"How Can We Best Help Other Small Businesses Succeed?"
Gozynta got its start in the late 2000s, going through the trials, woes and growing pains that all small businesses do, specifically as an IT service provider starting as a break-fix shop and evolving into a full-fledged Managed Service Provider. As we grew, we pivoted to developing integrations to automate some of those tasks that take up so much time. We experienced, first-hand, the challenges and struggles that come with creating, managing, and growing your own company. At each step of the way, we asked ourselves,
"How can we best share what we’ve learned and help other small businesses succeed"
and we’ve done our best to follow that question every where it takes us, and using data and experience to back it up.
Initially, we answered that question with a Free Tier of our main product, Gozynta Mobius. We imagined that a no-strings attached, simple version of our sync tool with no support since everything was so well-documented, would give customers the flexibility to try us out and automate the tedium of invoice-syncing, giving them a little bit more time back in their day. We imagined it as practical and helpful: giving MSPs something useful, and as they grow, they can grow into our paid tiers, if they ended up needing it. We set a conservative invoice value limit of $50k, monthly, and if they exceeded that, our Lite Tier would be an easy next step.
We actively advertised and offered the Free Tier: when people were overwhelmed in a one-man shop, or had a hard time seeing the value in our full-priced tiers, or just wanted to compare our product with competitors. We proudly shared it in conversations with community members: at conferences, in calls, and on Reddit, slack and discord. It was pretty cool to be able to give people something that we knew was very, very useful, and for free! Current and prospective customers responded positively, and we continued to see an increase in new accounts created month over month, which made us feel like surely our goal of helping small businesses was clipping along as planned.
So, with all of that said, you can imagine our surprise, when we pulled the numbers in late 2022 and noticed that we had literally 0.25% of our accounts on the free tier. Not even a single percentage point. To further confuse our belief: zero of those free-tier accounts were actively in use.
This couldn’t be right. Surely more customers needed this tool!
The Next Logical Step
So we took the next logical step and polled our customers. Most Gozynta Mobius customers were established enough that they had never needed our Free Tier, and in fact, at the point of reviewing the usefulness of the Free Tier, our partners shared the following:
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They didn’t need a financial break, they needed guidance. MSPs in our targeted market of Free Tier customers were sized and staffed in a way that it was often the business owner themselves spending their own valuable time figuring out how to make Gozynta Mobius work. These guys could and did set up Gozynta Mobius with ease, creating one more thing to manage and maintain on their own. Feedback we received wasn’t that they needed a price cut, but rather, needed an extra set of hands and eyes to make the way clear and be a force-multiplier for them.
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They signed up for a Free Tier, but really they wanted a trial to ensure Gozynta Mobius could handle all of their specific needs and use cases before investing. We’ve talked to thousands of MSPs and despite most of them using similar technical stacks, exactly zero have perfectly identical accounting processes. So, it made sense when customers said they had only signed up to see how it would work with their particular account mappings. The feedback we received about using the Free Tier as a trial was that the features they needed were actually in one of the paid tiers, which they would then upgrade to.
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They realized they actually did want access to our Support. We’re immensely proud of our product and our in-house support. We do what we can to make a product that just works and has good documentation for set up, syncing feedback, and errors. And, when you need support, we’re quick, thoughtful, and helpful. However, to save on costs, we decided that our Free Tier didn’t come with support. Many customers reported that they were able to set up Gozynta Mobius with those documents alone. But sometimes, they just wanted another set of eyes on an error or another translation of the given error message, and also, when you're tight on time, sometimes you just need someone to confirm what you’ve read!
The feedback was enlightening. We had made our product to save customers time and frustration, and in giving them a Free Tier, we actually were actively working against that. We had miscommunicated our value to them, and subsequently missed the mark on showing their value to us and what we knew that they needed. So, we felt the kindest thing to do was sunset the Free Tier and give our customers everything they need in a way that showcases our assets while actually addressing the problems they mentioned above.
A New Plan
We decided that this time around, since many of the conversations we had with customers begged for guidance and support, we instead decided to build value in to our product instead of take it away. We revamped the tiers to now require our Onboarding and made it so the annual price for both of our tiers included that program. The 5-hours (in 1-hr increments) of required Onboarding with a financial professional meant that now, new partners are getting the most out of the time-saving features that they’re investing in at no extra cost. They can sync from ConnectWise PSA with confidence, knowing everything is set up in a way that appropriately and professionally reflects their financial story.
Lastly, we continue to maintain and lead feature parity with other sync tools in the market without any revenue or invoice number limits, so as you find you are growing (hopefully with all of the time we save you!), Gozynta Mobius will have you set up for that, without needing to move up in cost -- in fact, it is company policy to not raise rates for customers who are on a plan with us, only for new customers, so the rate that you sign up with us now is the guaranteed rate forever.
We’re proud that Gozynta’s legacy is to create tools to better the lives of business owners and financial professionals who need it. If you’re one of our partners who used the Free Tier, thank you for choosing to try us out. If you feel that you benefited (or would benefit!) from the Free Tier, do reach out to us at support@gozynta.com and let us know, we’d love to hear from you.
We look forward to continuing to help you with tools that save you time and just make sense. We look forward to earning your trust and maintaining and further developing the best sync tool on the market.
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