I think the problem might be the pricing model?
Like, when we first launched Mode, we charged different prices for creator and viewer seats. Back then, we figured that analysts and data engineers would be our power users, would value the product a lot. And we could charge a lot for those seats, and give away seats to "consumers" for free.
But this doesn't really work. First, to make the economics work, you had to charge a relatively high price lot for analysts — roughly, a couple hundred dollars a month. Even if the total cost of an annual contract isn't that high, people balk at that sticker price; they're accustomed to SaaS products being tens of dollars a month, not hundreds. And second, the people who create stuff in data tools aren’t like designers or engineers, where there’s a pretty hard line between a creator and a consumer. Companies are full of people who want to occasionally write SQL queries or create their own reports. But they don’t want to do it as much as an analyst, and will argue that it’s not fair for them to pay the full analyst price for partial analyst usage.
At Mode, first tried to solve this by negotiating a bunch of weird partial seat licenses, where customers would tell us they wanted 10 full seats and 50 partial seats, so we’d charge them for 20 and call it even. But this is really messy to sell and a huge pain for customers to manage. Plus, both of us were trying to triangulate around an agreeable annual price. All the partial seat antics were just gymnastics to make it work.
So, we eventually threw it all out in favor of a flat per seat fee. But inevitably, this incentivized us to build more features for everyone, and one you do that, you're inevitably going to build a BI too. And so we did.
Every other data product get stuck in the same trap, for what seems to be the same reason: It starts as a specialized tool; its pricing model encourages the company to build things that expand who can use the product; they build generic features like dashboards and drag-and-drop charts; they become BI.
Show me your pricing page, I'll show you the outcome, I guess.
https://lnkd.in/eeMDvYNU