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13 Comments

Do you pay for your own product?

This is actually a really good idea!

Sign up to your own product, use it like a real user, sometimes. It's so easy to get carried away with the zillion and one things that need doing, that we forget to truly see what the customer is experiencing.

Please share experiences If yo

  1. 10

    I paid for my own product when I was working on Taskforce. It was actually quite annoying to see that $5/month charge every month. I wanted to cancel it, but never did. Perhaps that was a sign that I should've moved on to working on something else earlier. 😅

    But then again, you aren't always your target customer, so it's important to take that into account. As founders we can't just project the way we feel about things onto others and expect it to be identical.

    1. 5

      It's more than just being the target customer of your own product - there are some dark corners that are rarely being inspected and optimized such as automated communication with customers, renewal/billing processes or notifications and so on.

      I think the tweet was about putting more attention to the user experience side of those things

      1. 1

        Yep, totally agreed. Another thing that falls into this category of being worth doing often is signing up as a new user to your product and going through onboarding. I always learn a lot when I do this, and I don't do it often enough.

  2. 3

    I'm the first ever paying customer of my own product, https://SyncThemCalendars.com, and I keep paying that monthly subscription to remind me of the number of months since I have launched it.
    Obviously I got myself a nice coupon to pay only $1 a month 😉

    I think it's really important to play with your own product as a customer every once in a while. With SyncThemCalendars it's very easy for me to do, since I built it for my own use to begin with... 😎

    1. 1

      Are you kind enough to share that coupon code with us?

      1. 1

        Haha 🙂
        If you're serious about it, ping me after signup and I'll apply 20% discount to your account.

  3. 2

    Before I release any updates to the landing page (or sign-up flow) I will go through a full test (Stripe in test mode) from hitting the homepage all the way to being signed-up and using helpdesk.

    It is funny how many silly little issues that I would have missed if I hadn't have done this.

    It would be interesting to know if there is any benefit to paying for the product rather than using the test flows that are available.

  4. 1

    Why would you pay for it? Is it a physical product or sofware? If it's software, then just create a test account for yourself and use it. You're already paying for the server running the software.

  5. 1

    I paid for my product with "test cards" to test the purchase flow. Why would I give away 30% to Google just like that?

  6. 1

    I pay to use my own product, Proseful, for my personal blog. Though the business itself uses its own product for free for the company blog. Pricing is based on what I personally thought was reasonable for my own use.

  7. 1

    Absolutely. I pay for my own product to make sure I’m continually happy with the emails and general communication that customers receive from me and my product. If I think something is unclear or confusing or frustrating I’ll iterate.

  8. 1

    I pay for my own product (https://packetriot.com) as well and use it extensively. I'm a software dev so I will always be hosting code/sites that I author or services that I want to self-host.

  9. 1

    I personally pay for my own product (https://frequently.io). It's kind of funny when the charge hits my account every month. 😂

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