The Power of Parallel Efforts in Pricing Models

Going freemium or starting a reverse trial won’t work on their own. You need parallel effort.

I hear it everyday:

1. “Our freemium plan failed”
2. “PLG tactics don’t work for us”
3. “Reverse trial is a marketing scam”

Here’s the thing: pricing tactics in isolation fail.

These are the followup questions I ask:

1. Was your freemium plan powerful enough for people to do everything they need?

→ If people are hitting limits and not retaining, then it’s an ad — not a free plan.

You have to create a powerful free plan that generates word of mouth users on its own.

2. What was the activation rate to habit of your self-serve customers?

→ If customers weren’t able to drive to impact on their own, PLG will never work.

You have to make the parallel changes to your onboarding.

3. Did people use your premium features and hit feature gates later?

→ If people aren’t using the features granted to them, they won’t upgrade when it ends.

You have to build the usage + feature gates to support it.

I could go on and on…

And we do in our deep dive.

Enzo Avigo (june.so) and I have seen countless examples where founders or PMs poo poo a tactic.

But that’s because they haven’t undertaken the parallel effort to make the whole strategy work.

Each tactic must be supported by a host of parallel changes.