Alex and David E, thank you so much for this! Brilliant ideas here.
This is going to hugely helpful as we put more love into premium
plans. I too am curious about others’ thoughts on the idea of counting
pledges as credits toward premium. I actually mentioned that
possibility to Bethany the other day (I’m not sure who first had the
idea but it’s been kicking around a long time – probably originated
on this list) and she recoiled in horror. It is dangerous because it
softens the stingy-ness of derailments.
Hi all,
I was going to link to Patio11’s beloved
The Black Arts of SaaS Pricing. Glad
you
guys are already thinking along those lines.
Reviewing Patrick’s post again, and looking at the plans/pricing as they
are
now, I can’t help but notice a major gap: It’s unclear to me what “Bee
Lite”, “Plan B”, “Beemium”, and “Beekeeper” translate to. Seriously, I’m
baffled.
Patrick’s over there trying to make the point: Segment your customers!
Who
are they and how do they get value from you? What did they come to you
for
and what do they want??
And all I see from these plans is Plan A, B, C, & D. So they’re ordered,
sure, but who are they for? I certainly don’t know which of these
categories
I fit into. In the current scheme or the new one you propose. And
note,
I’ve been a user for months, & read nearly all your blog posts,
discussions
here, FAQs, etc, and still this leaves me confused.
Just throwing this out there, I would imagine segmentation more along
the
lines of:
New Bee: “Dip your toes into world of Beeminder”. (No subscription cost)
The core Beeminder experience. The free plan that new users start off
on.
Basic commitment pledges, a few private goals, & less (than now, even)
things to distract one with.
Worker Bee: “Be even more productive, with less work”. ($10/mo? $20?
idk,
test it!)
“Pro” things like unlimited private Beeminds, custom goals,
auto-ratcheting,
configurable ratcheting, SMS integration, weaselproofing, tips of the
day.
Super Bee: “All the things.” ($35/mo? Dunno)
The fun toys for the true lover of quantified-self. Free
short-circuiting,
unlimited free-bees (for more experimentation), change goal URLs, "fancy
data nerd features like turquoise swath and moving average line (HT Paul
Fenwick) ", “expose more advanced settings”, early access to test out
new
features.
What you currently list as Beekeeper, separate out into a more distinct
product. Don’t confuse it with the plans. Because it’s not really the
same,
right? A human beeing (ha). Fundamentally different from any of the
plans.
Maybe joining the Beekeeper program could include a 30-day trial of
Super
Bee as an additional perk, and then half price on all plans after that.
But
I would try to separate it otherwise from the subscription plans.
Because
you know, one is increased software options, and one is a person that
gives
their time to you. And I’m not sure the two are so directly related.
E.g. I
could see more Free Plan users buying coaching, even though they don’t
need
more software features, but the current ascending list confuses them
away.
Also, I would make it clearer that you’re getting a Beekeeper. The way
it’s
currently written on the Premium Plans page suggests the user is the
Beekeeper. I think it would be more compelling to say “A beekeeper to
take
care of you”. Maybe this is just semantics, yet right now I default to
reading the listing not as “want someone to look after you?” but “want
to
make bees your occupation?”. Subconsciously, it feels like more work.
On a different note, I’m very curious how these premium plans intersect
with
pledge revenue. My hunch is that signing up for premium would cause a
user
to Beemind more things (thank you sunk cost fallacy). Thus more pledge’d
money at stake, and (thus?) more pledged revenue. Does raising the price
of
these plans cause less people to take their relationship to the next
stage,
and then also hurt pledge revenue? In other words, does optimizing
subscription revenue come at a cost of pledge revenue? Of course, I’m
making
too many uninformed assumptions…
Thinking more on this theme, what about using money delivered from
pledges
as credit to spend on the premium plans? Thus avoiding the potential
zero-sum dilemma above. And the user feels a bit less bad financially
when
they fall off the road, because they can still “use” those credits
towards
premium. Maybe they’ll put more money on the line, because “hey, if I
fail,
then at least I can still use it for a premium subscription!” And then
more
New Bees convert to premium status, great! And all the while, Beeminder
Inc
doesn’t lose revenue from this arrangement because the money still gets
charged, and for the most part those premium features have trivial
marginal
cost. It’s just letting the pledged money go farther (get double
“spent”).
Is this too radical? Maybe. Would love to hear others’ opinions on it.
One last thing. Without changing the subject too much, if we’re still
talking about finding more sources of revenue, I would strongly suggest
giving TagTime some love. It seems like there is a seriously great
product
there. And such a perfect complement to what Beeminder already offers.
Why
not bring it into the family more tightly? It clear from reading your
blogs
etc that you guys make such heavy usage of it, but I wonder how many
users
do too? I don’t know! I haven’t even ever been able to get it working
(Windows & iOS – ugh, I know). Yet it seems to hold such promise. If it
was
more of a 1-click install (“Beeminder Desktop”), and offered a
no-bullshit
GUI decoupled from cmd, it could be much more accessible for the average
Beeminder. And seriously improve the value of the whole package for the
user.
— My 02¢. Hope this helps.
On Saturday, July 12, 2014 2:43:26 PM UTC-4, Alex Schell wrote:
In my view you could bundle retroratchet, configurable retroratchet,
and
auto-trimming of safety buffer at the same premium level, or maybe just
move
retroratchet to Bee Lite. These all feel like advanced tools that are
nice
to have but aren’t essential to beeminding. (My guess is that
retroratchet
is relatively rarely used to non-premium users, and that the advanced
retroratchet features wouldn’t be used much by the non-premium user
population even if they could use them.)
Re: private graphs, why not treat these like you do freebees? 2-4 free
secret goals would be reasonable IMO, and this takes care of the
concern
that enforced public goals are a barrier to initial beeminding. If you
do
this, consider not displaying mystery goals in people’s galleries.
Have you thought about offering free trials of premium plans?
On Thursday, July 10, 2014 4:52:02 PM UTC-4, Daniel Reeves wrote:
This is super valuable feedback! Let me quote ourselves from
Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper | Beeminder Blog (under “No Carrots For You”):
Seriously, we are all about the stick. We do not intend to hold
important features as dangling carrots. Premium plans are still an
experiment but we’re committed to keeping the non-premium Beeminder a
highly functional tool for maximizing the awesomeness of humans prone
to procrastination and other forms of akrasia. In fact, the only
things that we’re going to charge for are:
- Features that directly thwart our revenue model, i.e., unlimited
freebees and free short-circuiting (or in the future: choosing the
beneficiary of your commitment contract [1])
- Things that may confuse newbees (we’re not sure yet whether
customizable retroratcheting and auto-ratcheting fall in this
category)
- Goodies that are incidental to the process of beeminding, like
fitness
tips
- Things that cost us money to provide (we may make the SMS bot a
premium feature for this reason)
I hope I didn’t overcommit us with that. I no longer think that “the
free version of Beeminder must be a fully functional anti-akrasia
tool” is an important principle. I might like the idea that anyone
who’s at all serious about Beeminder should be premium, which is
obviously not the case now. In any case, here’s a list of possible
current features to make premium:
- SMS bot (HT dyang)
- Retroratchet
- Take A Break
- fancy data nerd features like turquoise swath and moving average
line (HT Paul Fenwick)
- private graphs
- widgets – beeminder
- weaselproofing
- no-mercy recommit
- auto-quit
- fine print
- supporters
- panic threshold
- goal unit rescaling
And here are potential future premium features:
- choose a beneficiary or at least charity percentage
- zeno SMS (could also think about international SMS, which costs
more and has to be set up for each country in twilio)
- super exclusive google group (maybe akratics anonymous could
become that after moving to discourse?)
- expose more advanced settings
- weasel-immunity (opposite of weaselproofing, where you can
self-service cancel charges and undo recommit)
- expose more advanced settings
- profile badges? (HT dyang)
- early access to new features? (HT dyang)
[1] Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper | Beeminder Blog
On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 12:48 PM, David MacIver da...@drmaciver.com
wrote:
On 10 July 2014 21:36, Daniel Reeves dre...@beeminder.com wrote:
One more item for consideration: What if we added a Fuzzy Buzzy
plan
at $2/mo (less than 7 cents a day!) with the only perk being the
warm
fuzzy feeling of supporting Beeminder (maybe also tips of the day)?
So one problem I think is that honestly the premium plans all mostly
feel
like this anyway.
You’ve built a really good service that I like a lot… the problem
is
that
basically all the things I like are present in the free plan, and
everything
added by the premium plans is pretty uninteresting on top of that.
(OTOH you’ve reminded me that I do like the service enough to
support
it
more than the measly $5/month I was paying, so I’ve upgraded my
account
anyway)
Obviously this is massive backseat driving and you should feel free
to
ignore everything I say, especially as I have literally no idea what
your
user patterns look like, but I rather feel like you might be better
off
removing functionality from the free plan into the bee lite plan
than
raising the prices on the premium ones.
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