Recently, our management team took a fresh look at the pricing plans that we offered to our users. Among the many changes that have been incorporated, an important one is this – we have introduced an all-new Standard Plan that is completely free for our Sellers.
What drove us to go for this intriguing piece of change in our pricing?
For a while now, we have been pondering over how we can improve the network effect of our platform by increasing the percentage of users who are ‘active’ – i.e. those who access their account at least once in a month. In the past, we have tried email reminders, calling up users personally, and even putting a few accounts on hold if they were inactive for too long. However, while there have been incremental improvements, we have not seen anything exponential or exceptional.
After several team discussions, two solutions emerged. Firstly, all Standard and Premium sellers now have to activate their account every 30 days with a single click. If this is not done, our system will automatically put such accounts on hold, so that anyone interested in the listing is not disappointed when their messages don’t bring any reply.
Secondly, we introduced a brand new free pricing plan – the Standard Plan. A Standard Plan for Sellers will have an account that is valid for 6 months (subject to one-click activation every 30 days), receive up to 5 matching recommendations on listing approval, receive unlimited buyer / investor interests, see contact details of interested parties if shared by them.
What are we hoping to achieve with this?
Three things – Engagement, Returning Users and Multiplier Effect
Since we want our users to get the best out of our platform, we believe that it is extremely important that we consciously make decisions that promote active user behavior. It is not enough that a user has taken a paid subscription with us – if he does not keep coming back, he is not benefiting from it. Further, when someone is interested in his listing and sends an interest, there is no response as he is inactive. This demotivates the interested party, creates a chain of unfulfilled inquiries and weakens the network effect we are trying so hard to generate. We believe that with over 35,000 user-base, we can trigger a massive network strength that can increase the possibility of a deal discovery manifold – only if we can encourage our users to be more active.
While it is too early to comment on the results, we believe that this will be a major step towards unleashing platform engagement and bringing together a wider pool of available opportunities for better deal discovery and matchmaking.