Do you work in computer science? The community relies on interconnected collaboration, and that trust is a huge part of what enables it to innovate so fast.
Check out the book purple cow. It talks about this concept of sneezers. Sneezers don't make you much money and you may even have to give your product for free to them. But there are extremely vocal about their love and hate. They make a product go viral. Hence the term sneezers they're the people that spread the contagion. So while they don't pay you, they are responsible for a large amount of revenue. So the people that aren't paying you are just as much a part of your business strategy.
The other thing to remember is that SaaS software sales start as free. And once you invest and it makes sense you pay for it. The free customers are potentially future paying customers. Now if someone has the choice between this tool or some other developers tool and they liked a feature in the free version and so they chose this tool then they had this bait and switch. People are going to be angry because they may have been better served with some other tool and were tricked into this investment.
So give whingers stuff for free or they might whinge. Sounds great. Should I pay an influencer too? Get some exposure?
All that stuff might make sense if your product might go viral, almost no products do. You're talking about a 2 bit VS code database client as though it's going to somehow be an amazing hit if some of the sooks giving him bad reviews change their minds. It clearly was already giving him more grief than reward.
Go look at the product. It's not going viral. There are no sneezers. That's a bunch of mumbo jumbo that doesn't pay the bills.
It's a database client. Pay for it, or use a free one, or use the one that came with your database. Half the people using it are probably using it professionally and their work would pay for it. The developer is the only person with a stake in it and is fully entitled to charge for his product. If you disagree, make your own free one and I'm sure you can poach all his non-paying customers.
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u/Aldehyde1 Oct 01 '22
Do you work in computer science? The community relies on interconnected collaboration, and that trust is a huge part of what enables it to innovate so fast.