Hey everyone, this is my first post. IH seems like an awesome community.
https://projectgroceries.com/
Hey everyone, this is my first post. IH seems like an awesome community.
I'm working on a product targeted at teachers with cooking classes. Not yet profitable, but I plan/hope to be in the next month or so. My question is really about what is the best way to go about doing this.
Let me give you some context first. I began working on this project in 2015 while in high school. The site was only used by teachers at my school until September of 2018 when I began expanding to other schools. Since then I've managed to get 63 schools signed up.
I want to start charging a monthly fee and would really appreciate any tips on how to best go about doing this.
Thanks.
Hello and Welcome!
I think it is awesome that you managed to get 63 schools to sign up. This means that you do provide value to them.
There's only 1 problem, you gave it to them for free. Converting free users into paying users is a difficult problem. Now that sounds bad, but it isn't all that bad.
If you just start charging, most of them will probably be upset. So I would advice against taking that route.
Your product currently offers a certain amount of features and you are probably working on improving that. One scenario would be where the new features go to a new payment plan. IOW, if the schools want to be able to use those extra features you will charge them on a monthly bases.
Another scenario is where you keep the current users at their price of zero dollars and ask them if you can use their feedback for marketing purposes.
This might be an option if your costs to run are low.
It also opens up some negotiating level where you are making it clear that your project is no longer free. However because you love your current users, they can still use it for free.
Yet another option is to sell support. If you spent time on helping out those schools that are getting access to your project for free, then consider offering them a support contract. You can't work for free, not even teachers do that.
Thanks for the response.
Right now I'm torn between whether to not charge current users at all or charge them a discount price. But also I'm not sure what the pricing should be at all.
I was thinking about polling current users and asking them something along the lines of "How much would you be willing to pay to continue using Project Groceries". Maybe the feedback will help me decided whether to charge current users or not.
Any thoughts?
Getting the price right is difficult, no doubt.
Sure you can ask some of your users how much they are willing to pay for it. The question is if they have to pay out of their own pocket or if it comes from a school budget.
Both have their own challenges. I somehow doubt that teachers want to pay much if they have to pay for it themselves.
If it has to come out of the school budget then the teacher would have to be able to convince the school board (or who ever it is that governs the budget at a school) that using your product will help them. In the latter case it might help if you can give the teacher a start list on why they would want to get a paid subscription.
Welcome!
What sort of feedback have you gotten from your first batch of schools that signed up?
Teachers seem to love what I'm working on. Most teachers have told me that they previously had makeshift solutions with excel spreadsheets. That being said, a lot of teachers that use the site aren't very active on the site. This makes sense given that teachers are very busy and also the use case for the site isn't very frequent, weekly at best. But this also makes gauging interest quite a challenge.
That makes sense. Any plans to leverage the current teachers to get some new ones onboarded?
I also recently launched a new side project that makes creating FAQ pages for your website super easy. I think it could be pretty useful for your project! https://frequently.io
This comment was deleted 7 years ago