Frew_M

I'll add my experience from the viewpoint of a small time business owner.

Background: I've run an online Ecommerce business that was B2C and a few software businesses that were B2B.

My overarching philosophy: I don’t tolerate abuse of my staff, my business, or myself at all. I step in any time I see any customer abuse my team and let the customer go immediately. Part of being the owner is I chose who works with us, in the same way a customer chooses who they work with when they sign up for our services. One of the first things I share with new members is to bring any abuse to my attention so I can deal with it.

In the Ecommerce/B2C market, there are a lot more mean, angry, and unreasonable customers. I'd say once or twice a month I'd refund someone and politely send them to patronize my strongest competitor.

In software and B2B, the customers are a lot more knowledgable, mature, and professional. We're all engineers, we're aware things can go awry. As long as we do our part of acknowledging a problem, discussion what we're doing to fix it, and following through, we rarely see that type of behavior.

I think in the last six years I've probably only "fired" maybe four B2B customers, out of thousands and thousands of accounts. Nor do I miss the revenue at all, not in the slightest. Losing $1,500 in MRR is so much better than dealing with bad customers, trust me.

Price does have something to do with this issue too. Like many have said, 95% of our questions, issues, and hassles come from the lower tier price points. To be honest, it’s predominantly from people on free plans, unfortunately. Higher tier price points are usually businesses with competent engineers where value-for-money is understood and any issues are dealt with professionally.

My overall recommendation, again based on what I've seen in my own small world, is to sell something in B2B, preferably B2E(ngineer), with a fair/honest, but not cheap, price point. Fire any bad customer the moment you see abusive behavior. There are literally millions of honest, good, and rewarding business relationships out there. Don’t let bad customers stand in your way to reaching those good customers.

That's a great interview on HIBT and you bring up a great question, as it's possible the way they explained it makes it sound like that's an 'expected' freemium user-to-paid percentage across the board.

It really depends on the product/service, company size/funding and the marketplace(s) that your customers find your product.

I operate a few SaaS services with a freemium plan and we're very, very far north of 3-5% of paying customers from our customer base.

But one of the many differences is I'm operating small software services. Dropbox is very different in that regard and there's just no apples to apples comparison between those two business models.

But 3-5% is not something you should believe is set in stone as 'normal' for all businesses in all marketplaces. It, as many things do, comes down to "it depends..."

It's possible to have a much, much higher percentage of your customers paying even when offering a freemium model.

I live on the strip and, so far, not much has changed just yet. Bars are still full of people, restaurants are full, people walking around having fun, pretty much the usual.

However, they are starting to close things (MGM buffets, for one) and likely this type of shut down pattern will pick up in speed soon.

This coming week is usually really busy, as its spring break, march madness, and St. Pattys day all in the same week. Honestly not sure how that will go, but wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still pretty busy.

We will be going out as usual, mainly to support our friends who are out there working and rely on visitors for their income.

But obviously, its much different coming here from outside if you have to go through all the airline process and exposure, reside in a hotel, and eat out for every meal.

I think either choice makes sense. There’s a chance that you may regret traveling, or a chance you look back a year from now wondering “what were we so scared of again?”

All I can tell you is that, so far, it’s pretty much normal here...as of today.

Experienced a similar situation with registering a new iPad Air in July 2015. Apple customer support was confused and unable to assist with the simple process of registering a new iPad. No matter how many customer service people they handed us off to on each phone call, the result was the same... "We're sorry, the Apple registration process doesn't work..."

When I grew up, Apple had no market share, yet it was the company we all turned to because their stuff just worked. Now Apple is a "big deal" and, yet, has become the same Microsoft-like company that we all tried to avoid growing up.