The question of a free plan is following me through my Saas journey for now 10 years. Do I need a free plan or does it attract the wrong people?

I try to break down the question in this episode to figure out what are situations where a free plan can help you a lot. And where it does not make sense.

For me a Free plan is a marketing channel and therefore treated like one and not as part of the product.

I had a real low on Saturday

From time to time I have days where my inner voice tells me - all this stuff will not work out.

My product will fail, projects will fail and are you sure what you are doing at the moment.

I learned to handle these days. In the past they caused me to stop working on things, disbanding ideas.

Today I know they will pass. They are just the lows on the wave curves. So I try to use them and note down the things I am most sceptical on these days and review them later.

In the podcast episode I speak about the low phases and how I learned to handle them.

Let me tell me a story....

This is a huge trigger for me, when someone is starting like this. I love stories. Can't wait to hear a new one. And usually a story is never boring. It's authentic to the core.

Listening to Dave Gerhardt's podcasts with April Dunford - they mentioned how powerful a story about "how the company was started and why" can be to let your customers understand your mission.

In this episode I try to tell the story of datatasks. It's starts a bit lame but gets a lot better to the end. It was a good session for me to figure out what kind of story makes sense to tell.

One thing I learned in building products is to always question the core of your product and if you need a feature.

Each feature initially decreases the user experience. First it adds only complexity (for the UX and for development). So the benefits of the feature have to be significantly higher to justify the added complexity. That is why I became very rigid to decide if a feature should be added.

When I was talking about datatasks with other people I recognized that two features I had planned needed more explanations. Especially why they are in datatasks. 

So I decided to remove them (and eventually build own products with them at the core).

The zero episode explains what this podcast is about and sets some expectation about the production and style of the episodes:

- it's a journal - so I capture my thoughts and decisions about building datatasks along the building it

- it's raw - as a journal I want to produce quickly and instantly - so no big editing involved (audio gets optimized, but no music, no effects,..)

- it's about brain dumps - I talk about stuff I am thinking about - so I can loose myself or take some turns not planned - I basically dump what I am thinking about