When it comes to growing your ARR, it truly is an uphill battle.
First, you have to outshine your competitors. That takes a well-designed product, a killer marketing strategy, and the ability to ship new features faster than other companies in your niche. Next, you have to add consistent value for your users if you want your product to be sticky enough that they’ll stay around month after month. Executing all those things well can feel overwhelming.
Imagine this: you have a great product that your customers subscribe to and use A LOT. You've vaguely heard of account sharing (you know someone that shares their Netflix account...), but you're not sure if it's happening to you. You like the idea of converting more users, but it's hard to justify doing anything about it when you don't really know if account sharing is even happening on your site, let alone much of it.
Believe it or not, but this is exactly why you should use Upollo: we show you exactly how many people are sharing accounts, and we do this completely free of charge. We believe in transparency: we want you to understand the scope of the problem, and once you do, we want to give you the tools to address it.
So how can you find out if any of your customers are sharing their account with others? Simply follow the steps below.
Nearly every product starts with a sign up page and they have a huge impact on revenue, a 10% drop in people signing up successfully is a 10% drop in revenue.
We have collected some data backed falsehoods that we have come across for sign up pages.
When building a signup page for your website or app, you are usually thinking about how to get people in. But it’s just as important to keep malicious users out, which can greatly improve your conversion to paid accounts.
A login page waiting for fake accounts to sign up
You’ve just had a customer sign up for your product - great!
While all customers are great, you may want to pay special attention to customers that you think are going to buy more of your product, upgrade to your premium offerings, and/or refer you to everyone they know. Ideally, you should engage with these high priority customers to ensure their experience is smooth and they are happy with your product. But how do you know who is high priority? Your customers won’t tell you this on sign-up - but Upollo will, AND we’ll do it for free.
Sometimes people do things that they shouldn't. They dye their hair an unflattering color. Get an embarrassing tattoo. Sign-up for 10 free trials. Account share with their 15 closest friends.
At Upollo, we think there are two types of bad actors: professional fraudsters and everyday people who see an opportunity to save a bit of money and take it.
Imagine a customer who uses your product nearly every day and is willing to jump through frustrating hoops to use it. Or another customer who evangelised your product to people they know, and onboarded them as users too. Sounds great, right?
These types of users sound like the best customers you could have, but most companies see these users as unconvertible at best or bad and unwanted users at worst. Why? Because users who signup for free trials repeatedly or account share are behaving like imaginary customers above.
But are they really bad or just misunderstood? Are they truly unconvertible? Let's take a look at some of the hard data and real world examples.
Auth0 is a helpful tool for managing authentication on your website.
However whilst Auth0 will let people login to accounts for your site it can't tell you much about the the people behind those accounts. It can't tell you if Alice creates a new account every month for to get a free trial every month without ever paying. It also won't help you discover that Bob and Dave have one account that they pay for but share the password to avoid paying for two accounts.
What if everyone currently using your service through someone else's account, suddenly got their own paid account tomorrow? Or what if your corporate customers paid for all the seats they're using rather than sharing passwords?
Would your website crash trying to process all the credit cards? And would that add tens of thousands of dollars in ARR to your books? Or even billions?
Here's the thing: Just like death and taxes, account sharing happens. Some of it is hard to stop. But there are key things you can do to reduce it -- and increase your revenue.
In a perfect world, referral programs work seamlessly. You create a deal to tempt your users to refer their friends or professional contacts, and then magically gain additional users and sales. Often at a much lower customer acquisition cost than you pay via other marketing and sales channels.
But the world isn't perfect. Just ask one retailer who instituted a give $10, get $10 referral program and had current customers self-refer to the tune of a loss of over $1 million in one day.
Ever think about making a new account to catch the last episode of a show after your free trial has run out?
Well you aren't alone.
Signing up multiple times to get repeated free trials is one example of what we call multi-accounting. You can learn more about how users are taking advantage of your free trials in our article; "How your one week free trial is being used for three months".
While your user growth and funnel metrics may look good if every user creates multiple accounts for repeat free trials; multi-accounting can be damaging to your business. There can be substantial financial cost, degraded user experience or compliance implications associated with this behaviour. It can also impact your ability to accurately measure life time value (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC) and make informed decisions about your user acquisition spend.
If you could increase the conversion rate of your free trials by 10%, how much of a difference would that make? For most companies, even a 5% boost in their trial-to-paid conversion rate would transform their business.
The problem is figuring out how to do that. What defaults should you use? How should you design your trials? There are so many small decisions that can make a big impact.
To help, we created a cheat sheet on how to offer an effective free trial so you don't have to A/B test until you're sick of hearing the first two letters of the alphabet.
Since free trials have existed, people have been trying to use them to get services for free. Outside of Twitter most people don't talk about how they misuse free trials, so let's dive into the most common ways people try to get multiple free trials.
Having an online business can be very rewarding, you can help people all around the world. It’s not always easy though, you need to accept credit card payments which sometimes lead to chargebacks which hurt your revenue, take up time and also impact your reputation with your payment processor.
Account sharing is giving someone access to an account that they are not the owner of, often by sharing login credentials.
Common examples of account sharing are families sharing a Netflix or streaming service account and entire businesses sharing access to a business email or productivity tool
Firebase Auth is a great tool to add account management to your app or service. It takes care of the myriad of ways people like to login.
However, Firebase can't tell you anything about the people behind those accounts. It can't tell you if Bob creates a new account every month so he can get the free trial again and again. It also can’t tell you that Peter and Patsy have created one account and share the password so they only have to pay once.
Human generosity is amazing to witness, and we are taught to share from our early childhood. So it is no wonder that behind a single-user paid account you will often find a couple, a group of friends or even an office full of colleagues!
Everyone loves getting something for nothing, which is why free credits or 30 day trials are so effective at bringing in customers. However, the love of something free can entice users to simply sign up again rather than become a paying customer.
