Chris,
I appreciate your reply and the thought your team has put into revising the limits with Rich that are placed on the user, but as a longtime CTO, I believe the 100 messages per month approach – while certainly better than counting characters, especially since the user cannot predict nor control Rich’s responses – will still stymie users who are trying to evaluate your product.
As most of us who have become deeply entrenched in the world of AI, you’ll likely agree with me that the secret to making AI useful is the careful crafting and development of prompts. To achieve the best results, users usually have to pare down their requests into specific, manageable bites for the AI and then repeatedly massage their prompts until the AI responds with the desired output. Depending on the task, its complexity, and the resources needed, this EASILY could mean more than a dozen requests.
Now, I’m not suggesting your company simply cave in and give users carte blanche. You’re in business to make money, certainly. What I am saying, and suggested in my original message, is that:
-
You need to build goodwill with your prospective customers and that means giving them the room to properly test and use your new product, about which they know almost nothing. While you and your engineers might have had unbridled access over the past three months, six months, year or two – however long it’s taken you to get it to the point you’re at now – myReach is brand new to the rest of us. We don’t know all of its quirks, advantages, disadvantages, what it does well and not so well, and so forth, and corralling us into a limited experience that allows us to work with myReach for a day or even a week and then having to wait a month for limits to reset isn’t going to build that goodwill – and very much risks the opposite!
-
Your company might have gone through a few rounds of beta testing with external users but absolutely nothing beats the response you receive once your application is released into the wild. Users who can’t follow through on even simple tasks (again, because one task might require repeated interactions) aren’t going to be able to test much at all, so you’re letting a highly valuable opportunity get away.
-
Users who have positive experiences can be priceless to the success of your company because they make the best evangelists. Early adopters in particular spend a great deal of their time and effort learning your product, figuring out how to work around its various quirks and pitfalls, and reporting all of that back to you, so they very much tend to feel as if they’re your partners of a sort, and frankly, they aren’t really wrong. Those who go on to blog about your product, write articles, post YouTube videos, recommend it to their own companies and much more are spending even more of their own time – all to benefit your company because they’ve bought into the product, believe in it and want to see it succeed, for themselves as much as for your company.
I’m not saying you won’t have some users who simply take advantage of a free plan with very loose restrictions, but the benefits you’ll earn with those who do appreciate what you’re doing will far outweigh them. Besides, once your paid plan is finally available, you can always THEN tighten up the free plan. In the meantime, what difference does it make whether a user exchanges 1, 100 or 1,000 messages per month or uses 5,000 or 50,000 characters in those exchanges? It wouldn’t be as if users are taking advantage of your company since there’s no paid option. Besides, users who want to take advantage will do it, restrictions be damned. All they need to do is keep signing up for new accounts with different emails and then using each account for a specific task. I’ve seen that kind of behavior more times than I can count.
Anyway, I’m stepping off my soapbox now and hope you aren’t too offended by the opinionated ramblings of a CTO who has been there and seen it all.
Whatever changes you make, I’m looking forward to being able to use myReach again – whether it’s later this week or next month. Have a great day, Chris!
We are just waiting for apple to approve the new release.