Marketing your services to people is a hard task. Doing thework, fine-tuning it, shipping the minimum viable product is fine. Tryconvincing people to try your amazing product, and you will be surprised to seehow many people run the other way.
One way to go about marketing is to build the service orproduct which people want. If your users have already paid for the productwhich hasn’t been produced yet then you win.
Another way is to make a fantastic product after rigorousresearch that there is a target audience. And then give a part of your serviceor some products free of charge. Because that’s the only way, strangers wouldinteract with you.
For example, if your product is physical, then give out somesamples free on launch day. By doing this approach, you are expecting that theproduct is impressive so the people would buy that the next day if they needit. Giving it free is so that they can use it and compare with their needs orexisting product they use.
If you are providing a service, then you can enroll peoplefor a part of your service – free of cost. This way, they can have the taste ofyour service, and if they desire more, they can pay the premium.
Sure, there would be lots of people who would try to keepthe free services forever. But you can provide the free service only for onemonth – that’s enough time to test. So the freeloaders won’t become a headacheimpacting the paid users.
Hence, the approach shouldn’t be free version Vs. Paidversion. Instead, you should mix them to let the users have the feel andprobably pay for your product and/or service.
All this approach is about the strategy about pricing. Thisisn’t an excuse to do sloppy work. Your product or service should beimpeccable, always work in progress. Keep on making the tweaks and improving.It ain’t about how much people you can fool to pay you. It is how much people’slives you can change for good with your offerings.
Your generosity, work and ideas will live on for much longerthan you anticipate. And it will reflect in your humility, approach and care.
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