Some thoughts I had:

* You are spot on in concluding that this is a tool that would be used a few of times in a year. A lifetime payment is the solution, with an appropriate price bump of course.

* Regarding the users that signed up for free: You should have allowed them to keep using the service for free. They are your implicit marketing team. They got in early, they deserve gratis access for that.

* Regarding the recurring scheme of cancellations: Do contact the users, ask them why they are leaving. This will help you either validate my first thought above, or iterate on the service to become what they expect to get out of it.

A lifetime payment is the solution, with an appropriate price bump of course.

I'm now hearing comments like yours a lot, I think I might give this a try this weekend.

You should have allowed them to keep using the service for free.

You know what, you are totally right. I hadn't thought of it that way, and if I do something similar in future, I'll take the same point of view.

Do contact the users, ask them why they are leaving.

I'm right now figuring out a nice email with a "don't worry, this is the only email you'll ever receive from me" bit in it, to send to the relevant users. I think I'm being silly by not having contacted previous users about this.

Thanks once again for the awesome advice!

I guess you have to be careful in your terms and conditions when you say "lifetime", right? Obviously, you mean the lifetime of the product, not the client's

First: give InboxCleaner away for free and use it to get registered users for TweetingMachine. I imagine if a user signs up and is happy with one tool you provide, they would be more inclined to pay $20/mo for another related tool. This seems like a great opportunity for some A/B testing as well.

Second: add InboxCleaner as a paid add-on for TweetingMachine. Your customers are paying $20/mo for the basic service, so you know they aren't afraid to pull out their wallets. Offer them a monthly inbox cleaning for an extra $1/mo. What's the difference between $20 and $21 when they're already paying you?

Also, your name might be inhibiting some initial click-throughs to your site. When I hear InboxCleaner, I immediately think email. Maybe this is because I'm not a heavy Twitter user, but it's something to think about.

One feature that might up the ante is email reminders to clean their inbox every 6 months or every year. It's something people will do probably rarely, which means they're likely to forget the name of the tool they used to do it or forget to do it altogether. You might offer a friendly reminder to do Spring cleaning on their inbox.

Anyway, I've really enjoyed reading your posts. They're some of the most practical real world case studies I've come across, as opposed to the "I'm making $2000 a week and only working 4 hours" drivel that's out there. Not that I wouldn't like to make $2000 in 4 hours a week.

I was wondering if there were many users who wouldn't spend $19.99/month on a service when they only wanted one feature, and to see if they would pay $4.99/year for that one feature instead.

I am thinking about making it entirely free and using it to solely promote TweetingMachine. I might stick a TweetingMachine advert on it for a week and see if that results in any sign ups and go from there.

Thanks for your compliments by the way - I have a few "proper" failures I can write about in the future if you're interested. Although I'm also waiting for the magic $500/hour moment ;)

Such a blindingly obvious idea, and it never even occurred to me. Thanks, I'm going to investigate this ASAP!

TweetMachine does look like a pretty neat webapp. I'm not a big enough Twitter user, but if I was promoting an app through Twitter, I'd certainly regard $20/month as likely a solid investment.

You might want to try and emphasize some approaches to app promotion and support in your features page.

Perhaps I'm not the heaviest twitter user, but the free service would wipe every DM I've ever received in.. a day. I imagine a one-time fee would work better.

(On a related note, I wonder if Dropbox is also far too generous with their free offering; almost everyone I know uses the free tier as 2GB is a huge amount for docs that need syncing; I've used dropbox since it came out and am only at 20% of that).

1) I am surprised this is actually a problem that needs solved.

2) I see this more as a product that can be used for free by many and often, but it must promote your other products that you do sell. It could be a nice marketing tool maybe.

3) Couldn't you just roll this in with your other Twitter product that you charge for?

Further: it's trivial for a competitor to undercut your app with a free alternative. I suggest you give this away for free to (a) build goodwill and (b) attract people to your other products.

Another thought: you mess with your pricing an awful lot. If I was your customer, and recommending your product to my friends, I'd be pretty pissed to find out the price has changed and made me a liar.

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Try presenting your users with a paid and viral choice. First oauth them with the promise of the service you are offering. Then present them with the value proposition: "You are about to save X minutes by automatically deleting Y DM's". Then offer them two choices to compensate you for that value: 1) Follow your twitter account & tweet an endorsement (which could be as simple as a variation on the value prop ) or 2) pay you $0.99 for a one time service.

This will allow you to a) measure your funnel, b) advertise without spending any money, c) build an audience, d) use that audience to build a feedback loop and test other ideas, e) make money in a way that seems to align with your users usage habits.

Thoughts?

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What do yall think, could this dog hunt?

Anyone reading that uses Twitter - would you pay or tweet to use a service? I'm guessing the vast majority would tweet... but am really not sure :)

In general forcing viral activity both misses the point and fails to work. I'd say you should at most randomly give away free inbox cleanings to your followers / people who tweet about the service. Really, though, you should probably just be active on twitter and talk to people. That doesn't scale well, but it's the most effective viral tactic there is.

This works because you're offering something that normally costs money for free. That's psychologically different than offering something for free (with a required plug), but with no option to pay for it.

The other thing is that it needs to be an impulse purchase. I doubt it would work for a Shoppify, for example.

So if you're selling something sort of whimsical, entertaining or trivial, this sort of "forced viral" marketing can work very well.

1. When you mentioned about 1 or 2 users signing up randomly - what's your overall inbound traffic to your app like?

2. I am guessing you did not particularly do any paid advertising, except for submitting them to various directories, is that right?

In June, the app's homepage received 1,344 unique visitors. It's typically around 40 a day. So yeah - conversation rate really isn't very good ;)

I am guessing you did not particularly do any paid advertising, except for submitting them to various directories, is that right?

Completely right; I don't know enough about paid advertising to be effective, so avoid it altogether. For now at least :)

> I also contacted lots of people on Twitter and asked if they’d give my app a try.

How do you do that? In past, when I have tried doing this using @replies on potential people who might be interested, I always felt like I was just barging in on a stranger!

It's not just directories - although they makes up for a decent amount of traffic! - and organic search brings in a decent level of users as well. Although my SEO knowledge is close to zero, I've tried to choose, e.g., a decent title for the homepage that's Google-friendly.

In past, when I have tried doing this using @replies on potential people who might be interested, I always felt like I was just barging in on a stranger!

Search for people asking how to do what your tool serves, and send them a reply. It was a free tool at the time, so seemed totally reasonable to me, but I accept others might not see it that way ;)

a) Payment friction is a big problem here; reviewing comments, I love the idea of overcoming that with an app, but there are also other marketplaces like google chrome apps, etc. Nothing to say you can't sell a web app through one of those right now.

b) Don't email survey your customers, call them. Well, in your case, email them and say you're the founder, you want to know what they liked / didn't, and do they have 10 minutes to give you some advice? This will get you far more than automated surveys

c) I'm kind of thinking a nice "Before / After" with someone's actual inbox would be nice, then they could just click to pay once they see how great it will look.

Tom, blog author here. If you have any questions, I'm here to answer them :)

Edit @1900 GMT+2: I have to run out for a bit, but will be replying on the train and then once I'm back again :)

Do you have a measure of their average stay or actions?

I'd be interested to know if some arrived thinking it did one thing and ended up not getting what they wanted.

You know how sometimes someone says something really obvious and you want to hit yourself because you haven't thought it through properly? Thank you :)

I've had a quick look through the stats, and users appear to be coming back repeatedly (no errors on the server - will try and see if there's anything else going wrong, e.g. IE6 problems). I think I'm going to try and find those cancelled users and ask them what happened :)

Regardless, though, $18/hr (($200 - $20 theme) / 10 hours) is not bad.

I'm kinda torn on the $1 idea. Whilst I like it in principle, I think in reality it might attract customers who'll be a pain. At the same time though - I can always experiment and find out! :)

I'm also wondering about maybe selling credits instead - e.g. buy 20 deletes for $9.99. My fear with credits is that it would make the tool too complex. But again - I can only try :)

Given the amazing apps and services out there for dollars a month or a one time cost of under $6, it does seem that you need to keep looking for the right sort of payment system for this product. I'd sign up to an amazing Twitter life management system for $5 a month, but not a tool that accomplishes one very limited purpose.

The audience doesn't want to spend money for this specific tool but it doesn't mean they wouldn't spend money in general.

I was struggling with the phrasing of that sentence for ages. But you make a fair point :)

Thanks for sharing your insights otherwise, appreciated :)

You're solving a infinitesimally small problem. Remember when GMail was missing a "Delete" button and people wrote greasemonkey scripts to implement one?

You're selling that for $5.

I don't get many DMs on twitter, but if I did I could see an automated "clean out everything over a month old and email it to me" service being worthwhile.