How can I give a high-tech product out for free?

[Callum Short]

I run getbeambox.com - We already have 70 customers and an 80% upgrade rate. Our full plan charges @ £37.50 and we connect over a thousand people to the internet every week. The product is a hotspot solution which taps into a businesses (cafe/bar/pub) existing traffic to harvest marketable data, it also provides a suite of marketing automation and social growth tools. That's the quick and very unsexy way to explain it.

It's an all you can eat market. We have a 75,000 APC in the U.K with an estimated 8,000,000 APC globally. Our best route to market domination is to think like mobsters. We're lean in our expenses and R&D with minimal overhead, we also can't be competed with on hardware hard-costs or recurring expenses.

In other words, I want to figure out a highly effective way to give this product out for free in volume. By doing so we accumulate territory and block our competition from poaching potential customers. We can then very easily up-sell features and capacity, with only a low conversion rate required to make this very lucrative.

So far I've tested out direct emailing, with a charitable incentive attached to it (See: https://getbeambox.com/practicalaction) - The problem however is that most people think it is too good to be true and don't bite. It's rather frustrating.

This is where I always come when I need to brainstorm, so I'm hoping you guys can help me out in coming up with some ideas to experiment with. I will report back with all results in the hope that some value can be returned to the thread.

 

[lion1978]

The first thing that comes to my mind is actually on the backend with the apps that it integrates with, earning affiliate revenue through that end.

also You could give it out to them for free for a specified period of time like 3 months or something, then if they dont decide to proceed you just come and collect it still free of charge, if they do deciede to keep it great then they upgrade.
Then the ones that are not converting, by the current rate 20%, you donate to things like local libraries or something just to get a bit of poblicity for cheap and or you still donate it but with a small ad or something.

 

[Potatoe]

My first thought, if they see the benefits and the monthly price and think "This must be too good to be true..." Is to raise the price.

 

[builder007]

you can always make videos for youtube/vimeo/social media of people benefiting from your product.
1. Present problem/frustrations
2. Introduce solution
3. show satisfaction or problem resolution

 

[miketpowell]

Soon as you start giving it away for free people will equate that to it's worth - I'd very much suggest against it. 2 key things can happen that will really screw you:

1. Free people won't upgrade, your 80% upgrade rate for paying customers isn't an applicable number for free people.

2. Once you give it away for free no one will want to pay for it ever again.

Giving it away for free isn't going to cement your market share. A competitor with the right pitch will come in and sell them something using the pitch, "If it was free how good can it be? Ours costs money so is obviously better." People throw free stuff out pretty easily.

I'd suggest you do 90 day money back policy kind of thing and offer 12-24 month 0% financing. You'd be surprised how many small businesses never have money on hand and just need to finance anything over $100.

Also push your current clients for referrals. Small business owners know other small business owners.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Not to harp on what's being said, but I would definitely raise your price and charge some kind of installation fee as well. You'll save a ton of time dealing with tire-kickers. I'd weed them out immediately by getting rid of any notion of free or cheap.

Then you'd also have increased income to spend on marketing. So instead of casting out a ton of lines with "free meat" on the hooks, you can raise awareness of your product while continuing to further weed out nonsense.

Some of these approaches like money back guarantees and trials are for crowded markets. I get too that you're wanting to gain territory first to block people out, but if you think about it, you're already fighting with price as your weapon against people who aren't your competitors yet. The last thing you want to do is fight with price because it lowers perception of value and hurts everyone in the market.

I'd might extend some super favor like you're doing to very specific businesses that can offer you incredible and prestigious testimonials and enough data to improve your software, and then use that for further marketing.

Free shouldn't be in anyone's vocabulary that wants to build serious wealth. If I was even thinking about doing free, I'd do it like those "As Seen on TV" guys. "Buy 2 and get the 3rd free" and then I'd double my cost so while they think they're getting something for free, they're actually paying more.

Pricing is one of your main ways of communicating value.

 

[contract]

IWe already have 70 customers

I am literally amazed that # isn't 7,000 right now. (Paying)

It should be.

I'll speak up on the reality. It pains me to say this.

July 2015 - July 2016 = A full year to acquire 70 customers.

You can attend an auto convention and sign up a 100 dealers in a single day. Or walk a downtown bar block and sign up 50. Both of those things are FREE. What I mentioned a year ago hasn't changed.

All it requires is a salesman.

I signed up xxx new customers on custom pet food trials, at roughly $50 a shipment rebill, simply by putting a booth at a local dog event and talking to people. These people have been feeding their pets the same brand for years, and I broke their habits. That's not even impressive.

Your product is brilliant, it's hot, but you have a major sales problem.

You need to hire people who know how to sell, to do it in person.

"Direct emailing" > Brick and mortar businesses ignored email for the longest time before adapting. The same is true for social media. The LAST thing they want to do is be sold over email. Esp. on a DIGITAL focused product.

Get off the computer, start walking in the doors of these businesses or hire someone to do it for you.

....

I gave the same advice to a friend of mine with a similar product about year ago.

Digital > Brick and mortar. He's never worked a day in his LIFE in that specific local niche.

He's killing it right now because he's been active. He got involved in the industry, met business owners, did interviews, stopped by stores, went to the conferences to pitch, etc.

Now he's running full steam ahead with a $1M investment to boot.

No excuses.

 

[Callum Short]

I am literally amazed that # isn't 7,000 right now. (Paying)

It should be.

I'll speak up on the reality. It pains me to say this.

July 2015 - July 2016 = A full year to acquire 70 customers.

You can attend an auto convention and sign up a 100 dealers in a single day. Or walk a downtown bar block and sign up 50. Both of those things are FREE. What I mentioned a year ago hasn't changed.

All it requires is a salesman.

I signed up xxx new customers on custom pet food trials, at roughly $50 a shipment rebill, simply by putting a booth at a local dog event and talking to people. These people have been feeding their pets the same brand for years, and I broke their habits. That's not even impressive.

Your product is brilliant, it's hot, but you have a major sales problem.

You need to hire people who know how to sell, to do it in person.

"Direct emailing" > Brick and mortar businesses ignored email for the longest time before adapting. The same is true for social media. The LAST thing they want to do is be sold over email. Esp. on a DIGITAL focused product.

Get off the computer, start walking in the doors of these businesses or hire someone to do it for you.

....

I gave the same advice to a friend of mine with a similar product about year ago.

Digital > Brick and mortar. He's never worked a day in his LIFE in that specific local niche.

He's killing it right now because he's been active. He got involved in the industry, met business owners, did interviews, stopped by stores, went to the conferences to pitch, etc.

Now he's running full steam ahead with a $1M investment to boot.

No excuses.

I couldn't agree more with everything you have said. It was my mission from the get-go to stay lean and equity rich, so that down the line I could leverage investment more effectively. But there's a difference between being lean and under-staffed. We are under-staffed.

The main issue I had was in product stability. We're a wireless startup, wireless is shit with big companies, so with a 19 year old kid being a one man product dev it introduced a whole new set of difficulties. I didn't want to enter hyper-growth with a terrible churn rate and higher support over-head because hardware wasn't performing.

I also think there was a subconscious barrier stopping me from moving forward. Sales runs in my family and is what I want to be excellent at, sales is the only reason I can code. I wanted to lead the sales and I think that delayed me because I was always thinking "Just one more month of product dev and then I'll put everything into sales".

The first time I read your message I got frustrated and closed the screen. I read it again for another 2 days because I knew you were right and had to get that perspective engrained into my head.

In the last 2 months I've taken on a co-founder with a lifetime of experience being a sales manager and trainer. We've hit a 1% paid conversion rate on cold emails (take in mind the hospitality industry is difficult like no other) and have used an in-hour tool to aggregate data on businesses at a high volume.

Currently, we're doing a 30 day snap-shot of our sales pipeline to get solid and factual numbers. I've received £20,000 commitment from 2 different investors + a £10,000 startup loan which will be easily justifier given our current monthly profit.

On the 1st of september I work only a few hours a day, 4 days a week. 4 days later our snapshot ends. Straight away I will be committing all of my free time in business hours to sales, my sales guy will be acquiring 30 customers a month base and I will be taking on the investment to hire an office and 2 sales guys. Over the next 10 months we will hit 500 customers minimum and raise funds to create a big team in anticipation of series A fundraising.

 

[flaw3d]

These guys have some cool shit you might be interested in doing yourself http://www.hotspotsystem.com/free-hotspot-social

 

[luxer]

The first thought that jumps into my head is bribe some tech bloggers. Send them freebies and tell them you expect nothing in return. Human psychology 101 we feel a need to reciprocate when people give us gifts. Even more so when they tell us we can't repay them.

The hare krishna were famous for doing this with their books or even a flower. They would approach people in airports with their free flower or books. It got so prevalent that the security would remove them on sight, they then started dressing up as business travellers in order to continue and then solicit donations. But I digress.

Bribe some people with influence in the industry!