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by wensing 5154 days ago
Maintaining two product lines for two segments is a recipe for lack of focus and serving two masters. In the end you will choose to focus on one at a time and may never do both.
1 comments

it's up to you to define your product line.

nothing is stopping you from just limiting the products.

Normal Accounts? Max 5-20 users.

Enterprise? Unlimited Users

no real difference between the products except for a single value

That's not really the same thing. What you are doing is offering a commodity product at a large discount to larger organizations.

Take MS for example, you can buy Windows for $100 or so a copy or you can take a site license but the product is the same.

For a large enterprise what they need is someone to take that and fashion it into something that fits their needs, this is where consultancy businesses and "Microsoft Partners" come in. They will have a small number of clients for whom they will support the MS products and be the first port of call if anything needs to be changed/fixed etc.

Then MS has a nice side business is selling training and certs to these partners.

We tried to do a hybrid strategy some years ago and it was a disaster. What we tried to do was create a product that could be sold as a basic system for $100 or so and then provide a "custom" version to a handful of companies based on the same codebase.

What we learned very quickly was that these are competing goals, we would get requests from the bigger clients to fundamentally change something about the software to fit their use case which they expected us to do because of the amount they were paying. Of course many of these changes would totally break stuff for anybody else, so the choice was either to build some sort of monstrous configuration system for the product, break it up into modular constituent parts (very hard to do) or just give up on the idea of selling it as a commodity product.

We chose the 3rd option.

It's fine to have two products for different segments within the consumer or business markets, but having one product for consumers and another for businesses is not as simple as changing a single value. Very different customers with different needs, demands, and expectations of your product.
So why differentiate, other than with a value that clearly segments them?

This is not unlike Apple's laptop plan - before it was retired, the plastic unibody 13" macbook and 13" aluminum macbook pro had almost no distinctions to a consumer aside from exterior.