Comment by milesvp

Youtube has been feeding me a lot of business advice lately. If you are truly interested in pivoting from tech to sales. Right now the best advice is coming from Alex Hormozi (ignore some of his hard work ethos, it’s not nuanced enough until you’ve watched enough of his content). The amount of content he is giving away is criminal, he’s using it as marketing, but he is almost never selling anything, so it doesn’t feel slimey the way most of this content space feels. Chris Do used to have excellent content for getting paid as a creator, his recent stuff isn’t very good though.

I will tell you, if your solution solves a problem that is only painful enough that people might pay $25 a month, you are likely going to have a really hard time with this business. Sales is disproportionately harder the smaller the dollar amount. Also, if you are not willing to give up the first 4 productive hours of your day to sales and marketing you will probably fail.

Ultimately I think the open source doesn’t matter much. You have a solution to a problem. You need to market that solution to people who have the problem, and take their money while they are still in pain. Whether they could have found the solution to their problem through the open source channel is largely irrelevant if you have good enough sales channels to find people who don’t know to look for your free solution. Looking at your site now, I’d be very inclined to remove the free option. The era of freemium is sort of over. You want to be able to give something free to your unqualified leads, but it looks like you want to give away too much with it. You can maintain the npm channel, but it should not be part of your marketing for the paid product. It can still maybe be part of the onboarding process, I haven’t looked at your solution enough to understand what onboarding should look like.

Also, I suspect $25/mo is too little. Pricing is a form of marketing, and too low a price attracts the wrong kind of customers. There have been numerous threads here on HN talking about the quality of customers when adding a zero to their price.

Another thing I noticed on the forms.md page, is it wasn’t clear to me what pain I needed to have that your solution provides. All I know from your page is that if I want to build forms you can help with that, but you haven’t reminded me of what is painful about building forms, or even that it might be difficult. Let alone how your solution will make those pains go away.

There is also no price anchor. You absolutely need 3 pricing tiers on a landing page. One should be high enough you’re embarrased about it. $20 should absolutely be the lowest tier with the expectation that no one should want it. The middle price is what you want to sell for, and it has a slight goldie locks problem, but you can dial that in once you have enough sales.

Good luck.