[tvbuzz]

From his partner’s blog:

“Once this was done the next step was to get people to choose our product vs the competition. In order to do this we did something that some might consider unethical - we included most of the features that the competitors had and made the app FREE which forced the competitors to go into losses. You cannot build a business by being nice.

Making the app free got us a plethora of users to whom we provided exceptional customer service which lead to them writing 5 star reviews, so even though they were using the app for free, we derived ROI out of them by gently nudging them to write reviews which boosted our ranking and eventually got us to the #1 rank for certain keywords.

This was when something very interesting happened. One of our competitors ran a DDOS attack on our servers. At this point we were getting 5 reviews a day and users congratulating us for our good work but the fact that someone tried to screw us over made it evident that we were on the right track.“

[sireat]

Building from free to paid is quite tricky.

There must have been backlash when going from free to paid product.

I assume the previous users were grandfathered in else those 5 stars would have turned into 1 stars rather quickly.

Also your moat is just as big as the next hungry upstart willing to work for free for 12-18 months.

[grwthckrmstr]

Author here

- we granfathered all users whenever we would change pricing or introduce new plans

- agreed on the point about moat

To be fair, we made a free version of a very basic app in a category in the App store that was stagnating due to lack of competition. example, someone was charging for number of clicks on the button.

We simply changed that and charged for something else instead, like premium button designs, or new features that no competitor offered but users were asking us for it.

Our app was free for about 1 month before we launched paid plans

[tvbuzz]

Congrats on the growth - enjoyed the writing which led me to find your partners blog as well.

DDOS is always a good sign —- would make a great post as well!