We’re constantly seeking ways to get better insight into what our users want via implicit and explicit feedback. We’ve been running an interesting experiment for several months now where we’ve been presenting hypothetical paid plans to new users and seeing how they’re received. We actually did a talk on this subject at this year’s AZ Entrepreneurship Conference and I was hoping to be able to post that video but given an immediate deadline for a startup challenge that we’re applying for, I’m going to jump the gun and do a quick overview here.

We’re planning to share all the data and methodology from this experimentation but for now check out the presentation I gave last week for the Kauffman Foundation Fastrac class in Gilbert, AZ:

These slides were designed to be visual aides so it’s sparse as a standalone preso and a bit disorienting (although Prezi crushes PPT). If you get past the motion sickness and lack of text, there are some really interesting data slides 15 clicks in that show how we’re using Kiss Metrics and Optimizely to “ghost-sell” our paid plans. The core essence of this technique is this:

We’re not actually charging for our service at this point – we’re strictly in a learning phase. We want to get a solid understanding of what musicians find valuable enough to pay for. Currently on the second step of signup (after you record a song but before you save) we present new users with a choice of various plans including some which are paid and one that’s free. If they choose a free plan we ask an additional question to gauge whether they would ever pay for it and if so, under what conditions. We’re simultaneously A/B testing multiple versions of the signup page to dial-in things like features, pricing, messaging and presentation. We log the plan signups and track all these variables to identify what people are most receptive to and unearth patterns.

Kiss Metrics provides an easy way to track the breakdown of plan types by source and Optimizely gives us a friction-less way to A/B test different aspects of the plans. And the survey gives us free-form input from users so we can learn more about what might compel musicians to pay. This combination of quantitative implicit and qualitative explicit feedback helps us to zero-in on what people actually want. The net result of these experiments is that when we actually do go and implement paid plans, we have a good degree of confidence that they’ll be well received because they’ve already been validated by real people using the software. We save engineering time and you get a service you really want.

Like I said, this is just a quick & dirty post on this subject and we plan to go into much greater depth about how we’re doing things in hopes it helps other boot-strapped startups. But frankly I’m Irish, it’s St. Patty’s Day and I’m looking out on the scene over Sixth St. in Austin going bananas so this blog post is about over

Props to Noah for letting us crash at his place this past week. I’ve been at SXSW Interactive and gotten the opportunity to rub elbows with people like Patrick Vlaskovits, Hiten Shah, Eric Ries and Steve Blank so it’s a bit surreal to talk about this stuff after having chatted with some of the pillars behind the Lean and CustDev movements. Shameless plug for Noah but I recommend checking out his Lean Startup Bundle – it’s like Mac Heist of web apps for startups and appears to be available for another three days. We purchased one ourselves and were already using a handful of the tools in there (Kiss Metrics is one of them). If you’re a fellow startup you’ll find at least one tool in there that makes the whole suite worth the cost of admission.

If you want to track our progress and get the results and techniques we share, subscribe to the RSS of this category on our blog and follow us on twitter.
Erin go braugh!