Your guide to reverse trials
A conversation with Airtable's Head of Growth on free trial strategy
👋 Hi, I’m Kyle and welcome to my newsletter, Growth Unhinged. Every other week I take a closer look at what drives a SaaS company’s growth. Expect deep dive takes on product-led growth, pricing, benchmarks, and much more.
What’s better for PLG: freemium or free trial?
You’ve probably debated the question ad nauseam. They both have their pros and cons, which then polarize different functions that might have competing objectives. Some of the classic freemium vs. free trial trade-offs include:
🏁 Acquisition: Freemium products tend to see higher conversion from website visitor to new sign-up, translating into faster and more efficient top-of-funnel growth. Since freemium products don’t restrict users to a restricted trial period, folks try out products earlier in their buying cycle.
🤑 Conversion: Free trial products see higher free-to-paid conversion, often 2-3x the conversion rates of freemium ones. Free trial products create urgency to make a purchase decision. They also force a binary choice: either use the product and pay or stop using the product altogether. The free plans don’t ‘compete’ against paid tiers.
⏰ Time-to-value: For some products, users can’t experience real value in only a 14-day or 30-day period. Freemium products without an expiration give users more time to get set up, share the product with their team, and form a habit.
🔁 Virality and network effects: Your product might become more valuable as more folks use it through viral loops or network effects. In these cases, product owners inherently prioritize acquisition over conversion and revenue.
💰 Cash payback: Free trial products not only see higher conversion, they also see faster conversion as folks buy upon trial expiration. Median time-to-purchase might be 14 days in a free trial company compared to 60 or 90 days for a freemium one. If you need to generate cash quickly to fund paid marketing efforts, a free trial looks far more appealing.
You don’t have to choose
Freemium or free trial is a false trade-off. The reality is that you can have your cake and eat it, too.
Enter the ‘reverse trial.’
In a reverse trial, new users start with a time-limited trial of your paid features. At the end of the trial, they can either buy or downgrade to a fully free tier.
These would seem to be the best of both worlds. You don’t need to choose between acquisition or conversion goals; you can pursue both! And you put your best foot forward with new users, giving them access to your most advanced features for a limited time. From a behavioral psychology standpoint, you start to benefit from loss aversion where the pain of losing something is twice as powerful of a motivator as the pleasure of gaining.
It’s no wonder that PLG giant Airtable, a workflow platform that lets your team build applications to run your most important business practices and is valued at $11 billion, has been an early pioneer of reverse trials. But how does this work in practice and are reverse trials right for everyone?
Inside Airtable’s reverse trial strategy
I sat down with Airtable’s Head of Growth, Lauryn Isford (LinkedIn | Twtr), to find out more.
Lauryn leads Airtable’s Product Growth team, a 40+ person team accountable for accelerating Airtable’s user growth and success from free signup through enterprise deployment, as well as self-serve revenue. In practice these teams work on product acquisition flows (sign-up, referral), activation and onboarding experiences, monetization (conversion, upgrades, pricing & packaging), and product-led sales (cultivating leads and hand-off for a sales conversation).
Below is a lightly edited version of our conversation (Lauryn’s comments are in italics).
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