[Axsuul]

1. MicroConf, who put together the report, is a conference for bootstrapped founders so naturally the audience that participated was already skewed towards non-VC

2. I believe this trend will continue since there are much more interesting and lucrative problems to solve outside your sphere. My SaaS has nothing to do with what I was doing at the time and came from talking to people outside my industry

3. I'd like to see a comparison of how successful these companies are vs. didn't validate

4. Margins are pretty high in SaaS due to leverage in software. You can likely serve 10 customers with the same cloud costs as serving 100. The only exception here would be if your service was prone to scammers or abuse which would make requiring a CC much more prudent

5. When you're boostrapped (which is where this report is skewed toward), you don't have the time or resources to provide support to non-paying customers. Growth at all costs is not the strategy here

6. I still don't know my visitor -> trial conversion rate because it's not that important to optimize at my current stage. As long as you have a reasonable amount of users trying out your product, it should be enough to grow with. And I'm not dealing with thousands of visitors per month. If you have some traction, you should already have the intuition of what moves the needle like improving the product, making customers happy so you can get word of mouth referrals, reducing churn, building features that visitors keep asking for, etc.

Disclaimer: I run a bootstrapped SaaS @ https://trunkinventory.com

[AlchemistCamp]

> 5. When you're boostrapped (which is where this report is skewed toward), you don't have the time or resources to provide support to non-paying customers.

I'm highly skeptical about this one. Very, very few freemium services actually struggle due to the cost of supporting free users. Unless you're doing something unusually resource intensive or nobody is paying, the infrastructure costs of having free users is usually a rounding error.

I'd estimate that around 99% of people who use the tutorials on my site do so for free, but the only cost I even really notice is for my email provider. Even at 100x the current usage, I'd still be on the same $10/month server.

[Axsuul]

Sorry, I meant customer support costs, not infrastructure costs.

[AlchemistCamp]

How much support to you really need to offer to the free tier, though?

I.e. if you had 10,000 more free users and 10 more paid users, would that be a financial loss? It would be a gain for every product I've worked on.

[Axsuul]

It wouldn't be a financial loss but it can hurt your growth. Free users are a huge distraction since what they ask for can be very different from what paying users ask for.

As a bootstrapped startup, your goal is probably to get to ramen-profitability as soon as possible so you can quit your job and focus on it full-time. You're not gonna get there fast enough by making free users happy. Paying users are what move the needle.

[AlchemistCamp]

Can't you restrict feature voting (or whatever kind of request prioritization) to paying users?

> "your goal is probably to get to ramen-profitability as soon as possible... You're not gonna get there fast enough by making free users happy"

But I already have! Making my free users happy has lead to a portion converting to premium and many more sharing my offerings :D

[Axsuul]

That's awesome! There's no one way to do this so if it's working for you, then keep doing what you're doing. Are you running a B2C startup by any chance?