What's Your Launch Discount Strategy?
Hello, fellow Indie Hackers! 👋
When you're gearing up to launch a new product, do you offer discounts to early adopters? If so, what strategy do you use - lifetime discounts on subscriptions, LTDs, first month discounts?
What's worked for you?
My current project has been a standalone free tool that's been garnering regular users, traffic, and an email list for a year. Now that the paid version is rolling out, I'm wondering what kind of incentives I should offer to my mailing list in particular.
Guys like Jay @simplisticallysimple are big fans of LTDs but I'm curious if anyone has pursued other discount models with similar success.
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I've seen lifetime discounts on subscriptions work.
"First month free" not so much, that's just a 30-day free trial.
But I'm interested to see what others' experiences have been like!
I'm also thinking of lifetime discounts, as this encourage the early users to never sign off the subscription! Think of HBO-max when they merged, really good package deal that's hard to give up
Lifetime discounts are great, but they have to be substantial (50% off, for example).
You're still building MRR, so it's a good thing.
Better than one-off revenue from LTDs.
I was also live for about a year before adding a paid tier. I had a very loyal user base and I wanted to reward them while also encouraging them to be long-term paid customers.
I decided to offer a perpetual discount of $10 just under 20%) to everyone who signed up within two weeks. Then because of the time it took me to integrate PayPal payments, I extended this by one week.
The results were great in that I went from ~zero income to having about 1,200 subscribers, giving me the confidence to keep going and grow the business.
I never considered lifetime deals seriously. I can see the benefits but it all feels a bit scammy to me - if you believe in your product then people will be happy to pay repeatedly (even more so if you give them early adopter status and a discount).
I also never did free trials but a lot of my site remains free.
Good insight
50% off the first year for the annual plan campaign worked great for me.
We are offering a one-dollar waitlist deal right now for ringly, and for the launch, I think we will go with a discount
$1 waitlist is super clever. Beats asking for donations!
I haven't done discounts at launch for my latest book Kamal Handbook and it worked out well. I am trying rather to give discount on an upsell.