Birdseed offers its full product free for two users to drive acquisition
Drew Sheehan · 1358 He's Put in $450k Before Turning on Paywall, Smart or Not? · Apr 13, 2019 · at 9:15
Drew Sheehan, founder of conversational SaaS startup Birdseed, details his freemium pricing model in comparison to Intercom and Drift.
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“So it's appreciably less. We operate on a freemium model. You know, our whole product, we give away for free. We limit it to two account users, but for the majority of our Who we believe will be our business, which is small to medium sized businesses to account users is probably enough for them. We have two upgrade packages, but yeah, I mean, we use the freemium model as an acquisition strategy, not so much as a monetization strategy.”
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More from Drew Sheehan
Sheehan: Live chat is too difficult for most small businesses to support
“Frankly, if you're open 40 hours a week, the majority of the time you're not available. And even when you are available during those business hours, it's very tough for a small business to support live chat.”
Sheehan invested $450K of personal capital into pre-revenue Birdseed
“So I would say somewhere around four, 450,000.
but the product is fully built and
That is my own money.”
SMB SaaS churn is largely uncontrollable because small businesses often close
“You know, I think in a small business, you know, space, one of the problems you deal with is churn that really is not controllable. You know, a lot of those businesses, frankly, you know, they just close up shop.”
Sheehan estimates 10% of Birdseed users would immediately pay $40 monthly
“I think if we were to literally flip the switch tomorrow to say, hey, you can sign up for this, you know kind of like Loom, I think about 10% of those businesses would automatically just say, hey, I'd love to spend 40 dollars a month to be able to remove brand…”