We got better conversions by giving away 80% of the value upfront

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One of the more interesting things we have learned building Causo is that gating value behind payment is not always the smartest approach. The usual model is: Show users 20% of what the product can do, then ask them to pay to unlock the remaining 80%. We found that the opposite often works better. When users experience 80% of the value first, they are much more willing to pay for the final 20% that turns it into an actual outcome. Causo has two fairly clear layers: Intelligence: finding the right investors or companies, researching why they fit, identifying the right people, and building the outreach angle. Execution: finding verified contacts, writing the sequence, scheduling it, and sending it. Initially, it felt logical to gate more of the intelligence. It is the most technically difficult part of the product and, in many ways, where most of the value is created. But intelligence is also difficult to sell before someone sees it. Telling a founder that you can find better investors is abstract. Showing them the exact funds, partners, reasoning, and outreach angles makes the value obvious. Paying to turn that research into a live campaign then feels much more natural. The same applies to sales. People do not necessarily want to pay for “better lead intelligence.” They need to see companies they would never have found themselves, understand why each one is relevant, and see how that research turns into actual outreach. So front-loading the intelligence worked very well for our fundraising product. Here is the problem. The intelligence layer in our sales product is significantly more expensive for us to generate. Each search can involve researching a large number of companies, checking multiple signals, validating whether they actually match the request, finding the right people, and collecting enough evidence to explain why the lead is relevant. We cannot realistically give 80% of that away to every user who signs up. But if we only show 20%, users may never properly understand why the product is valuable. So we are now stuck between two bad options: Give away enough value to make the product obvious, but take on a significant cost before the user pays. Or protect the expensive part of the product, but ask users to pay before they have properly experienced it. This is the problem we are currently trying to solve at Causo. How would you structure this?   submitted by   /u/Strong-Yesterday-183 [link]   [comments]