Its been 24 hours since the new, Freemium, version of Trip went live.  A few things I’ve learnt:

  • People have not been openly hostile about us moving to the new business model, I was expecting some abuse. I got some mild complaints from Twitter – but if that’s the worst of it.
  • People seem happy to pay and we have a number of paying customers.  Before we went live I was trying to think what might be good, bad and terrible and couldn’t actually come up with anything sensible.  However, the response so far has been encouraging.  But, I do need to stop checking the payments system every hour.
  • Institutional interest has exceeded expectations and it’s been really interesting dealing with many of the queries.
  • Internet Explorer (version 8) is not liked by Stripe, our payment system.
  • The system to reset passwords was a bit naughty and refused to send out links to reset the passwords.  Fortunately, that is now fixed!
  • I’m beginning to better understand some of the background functionality that I’d been not really thinking about.
  • I really need to think about VAT when setting up a payments system.

I think the biggest realisation is that, to make this model work, will require significant hard work on my part!  Anyone out there with (a) good sales skills (b) spare time (c) will to work on payments by results??