Late last year, my colleague Pat Chase and I announced the Redpoint Free Trial SaaS Survey. Over the course of a few weeks, we received roughly 600 responses from SaaS startups who use these marketing techniques. They span companies from $1M in ARR to more than $100M. The respondents sold into every key function of a business and at all different price points. On February 5 at 10am, I’ll be sharing the top 10 learnings from the survey at Saastr. After the conference, I’ll post the slides with the conclusions here.

This is the first time we’ve run a large scale survey. We were surprised in three ways.

The first is the amount of responses; we were stunned by the volume of data and willingness to share. Thank you to everyone who contributed.

Second, it takes quite a bit of work to analyze the data, far more than I expected. We wrote more than 1000 lines of code to identify the ways startups use free trials. We cut the data by contract size, target buyer, free trial structure, and many other dimensions. Then we tested the results for statistical significance to ensure we’re pointing startups in the right direction.

Third, the data suggests that some of the common knowledge about free trials is correct. And some of it deserves more testing. But that most of the conclusions apply across a broad base of startups. I’m excited to share more soon.

Photo by Capturing the human heart. on Unsplash