Screw it! Our paid product didn’t take off, so we made it free to grow our audience

I run a website called Email Love, which is an email inspiration website that also provides analytics and reports by category and brand. We launched a paid version in June, and we were charging $19 per month for full access to the site analytics.

After running the numbers and chatting with our AI overlords about it, I realized our conversion rate was ridiculously low. That tells me this just isn't something our larger audience is willing to pay for. We have 40,000 people visiting the site every month, and only a handful converted to paid customers. We also have another product on our site, and this caused confusion amongst visitors, with some buying one product thinking it was something else.

Yes, we could invest more money into it, try to figure out why people weren't buying, and I think over time we could have built it into a $10K MRR product. But it would take years to get there. By the way, there are a number of other paid competitors that do the same thing in this space, which is why we thought we did not need to put much effort into validating the idea.

The other option? Make it free, grow our community, and focus on our other product, which actually has traction.

I think long-term, focusing on one product and using this free product as lead gen will turn out to be the right move. It wasn't a super easy decision because we spent a lot of money on it, but I am glad we did it.

Anyway, I hope you find this interesting. I think the key takeaway is that even if there are competitors in a space, it doesn't necessarily mean your idea is valid or will work. Realistically, you don't know how well those competitors are doing or how long it took them to grow.