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by timjones 2032 days ago
Hey HN! Author here.

I know there are tons of readers out there with more SaaS sales experience than me (which is none...).

See any major flaws with my strategy? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

3 comments

If you have such a low price with a land and expand strategy, sell your subscription only on a yearly basis and provide a long trial of 60-90 days or more so there is enough time for asymptomatic incubation and infection to coworkers.

The fewer options you provide for subscription, the better. You want your B2B customers to have a simple yes/no decision process.

Thanks for the thoughts! I agree, and was thinking something along these lines as well.

I'm leaning towards having a permanent free tier with a low seat limit.

On billing, I'll definitely have an annual subscription option. From interviews I found that, in some cases, team leads will have to file expense reports and doing it monthly would be too tedious.

I'll have to think through offering quarterly and semi-annual plans. My gut feel is that it'd be too much complexity to have 3-4 options.

Consider also a "true-up" model where buyers can exceed their user quota on your platform until their subscription is set to renew. Then perhaps you can catch the big multi-team renewals due to inertia, as well as catching back-pay for the months they were over subscribed?
Interesting. So if their 12-month plan allows for 100 seats, and they grow to 150 seats during those 12 months, then for month 13 they would:

1. Pay a pro-rated amount for exceeding the seat limit during the first 12 months.

2. Pay the 12-month contract rate for 150 seats (or maybe more if they expect to continue to grow)

Is this a common practice?

I have no relevant experience, but I felt I should note that I would be extremely offended by being billed retroactively.

Hopefully you would provide some notification at the time they exceed their limit.

I second this. Instead of billing retroactively, consider just not billing for the extra seats during that period. Maybe notify the user that they've entered a grace period for this billing cycle, but starting next cycle they can expect to get charged for the extra seats.
The usual flaw with trying to make a bundle selling better mouse traps is that there is less demand than expected for said mouse traps. And the creator's idea of what is desired seldom matches the consumer's.

This is why the important thing is getting an MVP into the hands of users, then iterating.

Agreed. Everything sounds like a great idea when the only thing challenging it is your own thoughts.
Explain your customer support funnel.
1. Customers email me.

2. I fix their issues and answer their questions as quickly as possible.

3. I email them back.

I'll develop processes when this starts to break down or take too much of my time.