[mrborgen]

Charge for our product.

I'm the founder of Scrimba.com, an interactive code-learning platform. We went almost two years from when we launched our very first free course until we launched our very first paid course. In the meanwhile, we planned the "perfect" business model and also pivoted to a Teams-based product for a while.

Had I just dared to put up a pricing wall in front of our second course instead, we'd have gotten the signal we needed from the market much earlier. Once we started getting revenue, everything else became a lot easier (what to invest more in, which courses to prioritise, what to do in general).

[superasn]

Sometimes the free product helps you get traction during the initial hard phase of your business when nobody knows your name.

A lot of businesses do this as a growing strategy so don't fully discount the backlinks, leads, social media it gave you.

[rmbyrro]

Freemium can work, but without VC it's really hard to sustain.

For bootstrappers and small ventures, I'd rather spend the free subsidy in ads. If you do it right, it just works.

I hate ads, but they work.

[rozenmd]

I learned this lesson the hard way - 11 months of freemium, decided to add a trial because "why not?" - now something like 95% of new users choose the trial of the Pro plan, instead of the free tier.

[rmbyrro]

Nice! Mind if I ask whether it improved conversion to paid and what was the impact to your CAC?

[athenot]

On a side-note, thank you very much for creating and releasing Imba! It's a joy to write apps with it and I can put things out so much faster.

https://imba.io

[mrborgen]

Awesome to hear that you're using Imba! It's my co-founder Sindre who has created it, not me. But please share whatever you're building with us (e.g. via Twitter or Discord), as we love seeing people use it to build stuff :)

[Charlieholtz]

Awesome. I’m a huge Scrimba fan and have referred a bunch of friends. Great work

[mrborgen]

Thank you so much! That kind of word-of-mouth is the reason we’ve been able to grow without raising a ton of money .

[doitLP]

I love your platform and I will happily pay for my next course there!