Best approach for gathering interest to access a trial before it's ready?

Hi everyone!

Looking for advice on launching a fairly nuanced product… I work for LocalStack, a category defining devops tool - our offering are part on-prem (as in on our local device, within your CLI) and part SaaS. We built comprehensive out of the box cloud emulators for developers.

Today, we offer one top-line product - LocalStack for AWS. Soon, we will offer two top-line products, LS for AWS and LS for Snowflake. My engineering team has developed the GA version of our on-prem tooling for the Snowflake emulator, but the front end UX for the SaaS that enables any form of effective self-servicing, onboarding, etc. is not there yet. We’re a young org, so very much building & learning how to balance engineering fun and product/strategic requirements

We have a set date in early May where we wanted to fully launch this product - and I am scaling back the scope of it to better meet where we’re at now (we’re post early access and have closed some larger deals via sales, but we are not ready for overall GA)… therefore,

  • I am opting to reconfigure how we gain excitement and interest for this product by re-imagining the pricing page to be a sign-up to indicate interest for the product before the trial is ready.
  • I plan to highlight sales discussions as a viable avenue as well. Sales will also have insight into the leads from the form and be able to reach out proactively if we have a customer that meets our lead scoring criteria.
  • The thinking is to capture e-mails of interested prospective customers and then email them once the trial is ready to go to gain access to it.

I have a few questions that I’d love some help on:

  1. Have you seen any company do this exceptionally well? If so, who and what did they do well?
  2. Should I keep the trial interest form vague and more tied to the top-line product, or actually tie it to what the package will be? Upon true release, we will only have one package for this product but will quickly work to develop more robust packaging.
  3. If I showcase the package, should I show the price (even if we’re not fully aligned on what the price should be)?

THANK YOU in advance!

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Hey Alexa!

Quick question, are you launching this as the first product of a new company, or is it a new product within an existing business? That context matters a lot when deciding how much detail to show and how to position the launch.

If you have access to existing users (from previous products), I’d hold off on showing pricing for now and focus on getting early potential users on calls. Use those conversations to shape your pricing, packaging, and messaging. Once you’ve got a few strong signals, you’ll be in a much better position to launch GA with transparent pricing.

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Thanks for the feedback, Serge!

To answer your question, this is a new product line within an existing business - this product largely targets a distinct user base from our existing product (think of hubspot’s model of having tools for marketers and sales - we have tools for cloud developers and tools for data engineers).

We’ve had a closed early access program with our existing customer base where they have these distinct roles and needs - so we have some good insight on packaging and positioning! But I’m not convinced on pricing yet… I’ll certainly be looking to learn from this early group.

Hey Alexa!

I haven’t seen this done particularly well. As I mentioned in another post here, “Is it a pricing page or a sign-up page?” and there’s plenty of common practice, but not much I’d consider best practice. That said, my review focused on hundreds of pages that are closer in nature to my own product, which differs from yours.

Anchor to the product, not the package. You can position packaging in several ways once you understand your buyer and audience.

Since you’re still early in your maturity, I’d recommend using your sales cycle to gather insights that can help guide your pricing decisions.

Hope that helps, and things continue to go well at LocalStack.

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