Am I onto something, or do people just like free stuff?

Since my last post, I’ve been putting in some effort to improve the user experience of coverletter.me by taking in feedback from the users and making small tweaks to the app.

Not any major changes, but small things like making the length of the cover letter more customizable and allowing the input text boxes to resize so the input is more readable.

My goal was to get the app to a 90% satisfaction rating before I would consider focusing on getting more traffic. I figured that if I could get a 90% rating, that would be a strong indication that my tool was helping people and that I should invest more time into it.

While I am still not there (I have overall received around 80% “Good” ratings, with the options being “Bad”, “Neutral”, “Good”), through no new promotion since early August there are now approximately 1,500 monthly visitors, so I feel like it is definitely trending in the right direction.

But can I trust that as an indicator of better “product-market fit”? Or is it just a sign that people like free stuff? Like, what would happen if I started charging for it?

To be clear, I would actually like to charge money for it for 3 reasons:

I am fielding all the costs at the moment, and while it’s not a lot yet, if it keeps growing it will become a noticeable expense. I am not yet rich enough to pay for people I don’t know.
Getting paying users is a much stronger indicator of a valuable product than free users, so it would be great validation that I am onto something.
My dream is to one day be able to work on my own stuff full-time, and this would be a first step to being able to do this.

So what do I do?

To Monetize or Not To Monetize

Part of this project is applying all the learnings I made from starting my former companies, and one thing I learned from last time is that I should trust my own judgement as a user more.

So essentially: Would I pay for this?

To be honest, I don’t think so. Not yet. I think it’s a useful tool and I get a lot of positive feedback, but if I were on the other side of the table I would probably not pay for it. Not yet, anyway.

So I find myself a bit conflicted: On the one hand, I would like to start charging for it to get a better indicator of product-market fit, but on the other hand, as my own user I don’t think it’s past the “vitamin” stage yet.

I have been thinking of 3 approaches to this, and I think my options are:

Request voluntary payments (also called donations"), to see if people find this so useful that they would be willing to part money with it. This would also allow me to get an indicator of how much people would be willing to pay for it, and I don’t think it would take long to implement.
Convert it to a freemium model with a handful of free cover letters each week/month, and then subsequently paid. I could experiment with the price and number of free uses, but I worry that this would be time-consuming and ultimately drive away users.
Keep the cover letters free, but introduce a paid tier with additional features that makes the app more useful for job applications. Ideas for paid features I have at the moment are: get the job description directly from a URL (added convenience), tweak the generated cover letter (added flexibility), and create tailored resume (added value).

I think 2) is the least likely approach I’ll take, just because I don’t see a big benefit to doing that over 3), and 3) would be favourable from a dog-feeding (i.e. use my own product) perspective. 1) would be the quickest to implement and I think donations would cause little friction, but what does it mean if I don’t get any..?

Of course, I forgot to mention the 4th option, which is to go and seek a funding round and just keep it “pre-revenue” and let some ~~other schmucks~~ investors foot the bill. Just kidding 😉.

Read and find out next time!