The Bootstrap Chronicles

You Had Me at Fifty Bucks

It turns out I have a fifty dollar flinch point for ancillary services. If it’s not core to the delivery of my service, I’m not willing to pay more than fifty bucks a month to get started.

That’s not to say I’m not ever willing to pay more than $50. As the business grows, I’ll happily move into more expensive tiers if I need to. But if I can’t get started for $50 a month or less, I’m going to keep shopping. If I find something that gets the job done for under $50 and has a growth path, I’ll probably never leave, unless your service starts to suck.

Chartbeat, ProtoShare, Unfuddle, Google Apps, even QuickBooks Online Edition and my Bank of America business tool suite … Every single “support” service I’m using that I’ve mentioned since the start of this blog is $50/month or less to get started with a useful-enough feature set to justify signing up.

This became crystal clear to me when doing a feature comparison between UserVoice and Get Satisfaction. The two feedback management services have similar feature sets, but at radically different price points.

The features most important to me are: no ads, ability to skin/brand, ability to CNAME a sub-domain to the service, and Single Sign-On integration capability.

	UserVoice	Get Satisfaction
Ad Free	Tin plan ($19/mo)	Basic plan ($99/mo)
Skinnable	Logo in Tin plan ($19/mo)	Logo in Premium plan ($279/mo)
Domain CNAME	Tin plan ($19/mo)	White label plan ($899/mo)
Single Sign-On	Bronze plan ($89/mo)	Premium plan ($279/mo)

Now, I really wanted Single Sign-On, but was not going to do it for $89/mo. I’d decided I’d just live without that, and deal with it later after an upgrade allowed me access to that feature and the opportunity for some messy and painful conversion/identity sync process.

However, while writing this post, I saw a “For Startups” link on the UserVoice page that gave me a discount code for checking out that gives me the Bronze Plan for 50% off for the first 12 months. 50% off == $44.50 == under $50/month == SOLD.

I know that everyone wants the REVENUE from Enterprise Sales, since that’s where the $10k/month deals come from. But guess what? That’s where your expensive sales team comes from too. There’s no hard evidence that I’m going to want or need to upgrade to “Enterprise” level services, and I’m much more likely to upgrade inside a product I’m already using if/when that time comes. Ignore us bootstrappers at your own risk, folks.

One more note on Get Satisfaction: This blog post didn’t help them. However, I’ll also say that Jason Fried has lost his startup perspective by suggesting that anyone who gives a shit about their customers should build their own support forum/channel. I’ve got my actual product to build, Jason, thank you very much. When I’ve kept it real enough to be raking millions per year like 37 Signals, perhaps I’ll roll my own then. Or, perhaps I won’t, since I clearly will not have needed it when I reach that level of growth without having built my own.

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