The fallacy of freemium in SaaS - by Bobby Pinero

Deciding to make Equals free was one of the riskiest decisions I’ve made as CEO of Equals. I went into it with a ton of conviction. And I turned out to be wrong. It all started when we launched Equals in April 2022. We made a big splash. Because Equals is a complex product to build and expectations for how a spreadsheet should look and feel are insanely high, we gated access to the product. We wanted to onboard every single customer manually. We wanted to understand their use case. We wanted to establish a close relationship so they’d give us the benefit of the doubt when they inevitably ran into issues. This strategy worked really well. In fact, it worked so well that revenue took off. In just five months, we were able to raise a $16M Series A from one of the best investors in the world – a16z. And then I broke everything. Our pricing at the time was obscure – so obscure we were getting comments like these (there were more, but they've since been deleted). Coming from Intercom – where

Deciding to make Equals free was one of the riskiest decisions I’ve made as CEO of Equals. I went into it with a ton of conviction. And I turned out to be wrong. It all started when we launched Equals in April 2022. We made a big splash. Because Equals is a complex product to build and expectations for how a spreadsheet should look and feel are insanely high, we gated access to the product. We wanted to onboard every single customer manually. We wanted to understand their use case. We wanted to establish a close relationship so they’d give us the benefit of the doubt when they inevitably ran i