Company

Everyone knows about the 80:20 rule. In consumer SaaS, the ratio of free to paid customers is actually closer to 97:3. Compared to the early days of the Internet, it is an order of magnitude more difficult to launch a business in today's environment.

As a founder, you may be worried that your paid customer base is reduced by 85%. The good news is that an individual's propensity to spend is 10x higher than before. It is not uncommon to charge $200/month for the highest subscription tier. To deliver value at this level, you must pay close attention to real customer demand and relentlessly prioritize the highest-leverage task.

Since 97% of your user base is not paying for your product, traditional support channels and discussion forums stop working. Instead of surfacing signals that inform your product roadmap, they are flooded with noise and sloppy contributions. You have to spend significant energy dealing with community issues that don't necessarily move the needle for your paying customers. If you choose to neglect your community, public opinion will quickly send your product into a downward spiral. Your paying customers will lose trust in your company and you might potentially have to rug pull just to survive.

One way to sift through the noise is by hiring dedicated support engineers and community managers. We've seen support teams growing 10x year after year just to cope with user growth at the top of the funnel. Even with VC funding, it is too labour intensive for many young startups to follow this trajectory. A more sustainable alternative is to reduce the cost of operating the freemium model through open source, self-hosting, and business automation.

We are building the agentic harness that helps your business identify the 3% paying customers, optimise for their value, and support the other 97% for free. Drawing on our experience scaling startups, we help you turn your shower ideas into successful products.