Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

One of my sysadmins pointed out a great post from yesterday on using a decoy on your pricing page. If done well this can be a great strategy.

I’ve used this decoy pricing tactic on OfficeDrop’s pricing pages for a while. In particular, our digital filing pricing page has an expensive plan that has nicely increased overall conversion on the page.

The main result of this decoy is increased conversion on the page. In otherwords, a higher number & percent of visitors to the page pick a plan and become an OfficeDrop user. It hasn’t really changed the MIX of plans (very few people pick the expensive plan and the same % of people pick the other plans). But I consider the decoy plan a success because it’s getting more people into our funnel.

You can see the pop here when we added a decoy pricing plan to our standard digital filing pricing page. This chart is the % of visitors who visited the page and then signed up for a plan. I.e. the conversion rate of the page. Note that there is a little dip in the beginning that has nothing to do with pricing; it’s a data error. The way to look at this w/o the data error is the two little peaks on the left are close to the pre-decoy conversion rate average; the hump on the rigth is the new average post addition of the decoy pricing plan.

What the Decoy Pricing Plan Looks Like

The decoy pricing is the “ScanPro” “ScanFive” plan on the right. (Thanks for the typo catch Pete!)

Decoy Pricing Plan

It’s designed to be expensive and to make clear that we’ve got the ability to support additional users in the plans… it’s not really clicked that often.

Anyways, check out the post I linked to above. You’ll find it very solid, and it explains why a decoy plan works.

Really? Does this make any sense? Intuit announced that QuickBooks 2011 will not have a free document management plan due to a change of accounting policies. The email they recently sent to QuickBooks users said:

Free Document Management will be discontinued in QuickBooks 2011

What’s Changing?

Document Management is free in QuickBooks 2010, and it will stay that way. But after May 15, it will no longer be free in QuickBooks 2011.

Why?

A change in our accounting policies requires us to stop offering free services in any version of QuickBooks after 2011. We’re not happy about it because we know Document Management could be an integral part of how you do business.

Waaaa? It’s an accounting software company, you’d think they could figure out a way to not let the accountants drive important business decisions. Does this mean that Intuit will never offer a paid version of Mint because they’ll have to end the free version? Does this mean that no packaged software companies can do a freemium upsell model for attached services? If the latter is true, will a company like Microsoft – that makes a lot of money off of one time installed software – be totally unable to acquire freemium SaaS companies? Will Intuit never be able to acquire a freemium company like Box.net? This seems nutty.

I just don’t get this move by Intuit, unless the real reason that the free plan is being eliminated is because they just aren’t making money off of the free to paid upgrades and this is a way to kill off the free plan with an excuse that is so obtuse customers are unlikely to question it.

What do you think? Are the accountants just running the show at Intuit and forcing business decisions to be made off of accounting rules, or is it likely that the free plan just wasn’t working for Intuit as a business/marketing model?

Here is most of the email that I was able to screen capture:

QuickBooks discontinues free document management

Note, I have no info other than this email about Intuit’s document management policy change. And these opinions and questions are 100% mine, having nothing to do with my employer.

Rob Go, seed investor with NextView Ventures (I wrote about NextView last month), has yet another good post, this time on Product Development – Librarians and Poets. He talks about how product management and development needs bot vision and execution/organization, and contrasts several well known startups, internet companies and founder and talks about how they played to their strengths. Good piece, check it out!

I was at a private luncheon 10 days ago with Scott Cook, the founder and Chairman of Intuit. Coincidentally, Microsoft officially withdrew MS Money from the market on the same day – a huge achievement for Scott Cook and Intuit. When asked how he managed to stem off competition from Microsoft, this is what he had to say:

Solve Customer Pain Point(s)

Most companies are founded with an objective to solve a pain point but only few firms continue to focus on the customer after they have achieved success. What Intuit has done in the last 25 years and is relentlessly focussed on what the customer pain points are and then go about solving them. They engage the customer before, during and after each release cycle to ensure what they build is what the customer wants.

Delight the customer

Solving the customer pain point is not just enough but doing it in a manner that the customer loves it is what counts. The customer interact with a company and its products in various ways and various times. The post-sale customer experience is even more important than the pre-sale experience. How the product satisfies the needs, how accessible the company is (customer service) and how involved the user community is play a major role in enriching the customer experience.

These according to Scott, will create a loyal customer base for life and continue to generate word of mouth. When Scott asked Bill Gates what the main reason to acquire Intuit (in the mid 90s) is, Bill responded by saying that they could replicate everything that Intuit did but not the word of mouth. No wonder, Microsoft pulled out of personal money management market.