A Subscription Planner
September 16th, 2009 | Published in agtweet, bizcamp, pricing | 7 Comments
The only problem with having control over your own time is – no one tells you when you are spending too much time on a task. Anyway. This is done now. A good while ago at the first Bizcamp in Dublin, I took part in a little game that involved putting together a pitch for a fake business in under 10 minutes. I can’t remember what is was called. Anyway, some bright spark came up with the idea of a collaborative subscription model planning tool. I really liked it and I’ve spent the last day or two putting a lite version to further the discussion on what to do with Ag Tweet.
You can check out the (mostly javascript) tool at http://www.jameskennedy.ie/plannr.
So what does it do? It aims to help you discuss price points for your subscription service. It assumes there are 3 ‘levels’ of subscription and you can play with the figures ( prices, % of people on each plan, total number of subscribers etc).
When you are ready to you can add a comment at the bottom and email it off. None of the data is saved on my server and all the information is held in the URL.
I’ve pre-populated the table with figures which look kind of like what I’m thinking of for AgTweet. If you have any ideas on what pricing structure I should put in place for it, by all means fill out the sheet and let send it on to me.
September 16th, 2009 at 4:48 pm (#)
I think it might be worthwhile to separate out sales from churn into two different line items. This is because these two figures have different drivers. Churn is dependent on industry norms (how many people leave the business etc.) and on levels of satisfaction. New sales can be driven with increased sales force, promotion, etc.
September 16th, 2009 at 4:58 pm (#)
I’ve added that in along the bottom as a static value for churn. What would be really nice is a place you could mark specific marketing activity. Eg: assign telesales campaign for month 3 and see that impact on the subscriptoin rate.
It’d be nice to have a ‘menu’ of activities with stock values for effectiveness you could use to build up your plan.
September 16th, 2009 at 5:57 pm (#)
Okay, so I broke out the churn and growth to their own lines now. Not sure it helps much unless you can tweak the individual months.
September 17th, 2009 at 8:09 pm (#)
I know I’m being irritating but new subscriptions shouldn’t be a % of existing subs, unless your application is viral. It should be a hard figure that reflect the sales effort. I agree that it would be handy to vary it month by month
September 17th, 2009 at 9:01 pm (#)
Such is the nature of these things. What starts out as ’simple’, grows hairs.
I think what is needed is a list of marketing activities with associated yields in terms of new subscribers. Then maybe you can select a marketing activity and assign it to a particular month. The more marketing you do – the more subs.
Of course the old ‘viral’ trick would be nice. I must go buy some of that. I’ll get some ‘word of mouth’ while I’m at it.
September 19th, 2009 at 7:37 pm (#)
I just couldn’t let it lie. I’ve updated the plannr to allow for the addition of ‘marketing activities’ – each of which yields a specific number of new subscribers. Similarly you can add individual expenses on a per month basis so in theory you could schedule a bulk email for a particular month and then add the associated cost below. The blue link indicates expense and the yellow bars indicate income.
Right. I’m not allowed touch this again.
October 7th, 2009 at 12:38 am (#)
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