A Tiny Experiment

Will people pay for your product?

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I will be honest. As we slowly built the billing infrastructure for this product, I wasn’t entirely sure if people would pay for the product.

Sure, Every metric that we’d instrumented said the value proposition was there, but then you know how products with seemingly compelling value propositions fall out of favor once the free-trial is over.

Over the past two years we had nailed down a market need built a functional prototype, and were running an ‘invite-only’ pilot. Our pilot users said they loved it. But did they really?

We’d recruited these pilot users based on very special filters that matched our target market. We “promised” FREE access to the product and in return, asked that they give us their feedback. For Context, this was an IoT Product — so we shipped pilot users

• Hardware for FREE
• a mobile app with limited functionality that they could download and use for FREE
• and a New Software that had premium functionality — also for FREE but for a limited period.