to just say "therapy" or "feel better" people thought we were talk therapy and then got upset that there wasn't any talk therapy. If you say "CBT" the folks that have heard of it LOVE the product and the folks haven't we can explain what it is from a blank slate rather than trying to change any past stigma or misconceptions about therapy.
But this is something we're still not that great at. Figuring out how to do it well will be a lot of our core focus in the coming months. Especially considering our current website is basically a wall of text: https://quirk.fyi
On Stigma - This is exactly what we want to do, but haven't been very good at it yet. If you're reading this, CBT can probably help you, regardless of any specific condition.
> While going from bad mood to good mood is obviously valuable and desirable, so is going from good mood to great mood. But if you make it seem like using the app is effectively self-identifying as 'mentally ill', many folks in the latter camp will be turned off.
That is a REALLY good way of framing it. Holy moly, I'm gonna steal that.
This advice is amazing! Thank you so much! Seriously!
I think the price is great and you should keep it. It's the perfect solution for a teenager who really needs help but doesn't want to talk to anyone about it, and doesn't want to tell their parents.
I feel if something like this could ever be demonstrated to be as good as/almost as good as therapy, it should be run by a foundation with draconian data privacy rules and offered for free to everyone. This "make some programmers a lot of money and suddenly introduce us to a new future where we don't understand any of the implications of our new incentives" model is really getting tiring and often scary.
Some pushback on pricing: this app is a vitamin, not a painkiller. $4/mo is a perfect price for an app I may use daily for years and years with varying levels of engagement. Like Day One (price: $3.99) or TeuxDeux (price: $3/mo), both of which are quite successful.
Charge $10/mo or $20/mo and your churn will increase as people think "haven't used that in weeks, waste of money" and cancel.
Additionally, I think the term 'open-source' and link to GitHub have no place in your marketing materials at this point. You're gunning for the public now, and your support channel is going to be clogged with questions about why open-source does not mean free or how to install from GitHub.
> I think the term 'open-source' and link to GitHub have no place in your marketing materials at this point. You're gunning for the public now, and your support channel is going to be clogged with questions about why open-source does not mean free.
Agreed, basically only using the open source terminology in dev environments like hacker news. So in our screenshots and marketing materials, it's definitely not going to be anywhere.
We've expanded outside of just hacker folks at this point and some folks got really worried about privacy because they thought "open-source" meant that the their thoughts would be shared publicly.
Happy to help! I've been through a similar process on pricing with my startup so I completely understand the difficulty.
Makes sense on freemium--I think it's good to first make sure you can satisfy users at whatever price point is sustainable and then later you can open up the floodgates via freemium when you're ready for the volume.
> I think it's good to first make sure you can satisfy users at whatever price point is sustainable and then later you can open up the floodgates via freemium when you're ready for the volume.
On Pricing - Agreed. This pricing mostly came out of a bit of nativity on my part. I assumed that wanting to make something accessible meant being really cheap. But we're very quickly realizing that both we won't be able to sustain this price and also that by having this price, we're basically telling people it doesn't work.
The reason why we haven't done too much on pricing quite yet is because it JUST started working as of a few weeks ago. We technically had it working a month and a half ago, but we messed up heavily with the rollout. Due a bug, it involuntarily canceled everyone on Android and then messed up our attempt at grandfathering existing users as "free-forever."
We might try freemium in the future, but at the moment we don't have the resources. In our past experience, freemium products tend to be basically two products where one is trying to sell you on the other. In a purely-paid model, every hour we spend on making a better product directly contributes to keeping the business alive. Since we're so small, we don't have the hours to spend yet.
On branding - This is super true, but when we tried to just say "therapy" or "feel better" people thought we were talk therapy and then got upset that there wasn't any talk therapy. If you say "CBT" the folks that have heard of it LOVE the product and the folks haven't we can explain what it is from a blank slate rather than trying to change any past stigma or misconceptions about therapy.
But this is something we're still not that great at. Figuring out how to do it well will be a lot of our core focus in the coming months. Especially considering our current website is basically a wall of text: https://quirk.fyi
On Stigma - This is exactly what we want to do, but haven't been very good at it yet. If you're reading this, CBT can probably help you, regardless of any specific condition.
> While going from bad mood to good mood is obviously valuable and desirable, so is going from good mood to great mood. But if you make it seem like using the app is effectively self-identifying as 'mentally ill', many folks in the latter camp will be turned off.
That is a REALLY good way of framing it. Holy moly, I'm gonna steal that.
This advice is amazing! Thank you so much! Seriously!