Taking a Moonshot: CM Commerce Is Now Free!
Yep – you read that correctly: the current version of CM Commerce (previously Receiptful) – and all of the features we’ve released to date – is now free.
This may come as a bit of surprise given that we only launched CM Commerce (previously Receiptful) earlier this month and it most definitely wasn’t free then (and hasn’t been until now).
Such a quick change to our business model would indicate a drastic change in our mindset about the business and / or the feedback that we’ve had in since launch.
I’d bet that the default position on outside perception would thus be one of confusion and intrigue about our decision. As such, our whole team decided that we’d like to explain this (seemingly) quick pivot by sharing the considerations that formulated the decision in our heads.
One Receipt To Conquer Them All
We started building CM Commerce (previously Receiptful) with one, clear vision in mind:
CM Commerce will power the majority of all receipts being sent in the world.
To achieve this, we decided that we’d focus on The One Metric That Matters. In our case that metric would simply be the number of receipts we’re sending (on behalf of our users).
If we were to be fully invested in this strategy and focus (to achieve our vision), it meant that our short-term execution needed alignment too.
Selling a new Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) product is hard. It’s not called the “slow, long, SaaS ramp of death” for no reason. And that’s when you’re selling a painkiller that solves a very extreme problem for someone. In the case of CM Commerce, we’re without peers and we’re exploring a hypothetical value proposition that has no direct point of reference.
Removing the friction and challenge of justifying a price tag means we’re aligning ourselves with our vision and goals: send more receipts.
Debunking The Myth: There Is No Traction
Our decision can easily be assumed to be a counter-measure to not having generated traction in the last couple of weeks.
The reality is that we set ourselves very modest goals to start off with: we wanted 10 live customers by the end of this month and we wanted a healthy funnel of new leads, trial users and customers about to go live.
We’ve achieved that already.
In addition to that, we’re sending well in excess of a 1000 receipts a month and the data we’re gathering is promising.
If I were to be an objective judge about our progress, I’d venture to say that we’re smack-bam in the early stages of that slow, long SaaS death ramp. 😉
There Is No Feedback Loop
Today we don’t have a proper feedback loop within the product. What I mean with that is that we’ve unfortunately not yet built the infrastructure and features to help us determine exactly what the value of our product is to our customers.
This is something that comes with greater (product) maturity. Considering that the current CM Commerce was built in approximately 9 weeks, we’re feeling pretty good about our progress thus far; regardless of not having this feedback loop.
Right now we’re uncomfortable putting a price tag on a value that we can’t quantify. Having this feedback loop in place will help us quantify that value (which will eventually translate itself to the implementation of paid CM Commerce plans).
(We are releasing new features in the next week or two, whereby we will have the first version of this extended tracking in place.)
Learning To Make Money
We’ve always known that greater amounts of data (which we can loosely term as Big Data) will ultimately unlock the most significant value for our customers.
This would happen on both a micro and macro level.
On a micro-level, we’ll be learning about individual customers and how their customers interacts with their CM Commerce-powered receipts. This means that we’re moving away from a hypothetical value proposition to something that is generating a quantifiable increase in our customers’ revenues.
The best part happens on a macro-level though, where we really start to tap into the advantage of that Big Data. Within this sphere, we’re learning about how customers in general interacts with receipts and which parts of those interactions we can leverage to make customers more money. It’s also here where the whole solution will be much greater than the sum of its parts.
To this extent, we’ve had a couple of big features on our roadmap since Day 1. These are features that will take us weeks to build and would do one of two things:
- Capture and analyze more of the data we’re capturing; and
- Leveraging that learning vicariously through other features.
These are things that we’d be happy to put a pricetag on, because this starts unlocking the real value of CM Commerce.
What does this mean for CM Commerce today?
First off – nothing changes for our existing customers, except for the fact that everyone has now been moved to the new one-size-fits-all free plan (regardless of which plan they signed up for before).
In the short-term, we’ll continue to ship releases with additional features (like last week’s release. We’re also working on some initial extensive features, which we’ll roll-out as a premium add-on to these free plans (for a nominal monthly fee) in the next couple of weeks.
We’re also working on a whole bunch of additional out-of-box integrations to go alongside our WooCommerce integration and our API. These integrations widens the top of our funnel and allows us to get CM Commerce into as many different environments as possible (to send more receipts and accelerate our learning).
Want to help us send more receipts?
First step is to create your free CM Commerce account today; use the product and experiment with the tools we’ve built.
We’d love to hear your feedback and collaborate with you to figure out where you could leverage CM Commerce to make more money for you from your customers. 🙂