5 Tips To Transition From A Free To A Paid Service

Dave, TeachStreet’s CEO, has a guest post up on TechCrunch today about our transition from a free to a paid service.

Dave calls out the following five tips to make the transition go smoothly:

Give your customers plenty of notice, and give them a (real) chance to comment/contribute feedback.

Price it ‘fairly’ (probably still at a deep discount)

Offer your customers a way to get your product for free

Provide Grandfather’d Pricing for long-time customers, or give them exclusive benefits

Make the transition gradual, if possible — people should only pay if you’re delivering value

He also shares a bunch of details about TeachStreet’s history and evolution - a.k.a. the story of my life. We’ve still got a long ways to go, and certainly don’t have everything figured out yet, but hopefully you can take something away from the article and our experience.

(via daryn)

Being at TeachStreet after launching it’s first city of Seattle, it’s been amazing to see how we’re grown as a company and maneuvered the way we have. It’s really all about the customers in the end, and if we’re able to build a product they care about and brings value — we all win.

daryn