Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, March 21, 2007:
Hosted Trials Come Highly Recommended
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
If you have a web app that’s not SaaS I have to say that I highly recommend setting up a hosted trial environment. It’s a bit of a pain and has some costs since a dedicated server is probably required, but so far it’s been well worth it for us.
I have the entire thing setup so I can convert a regular trial to a hosted trial in a click. I’ve thought of making it totally automated and I probably will at some point, but I wanted to make sure the system I put in place could handle the load before making it wide open.
It’s only been an option for a few months, but the numbers are great. The average HelpSpot sale is $721.46, but the average sale from a customer who did a hosted trial is $1,727.61. It’s a bit early to know if these numbers will hold up, but I think they will. The main reason I wanted the hosted trial option was for larger companies where dealing with IT can be a pain. They want to know the solution is for them before bothering with IT to setup a test environment, etc. So far it’s worked like a charm and we’re reaching the audience we wanted to reach with it.
So if you’re building a downloadable web app you should definitely keep this in mind for some point in your development. I think it’s also worth noting that a hosted trial is not the same as an online demo. Online demo’s are OK for less expensive applications, but in general customers can’t really get a good idea how it’s going to work for them in a demo. A hosted trial lets the customer really customize the entire system to get a feel for it. In HelpSpot’s case we even setup an email account for them so they can see the email integration without having to setup a test account.
The hosted trial option has really helped remove at least one big barrier to purchase from the process. Hopefully I can find a few more to remove which work this well!
Discussion
Congrats Ian, on the continued success of HelpSpot. I'm sure you've thought of - or maybe even already had to answer - what will you say when a purchaser asks to keep their hosted trial as the solution to use forever?
Created by Scott Meade on 03.21.2007 3:29 pm
Sure, we have a hosting company we work with that offers a service of hosting HelpSpot. They'll set it up for you, etc. We and they use MySQL so we can just send the DB dump over to them if they want to keep their test data. All data including files is stored in the DB so it's easy to move.
So far though, it's been mostly larger companies who intend to host themselves, but just don't want the hassle of dealing with IT to setup the product.
Created by Ian on 03.21.2007 3:36 pm
All around great idea!
Created by Scott Meade on 03.21.2007 3:48 pm
Hard to believe you waited so long to do it. Of course, your product sells itself (as anyone who owns it knows), but, having the ability for someone to instantly use it not only gets them started quicker, and gives you a better conversion rate (and gets you the bigger spenders, apparently), but it helps your customers to ask you better questions (instead of the ones like 'how does it work').
Created by OneNerd on 03.21.2007 7:25 pm
Yeah I can't believe I waited this long either. Actually it was planned from near the beginning, but HelpSpot took off so fast that I didn't have time for any "side" stuff. It certainly does take a lot of the pressure off the early support and makes it much more product focused. I can see why FogCreek only offers FogBugz trials like this with no downloads at all. I must say I'm tempted to go that route myself once I know the trial platform can scale.
Created by Ian on 03.21.2007 7:35 pm