Dealing with the freetards?

[davecoveney]

At Spectacu.la we get about 4x the requests for support through comments and through e-mail from non-paying members than we do in the forums from paying members. In fact, I'd say 90% of paying members never need support. At one point we would respond anyway, but rarely did we get thanked, let alone a new member.

And now I see why none of the other clubs out there have 100% free downloads. Simply doesn't work. Our rebrandable WordPress user guide can only be downloaded if paid for, isn't GPL, and the free version is heavily compressed - consequently it drives more memberships than any of the themes.

So - clearly money doesn't flow from being nice or generous.

We've worked out how we should move forward, but wondered if we could get some feedback on plans?

1. Continue with free to download GPL themes, mostly blogging related, and keep Caribou free.
2. Develop new styles for Caribou which are members only.
3. Continue with the user guide - we're planning a higher quality version. Free to members.
4. Pay to download - ie, some themes you can pay to download, but you're on your own and there's no supplied support. Say, £10 per download. A lot of people simply don't need support. £10 for a download is cheaper than £25 for a membership. And yes, if there's a new version, you pay again.
5. We'll probably charge more for membership in the future.
6. Continue to support the GPL, of course.

I think it's the only way.

Essentially we're not that bothered if Spectacula makes us money or not, it's kind of our 'labs' section where we try out ideas. Indirectly I know it's generated a lot of work for us, so we're not unhappy to carry on with giving stuff out. We just don't like those that want more from us, for free.

But we'd like Speccie to make money because then it would make it worth releasing some really awesome themes to the community. Imagine being able to download something of the quality of http://www.telecoms.com with its sections and array of widgets? It needs profit, or all our best stuff will be kept for the big paying clients.

[greenshady]

Actually, one club (Theme Hybrid) has always had free downloads, ever since August 2008. It can work. But, it may not always work.

Most people won't be able to get away with free downloads and paid support. It takes some time to establish that, and a lot of good word-of-mouth advertising. I think my reputation within the WP community has made much of what I've been able to do possible.

Some things I've learned:

* Draw a line in the sand (so to speak) and never cross it when it comes to free users. Even if I could answer the question in less time than it took me to direct someone to my support forums, I hold my ground. This is tough sometimes because I like helping folks out, but being too generous isn't going to put food on the table. People take that generosity for granted and will use you (I've seen it happen on too many occasions).

Have I ticked off a lot of people with this method? Yeah, it happens. But, you can't be everyone's friend.

* Avoid these people like the plague -- "If you answer this one question, I'll join your club."

* Sell what you're good at. I'm not a great designer, but I do consider myself a good developer. I've written far more plugins than themes, but the money is in the theme market right now. I try to use my development skills to my advantage. This really starts back on my personal blog where I post fairly in-depth tutorials on WordPress. This establishes that feeling of "this guy knows what he's talking about." Many of my users have personally told me that's the reason they've signed up for my club.

I sell knowledge. Not themes.

* Be extremely active in community forums, blogs, and all kinds of things. One thing I even try to do on my own blog is reply to every, single person that leaves a comment. It's tough to do, but I still try to get around to most people (even if it's sometimes a month later).

---

While the above things may not work for everyone, that's all I can really say about how free downloads and paid support work.

[davecoveney]

I think that what helps for you is that you're offering a framework, rather than full blown designs. You can help people to create their own designs. Ours are mostly for people who want something off the shelf. Caribou is designed with customisation in mind, and has a basic default stylesheet, but few people do much with it at the moment.

Very true about drawing a line in the sand. At first I was always happy to help, but I noticed that even if people had good intentions about joining, it becomes a low priority item for them. But twenty years ago I was knocking out shareware that was unrestricted and I got an awful lot of "if you can just help me with this, I'll register ten copies for my company." Never ever happened!

It's tricky to know how much time to devote to the club. We only started it because we'd spent time developing some themes for the WordPress.com theme marketplace that never happened... we had exclusive stuff just sitting there, and had been accepted for the launch, but announcements dried up and e-mails went unanswered. Eventually we wanted some way of monetising the work we'd done, because we realised Automattic weren't going to. Funny that it then caused us to lock horns with Mr Mullenweg at a later date :-)

[Ryan]

* Draw a line in the sand (so to speak) and never cross it when it comes to free users. Even if I could answer the question in less time than it took me to direct someone to my support forums, I hold my ground.

Yup, answering free questions by email is a bad idea. I don't mind it so much with paying customers. I try to encourage them to use our forum, but since they're paying I let them contact me however they feel most comfortable (95% of the time that's via email).

* Avoid these people like the plague -- "If you answer this one question, I'll join your club."

LOL. Yeah, although often they do end up paying so there's a risk involved in not replying. If someone posts something like that via my forum they get a straight no, but when it's behind closed doors (ie: via email) I occasionally bend that rule a bit just to keep them happy.

* Be extremely active in community forums, blogs, and all kinds of things. One thing I even try to do on my own blog is reply to every, single person that leaves a comment. It's tough to do, but I still try to get around to most people (even if it's sometimes a month later).

Yup, there's nothing more annoying than speaking into a hole. I try to make sure I reply to everyone within one week, usually within 24 hours if possible though. I do make one exception and that is for people ask questions regarding IE bugs which are caused by problems with their theme and nothing to do with my own software. Those sorts of things can take 10 - 15 mins to fix and so I tend to leave them for quite a while and then fix them all at once. If that means I don't get to them until 4 weeks later then so be it. It annoys people, but the other option is to simply refuse to answer those questions which is not very helpful. For paying customers obviously they get a response within 24 hours unless something has gone wrong on my end.

[Ryan]

Lol.

Between my last post and now I've been pooped on by a potential client who said they upgrade to paid support if I could show them how it worked and check that a couple of problems could be fixed. So I showed them how to fix the problems and now they've said they can't afford to pay for support as they don't have a job .... despite having said they would pay for support if I helped them out. Grrrrr ....

[Ryan]

My response (via email) was the following:

Why have you been emailing me if you can't afford the fee? I have limited time and can't afford to waste it like this.

Do you guys think I was too rude? Or is it okay be a little abrupt with people like this?

[conorp]

Well he was obviously taking advantage of you. I say be as rude as you want.

<img style="margin: auto; position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px; right: 0px; bottom: 0px;">

[conorp]

hmm wonder why that <img style.... thing keeps coming up when i post?

[Cais]

Do you guys think I was too rude? Or is it okay be a little abrupt with people like this?

I love these types of responses from people ... they give me a chance to play

How about ...

I can appreciate your financial situation being somewhat precarious, perhaps you should concentrate on changing your employment status rather than focusing your energies here. Please feel free to contact me in the future with your payment details, I will refrain from replying to any further communications until such time.

... or in other more coarse words: Get a job and leave me the ^$#^ alone

[conorp]

.. or in other more coarse words: Get a job and leave me the ^$#^ alone

Much better.... :p