Low to No Initial Cost

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Low to no initial cost.

This is a favorite for consumer apps: people are always trying to find frictionless ways to get trial. It could mean frictionless trials, free samples of textiles (enough to test-manufacture some stuff), or developer kits for hardware that cost nothing. It means a lower cost of customer acquisition. If you can take the cost out of customer acquisition, that is great, and it can be very successful when it helps you identify prospects, or lets them identify themselves, because there is no barrier to trying something.

You can use a freemium model: free, and then you upgrade to a premium offering. But be careful. People often equate the value of a product with what they pay for it. If something is free forever, the perceived value is often zero, and free does not mean anything except that you are not delivering value. Generally a free trial period that emerges into something people pay for is preferable to going fully free all the time, because when there is a free version you are constantly upselling.

LinkedIn. We all use LinkedIn. It started as a place to put an online version of your resume, quickly became a social network, and a lot of people were skeptical of it. What they did brilliantly was get all the network effects by having a free product (for a whole range of people, including me, it is still free and I get value out of it), then pile on premium products: Sales Navigator, InMail, extra InMail messages, LinkedIn Premium. They monetized the people who actually use the network, the head hunters and recruiters in the HR world, for whom it is a network worth paying to tap into. It creates a virtuous circle: get everybody hooked on the free product for the network effects, then monetize.

So figure out early in your value proposition where you are going to monetize. If you go the free route, give people real value so they engage, because there has to be a virtuous circle, and if you are smart, build in virality so people take an immediate action and share it quickly.