Changing Your Price Anchor With Anais Concepcion  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Use Targeted Free Keys To Lower Friction** - Offer free enterprise activation keys to individuals and orgs under a clear revenue threshold to reduce friction and protect small users from nickel-and-diming. - Tie keys to installation ID, expected users, and a one-year term to keep the program manageable and renewable. Transcript: Anais Concepcion So it's pretty straightforward. It's if you are an individual, like a hobbyist or a home labber, or if you're an organization with less than a million U.S. Dollars in annual revenue or funding, then you can apply for a free activation key that is valid. It is tied to your installation's ID. It is tied to your expected number of users for the year and a one-year term. And you can renew it every year as long as you qualify. ([Time 0:02:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c759d06b-bec2-4eb0-b2fd-e8fdaefc6043)) - **Shift The Default To Raise The Price Anchor** - Making the full product the default shifts perception so non-paying users no longer anchor value at zero. - This also increases testers for paid features, improving product feedback on revenue-driving areas. Transcript: Anais Concepcion So one of them is if we do this, then it kind of makes the full version of Grist, the main version of Grist. So instead of having the community, which is the primary one, and then people are dragged kicking and screaming into paying for the enterprise one, if they absolutely have to, most People are on the full version of Grist. And now if you are a large enterprise you might feel like you're missing out if you're not paying for the enterprise so that was one of the reasons why we did this is and in fact we're right Now talking about possibly not calling it enterprise anymore because it's not because it's not no longer accurate it's the it's grist and then the other one will just be the community Version and it's really about changing the perception around this because i think in open source a lot of bad branding when it's like you can do the free one or you can do the paid one like Okay what if we have just full grist that's what most people are using and then there's this one that feels like you're getting less so that was part of the strategy and then the other thing Was because of that typical structure where most people using the community version and only a few people are using the enterprise version, that means you have fewer people testing Your paid features. That doesn't seem wise. Like I want more people testing the enterprise ones, giving me product feedback, telling me what works well and what doesn't. Because that's the moneymaker, right? ([Time 0:04:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/18266f38-eb16-4cbc-9ffb-77e75dbe4141)) - **Turn Self-Hosters Into Measurable Leads** - Use an application form for free keys to convert anonymous self-hosters into measurable leads and case study candidates. - Leverage influencer spikes to analyze who applies and capture testimonials and evangelists from genuine users. Transcript: Anais Concepcion Anyone who's ever tried to fundraise, you're like, at most I can tell you the number of installations out there, maybe, right? And you struggle. Well, this has given us more numbers in terms of visibility on who is using us and why, because they have to do a form submission. Yes. When you want an activation key, there's a form and people want to talk for the most part. Like a lot of people, you know, especially the ones who are asking for a lot of keys and want to explain why tends to be nonprofits. We're like, I have a lot of volunteers. Here's my website. I'm totally legit. But then you learn a lot about how people are using Grist. And that's really useful for just knowing who your market is. And then even if that market's slightly different than the people who pay, there's some overlap. And some of those will say, hey, I'm doing this on my home lab. I want to try out the full functionality. And I might bring this into this company that I work for, which wouldn't qualify. And they'll tell you that upfront. And some of those have gotten to the stage where, yeah, now they are trying to implement it on a small team at a bigger institution. So it's a very slow, but extant lead generation basically. And also it helps us measure the impact of influencer marketing better. So before we'd put, we'd pay an influencer, we'd see more visits to the website. Maybe we're seeing more installations happen, but we don't know much about who they are or why. ([Time 0:09:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b311b7b6-9990-4bca-8180-9fdd6b4dbaa2)) - **Map Buckets First, Then Automate** - Manually review early applications to discover common user buckets before automating the process. - Create simple follow-up buckets (quick approve, extended trial, university subgroup, potential partner, sales lead) for scalable handling. Transcript: Anais Concepcion Exactly so um yeah that's a great question it was really time intensive in the first few months because what I was really seeing is what are the common buckets? I'm getting a lot of form submissions that are going into a grist document. And what are the patterns that I'm seeing? And five emerged. One is don't think about it super qualified, a home lab or a tiny organization. Go ahead, just do it. The next one is I don't actually know if you qualify or not. We're too busy to spend more time arguing about this. So I'm just going to extend your trial to six months, tell you I don't know if you qualify or not, let this become sticky for you over the next six months, see what happens. Maybe six months is a sale, maybe it's not. I'm not spending too much more time. And just being clear about that in the response. Is what I'm calling like university subgroups. So a university very rarely would qualify, but within universities, what you'll have is a research group or like a tech group that has their own grant, their own decision-making process. They don't really have a way to like engage with the university procurement system. They have a very limited thing. They're doing one thing as part of a grad program. So for those, what I end up saying is, hey, we're looking at the parent organization, but I can extend a key. Basically I'll do like a year for them and just let that just for evangelism, because that's a lot of young people who are very technical, who are researchers, let them touch that. And if it starts spreading within that university, great. And if it doesn't, they're going to go do other things and be aware of Christ. So that one's just pure brand awareness. So I'll just give them a longer evaluation. Those three once i do those buckets i can automate that once i know what i'm doing for those three um so all i need is somebody to just come in and tag in grist what bucket are they and then The last two buckets one is um potential partners so what this program did was for a lot of it solution building kind of tech consulting companies that have a lot of customers they themselves May not be making more than a million a year might be a team of like four people, but their customers might. So then that's a good reseller path. So when I see someone like that, now I'm engaging with them and making them a partner. Then the last one is somebody who's clearly a sales lead that just goes to sales. So that's just sort of, yeah. ([Time 0:12:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4c786cb4-0efc-4d46-8374-53e6ba24f239)) - **Hidden Power Users Turned Into Case Studies** - Many unknown self-hosters contacted Grist and became case studies, like a digital marketing agency that built its entire ERP in Grist. - These discoveries surfaced real, impressive uses the team hadn't known about before. Transcript: Anais Concepcion The other results really was marketing. We've gotten a lot of case studies out of this. So a lot of people, especially in the beginning, now fewer because now it tends to be new users who haven't really implemented grist but in that first couple of months it was existing Self-hosters we didn't even know about who've already been using grist for a long time who are like oh my god we love you and they're like great tell us how you use us right so one was like A digital marketing agency that built their entire erp system in grist we didn't know about this at all right and that's not that's typical for um you know open source self-hosted products, But now we get a case study out of that. So that's been useful. And just, yeah, better testimonials and relationships. We do something like a virtual event in our, we have a discord where our most enthusiastic users, mostly self-hosters hang out and we do a virtual community event. And it's a great way to know who are our power users because we invite them to speak and show off what they've built in Grist in this conference. ([Time 0:18:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b57d1231-d88a-47a7-8d42-87f42e3f1170)) - **Feature Confusion Reveals Messaging Opportunities** - Confusion arose between enterprise admin controls and core access rules, revealing communication gaps. - Clarifying feature boundaries improved messaging and revealed what users actually want. Transcript: Anais Concepcion Yeah. So in particular, well, there's two things. One is just confusion in the market. We have two features. One is advanced admin controls, and the other one is access rules. These things can sound really similar. So actually, it was interesting to see the amount of confusion between these two features, because one is enterprise-only, the other one's in the core. And usually what people want is the one that's in the core anyway. So that was interesting. Is that helped identify we need to change our communication around these two features so people understand what is in what. Because one is basically just what are all your resources and authorizations for your entire installation. That's the enterprise one. The other one is, you know, granular column row level controls within a grist database. And that's in the core. So being able to explain that difference became really important. And also the advanced admin controls that's one where right now at its most basic is it's what are all of my resources all of my users who is authorized to use what how to disable certain Accounts right just like that governance but people want a lot more they want things like well I want to know a large installation. Like, am I paying for people that I shouldn't be paying for, right? Even the people when they're free, sometimes they just want to know who's using this, who can I get rid of? So yeah, so it's been useful in just how are people actually using this? ([Time 0:19:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d0658347-ee6b-497d-a09c-45f848e83fc6)) - **Decide Features By Strategy, Not Guilt** - When debating feature placement, focus on strategy: is it a lead/brand driver or a direct revenue maker? - Ensure portability so documents and customizations keep working when users downgrade to protect user trust. Transcript: Anais Concepcion I mean, really bluntly, what it does is it makes it easier to say, if somebody who is not an enterprise wants to use this feature, they can apply for the key, they can get the key. And that has just made, because we're doing open source, because there's a lot of like bleeding heart, you know, kind of like values here, right? So like one concrete debate would be, we have something called custom widgets that let you write a little bit of code to read or write to your database using, yeah, like a little bit of Front end code to change how you view things within a grist document. And it integrates with everything else. It links to other tables. It has all the gristiness around it. And a lot of people for the past couple of years have been using AI to do that front-end code, people who aren't developers. But it kind of requires you to know exactly what's happening. And it was still just a little too hard. You needed to invest a lot of time to figure out, well, how do I make sure that ChatGPT or Claude or whoever I'm using understands enough about a gris custom widget to like give it to me in The right format so there was a custom widget that somebody on our company just tinkered with over the weekend and then just made it so that the custom code is stored within the document So it's fully portable and it tells you the instructions to just copy into a bot somewhere so the argument around okay how is this going to be enterprise or is it going to be core you know Any argument that's like, well, this is really useful for individuals, like that argument, it's just off the table now. Instead, the argument is more around pure strategy. Do we want this to be in the core version? Because we see this as a lead generator usage brand awareness, or is this a money maker for us? And that's it. It's not, it just, the part that's just the kind of bleeding heart part of it and focuses on what is our strategy here. And the other thing it did for us is it said, okay, well, we need to protect, though, that if you did build a custom widget using this AI enhanced editor, if all of a sudden you move that into, If we were to put it in enterprise, if you then move it to core, it should still read well and work. It shouldn't break. So maybe you don't get the editing and the AI help part of it, but it should still work if you were to downgrade because we don't want things to completely break or be unusable. In the end, we decided we have more, we have bigger ambitions for how to use AI Ingress. So we're releasing it as a community widget. So we're basically saying we could do more with it. We're not going to. It's useful enough as is. That's fine. It's a community widget. We want to do more than that. ([Time 0:21:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2c7d4351-3f8b-43d0-8200-920e78706ca6)) - **Users Stop Debating Version Choice** - The program made many users stop debating which version to use and simply apply for the full one. - Anais expects a larger cultural shift if they rebrand 'enterprise' away from sounding like the premium default. Transcript: Emily O'Meara And has there been any other advantages related to just getting more eyes on your enterprise features? And if so, what are they? Anais Concepcion I don't know if it's necessarily more eyes on the enterprise feature. Really does come back to making what has been working is people are no longer doing the debate or most users are no longer doing the debate of do I need the full one, the enterprise or the Community? Can I get by with or without it? They're no longer thinking about that or even diving as deep into our documentation to figure out what the differences are. They're just applying for the full version. So like that is accelerating a little bit. So the idea of getting that to be the main version that is used and what I haven't seen yet, but I'm hoping to see by the end of the year is a shift in, and I think that's why I want to change the Branding and not call it enterprise anymore, is a shift in what is the primary one that the community uses. I think that's going to be the real value because it makes it harder for people who should pay to then use the one that feels like it's not good enough compared to the full one. Like that big part of this, right? Is I want to make it that the full version is the community version. ([Time 0:25:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/193aa7ee-5534-468a-b43d-914547cd8aff)) - **Low Friction, Low Abuse** - A low-effort application hoop preserves value while keeping access fair; most dishonest applicants self-eliminate. - Some legitimate small teams use the program to prove value and later convert through sales engagement. Transcript: Anais Concepcion And the hoop's pretty low. It's a form. It's a grist form. That's it. And yeah, there's going to be a person who reviews it. And I will say, you know, a lot of people might wonder, well, how many people are lying or how many people are trying to get away with something? There is a little bit of that. Um, but I'd say three things happen. One, uh, some liars are obvious. They tell you no information about who they are. They use the net Gmail and they want a thousand keys. Okay. No, like just no. So that was easy. Uh, the other one will be, somebody who is hoping it's automated. They're testing. So they'll give you information about who they are and they think they'll just get a key anyway. And then you're like, no. And then for the most part, most of them will just ghost you. They just won't like, if they're not getting a key, then they just won't use it. And they just won't respond to the sales thing. And that's fine. Some of them will, some of of them will then engage with you um and then the there is also a category of basically people who come in from the beginning saying hey i know my company wouldn't Qualify but we're a team of four people who are neglected with a shoestring budget can you help me anyway um and you know as our sales team grows we can put more effort into figuring out What to do there. ([Time 0:27:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5183ca43-4147-4471-bc44-a2bafdcea210)) - **Measure Impact When Keys Expire** - Expect revenue effects to lag; track what happens when one-year keys expire to measure conversion. - Use partner-driven proofs and university stickiness as signals for future sales opportunities. Transcript: Anais Concepcion After five months? Not really. We've had some sales leads. And like I said, there's one that could be, right? They're supposed to make a decision in the next few weeks that came from a particular, like a partner that we found through the program. In a year when these keys start expiring. I think that's the university ones would be interesting. And some of the ones that were kind of on the cusp that we weren't sure about, it'd be interesting to see what the conversations are like then. But a big part of the play is just making this sticky inside some institutions. ([Time 0:30:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d541e3ba-b05c-4b38-88ee-5dd73cc48bb8))