[shoo]

> Your existing users might be good leads, or they might not. At the least they see enough value in your offering to use it for free.

Great point. It is possible that a lot of the existing users only use your service because it is free, perhaps because they simply don't have a budget for paying for any service, or perhaps due to some other reason, e.g. they work for some huge organisation where they may need to fight through a lot of red tape in order to get a new service approved for use and paid for.

In both cases, these could be kinds of users that are difficult to turn customers of a viable business: in the former case, because they won't pay you money, and in the latter case, because they can't pay you money unless you first invest 18 months in an enterprise sales cycle with the hope they sign up to your "call us for pricing" enterprise plan that offers RBAC, integrates with their baroque SSO implementation, and offers support for white label branding (or whatever it is that the various stakeholders deem as mandatory features).

> Talk to [your users] and find out what they think you’re adding, and figure out if that’s something people might pay for.

This is much more actionable and useful advice compared to my speculation!