>1m emails processed, 1.8k users, 220 MAU, 0 conversions: ideas please?

Hey IH,

I built InboxesApp.com, a chrome extension which gives you long lasting disposable emails right in your browser. It's a great tool I wanted for myself and use regularily and it seems others do too. I'm now at the point where I want to try make this project at least a little bit profitable.

I added Paddle payments a while back to charge for additional features such as using your own custom domain, more email addresses, and getting your own US based SMS phone number for £29/year. I'd hoped a few users would convert, however this is not the case.

My Mixpanel analytics tell me that people are clicking the sms nav button, with fewer clicking the add domain button hidden away in settings, which both then show an upgrade page, so there's clearly some interest.

Is this more a case of finding the correct pricing point? Are the features not attractive enough? Is the free tier too generous? Do people just not want to pay for disposable email (my current theory).

I suppose the best thing to do here is to talk to customers/google forms and straight up ask what users think?

PatrickS

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on June 9, 2023

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IMHO, I believe the free tier is waaaay too generous.

It gives "Three addresses a day" and "15 day email retention". Let's brake it down.

The way I would personally use this product is for those times where I wanna sign up somewhere but that 'somewhere' is not that important to me. So I won't use my regular email address. Everything obvious so far. But in a real life scenario, how many times a day would I, a regular average Joe, sign up somewhere? Once? Maybe twice?

So my feedback is, your free tier is literally enough for all of your users.

I would work on creating a much larger disparity between the two tiers.

The free one should be less generous and the paid one should be:
1. more expensive (people are buying things that are more expensive as they believe higher price = higher value -- which you should provide, btw, which is point 2)
2. while setting a higher price, provide more features to actually justify it.
Just my opinion, good luck!
RusuTraianCristian

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a year ago
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  Thanks for the reality check of the free tier being too generous; I think there's part of me that's slightly worried to reduce its usefulness and impede growth given it's still a fairly small userbase. I can definitely test reducing it to 1/day and pushing to upgrade page after that.
  
  PatrickS
  
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  a year ago
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    I agree with @RusuTraianCristian
    I gave exactly the same advice to my client recently and he's starting to see his MRR climb up after long months of stagnation. If you ever get stuck at anything else re: your project's growth, consider my package exactly for solopreneurs like yourself: https://www.experimenterra.com/
    
    Best of luck Patrick!
    
    justi_cg
    
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    a year ago
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I've faced this issue in past (and I guess everybody has) and the simple trick I used was to keep a separate email address just for spam sites that force sign in.

What is the additional benefit that people like me will receive by paying for it?

Subro

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a year ago
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I actually find the product, pricing and offering as a whole very reasonable. I am not US based, so the US SMS number would not be ideal - but the whole thing looks right to me.

What is the conversion trigger here? Is it email retention? Number of emails? Domain name? Have you asked your current users what would make them convert? Do you have a dominant competitor already offering the kitchen sink for free?

Also, do you think that new-ish Apple's hide-your-email-initiative have worked against you?

ditlev

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a year ago
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Maybe try to limit the free tier and eliminate it and see if users convert? Then you can see the value of your product. Also, when you launched it, how did you get your first few users? Did you run ads or already have an audience or something else?

steelblad3r7

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a year ago
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  Yeah, might try tweak my marketing message down to 1 address a day and see if that converts, though I suspect it won’t. Really don’t want to resort to ads.
  
  I grew it and continue to with SEO and then improved conversions using a/b tests. It’s taken a long time, but it’s paying off.
  
  PatrickS
  
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  a year ago
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My 2 cents:
- The value equation is not there. Imho, people who use free emails don’t use it that frequently to justify a monthly subscription;
- The free offer is too good. You basically are giving more than what people need and not even asking people to watch some ads. Too good.
What you could do:
- $10 to have 100 disposable emails. First 3 are free, then pay or watch a ton of ads. The idea here is to get people to pay on impulse, when they need.
- If you had programmatic access (a Python API for example), I would happily pay. (But that’s another product.)
Here’s what I really would do:
1. I would keep the product for free, just to gather intelligence, i.e. monitor which websites people are looking to register using temporary email. They will be your customers.
2. I would create a crawler to discover the email domains for the main disposable email platforms available and which of them work for the websites you discovered in (1)
3. I would approach the websites discovered in (1) and sell the report of which disposable email platforms are being used to bypass their freemium model, so that they can ban them. And for that I would charge way more than £2.5/mo :)
“Invert, always invert.”
https://jamesclear.com/inversion
CarlosSouza

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a year ago
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