Freemium launch

edrone is marketing automation for ecommerce. Automated messages bring shoppers back to buy: an abandoned cart, a first order, the next one.

For ten years every customer came through a salesperson and stayed with a Support team. Both cost more than a small store would ever pay, so small stores were not worth acquiring. Almost nobody had ever run edrone alone.

Open edrone to the stores the old model could not afford to serve. No salesperson, no Support team. The product sells itself, sets itself up and earns its keep.

Ten years of the old model had built 2,500 paying stores. This channel had to reach the ones it never could, and most of them would never pay at all.

Active meant a store had connected its shop to edrone, had automations running, and was doing around fifty orders a month. Not logins.

A person had set up every paying customer, so the product had never stood on its own. My job was to digitise the onboarding team.

Those customers still wrote their own newsletters, so it was never all or nothing. I had to find the line: what is done before the store arrives, and what it still wants to do itself.

Then a third thing. A newsletter only counts if the next one is coming. Setup that runs once is a demo.

The build was quick; the eleven months were the iterating. Two freemium specialists gave me dozens of store calls, and everything went through pass after pass.

Freemium, not a trial. Orders come when shoppers are ready, not when we are. A trial closes the account before that happens; a free one costs us nothing to leave open.

Everything is built from the store's own site in the minutes after signup. It gives us a URL and nothing else.

Someone still had to decide what runs, and I took it. edrone knows what works better than a store that never ran marketing automation, so I switched everything on. Seven automations are live before the store logs in.

I started with two, to see whether a store would leave running something it had no hand in making. Nobody switched them off, so the rest followed.

Nothing is asked before something is shown. Tailoring means questions, and a question comes before anything runs. So the same seven go out for a furniture store and a store selling socks, and every one has an off switch. Disagreeing costs a click, not a setup.

Nothing sends until the store connects its shop, so integration is the real start line, not signup. That ask is the last step of the walkthrough rather than the first, because by then the store has seen what is waiting for it.