What we learned in our first 3 weeks
We launched Paygo, a Micropayment platform for monetizing Journalism. Here is what we learned so far
It’s been an exciting 3 weeks since launch, battling bugs, obvious features (e-mail sign up, duh…) and user feedback. Here are our observations (yes, lots of methodological caveats, small sample size, small content pool etc):
Our main challenge is finding the equilibrium:
Product Market Fit - the technical definition is a flattening of the retention curves but this takes time and usage. The first signals one should look for are the subjective remarks and feedback from users directly. If users are not excited about your product then nothing you do matters.
Consumers are excited about our offer
We have been getting a lot of extremely excited users telling us how our service solves a real pain point for them and asking for it to be rolled out to other publishers
This is backed up by action - users paying for the service (pre-paying $3). Around 4% of signed up users have paid (while most still have the promotional balance so they have not encountered the Recharge screen). Of users hitting 0 balance, 73% have Recharged!
Our best example (which I will save forever) is a user wanting the service but not wanting to pay with credit card, randomly Paypaling $5 to our support email ;-)
We have found that free Newsletter subscribers interact with our service up to 5X what Twitter users do (depending on content). Based on that, we rolled out a new Paywall model enabling distributing premium content (Paywalled) to free newsletter users with 2 CTA - Subscribe or pay with Micropayments.
This has performed very well and really surprised us that it drove subscriptions as well as Micropayments. Meaning that, on average, 35% of users clicked on the Subscribe button vs Micropayment button and drove real subscription signups.
The biggest variance in performance seems to be content. Dan Rather’s best performing article saw 3X the engagement from the worst performing article.
We are onboarding several new creators but really need a diverse set of content, creators and publishers. Please join our experiment and help make Journalism profitable again.
How can you help?
Creators - If your audience is on Social Media - try our platform directly and try and monetize some of your following (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc)
Creators - If your audience is on a Newsletter - Try our new Paywall to help distribute your Premium content to your Free newsletter readers (you already produced it, why not monetize it?) and drive Paid Subscriptions
Publishers (you run your own platform) come try Micropayments in several easy ways:
Monetize your Social Media channels (no integration)
Monetize your free Newsletters (no integration)
Add our button to your paywall and monetize the “other 98%” who are not subscribing (light integration). Learn more here
Monetize your poorly converting cohorts (light integration) - AMP, Social, our of DMA etc (you know who these cohorts are)
Thank you for reading this far
-Team Paygo