Making it a no brainer
TL;DR #
Last week I sent out a screencast showing the current state of Branch and announced the kick off of the beta. The beta is going to include a free trial with 100 free builds to try out Branch. Spots will be limited in the beginning, so ping me if you want one.
Learnings #
I learned some very valuable lessons on marketing this past week. It seems so obvious now and I feel a bit stupid for making these mistakes… Probably a good idea to share what I learned!
First of all, after sending out the screencast and mentioning the beta, here’s some of the feedback I got on Twitter and via email:
This made me very excited, but also a little bit too confident.
Some context: At this point I have on-boarded a very small group of people that have paid $99 to join the beta. The $99 is an intentional barrier of entry, intended to filter the most “serious” users. People will be able to apply the $99 as credit when signing up for a paid Branch plan later on. However, I’ve realized now that the $99 up front charge was probably not the best idea. At best, it’s a confusing barrier of entry. At worst, it completely turns off people that are super interested in trying Branch, but are being confused about this weird up front fee of an arbitrary $99. In addition to the charge I also wanted people to schedule an on-boarding call with me (a lot of devs hate this), since the product has barely any on-boarding built in.
Back to the “too confident” part:
I sent out an email to a small group of about 25 people offering them a spot in the beta. This email was way too pushy and just went straight to the point. It included a Calendly link set up to collect the $99 charge. Response? 0… This hurt. I freaked out a little bit. People told me they really wanted to use Branch, but now they didn’t even reply to me?
Lesson learned, I sent out another email later that day to a similar sized group. This email was waaay more casual and basically just said: “Hey are you still interested and what is your use case?”. Response? 8 replies in almost no time… Wow!
The next part is where it gets really embarrassing. I somehow decided to reply to the 8 people WITH ALMOST THE SAME EMAIL AS EMAIL #1!? Response? ZERO. So yeah, not very nice.
It was pretty crushing to be honest.
That blow required a bit of thinking time. Thankfully I’m spending a week working from a co-living space in Spain. I took some long walks by the ocean (🌊) to think about what was going on. It became pretty obvious to me what was wrong (it probably has been to you for a while now): Joining the beta was a really bad deal. Pay $99 for something that’s super early stage, wait for a while, get on a call with a stranger. It’s almost like I didn’t want people to do it…
It needed to be a no brainer instead.
This led me to the decision that very soon Branch will have a free trial. I’m currently working hard to improve the on-boarding and make the product more bullet-proof so I can let some more people in soon - without a ton of entry barriers! Hopefully a free trial will be a no brainer and give people a chance to see how awesome (in all modesty) Branch is. And I won’t have to spend my energy trying to convince people to pay $99, when all they want is to play around with Branch.
Free trial details #
Here’s the gist of the free trial as I’m planning on doing it:
- 100 free builds, starting from the first green build
- Small batch of 10-20 users in the beginning
- No video on-boarding - self service, with email support / Slack support
I hope to begin on-boarding some people next week, if I can get everything ready. If you want a spot, feel free to ping me!