A bug saved the company

So, letting people try it out it for two weeks prevented them from buying it? That doesn't reflect well on customer satisfaction.

I think more than anything it reflects on the fact that most people don't need to record audio all that often. If the product is fine, but you've done all the recording you need, why would you buy it. I would wager that most users never even saw the trial end nag screen simply because they didn't need to open the app anymore.

I believe this goes hand in hand with certain types of customers. Purchasing software is often a long-term decision, but many people only need it once. In 15 days, they can complete one or two projects and then forget about it. With a 15-minute limitation, however, you are effectively encouraging them—assuming the quality of your product matches the price—to purchase the software.

So customers were satisfied anyway, but because of the bug their satisfaction did not last enough:-)

I'm sure this is some MBA 101 stuff, but I'm slowly learning that all sales come from a sense of urgency.

A two-week long trial ends and you're not even on the computer? Oh well.

You're recording something longer than 15 minutes that you want completed _right now_ and the only way is to upgrade? Instant purchase.

That doesn't mean that urgency has to come from a place of in-authenticity. In this case, I think the trial time limit is fair. People still get real value (actually for even longer than just two weeks), but if you want the full-offering you have to pay for it. It's a decent balance.

So it seems; there's a lot of software you only use incidentally, I suspect this one was right in that spot. Like, once a year or so I need to clean up my hard drive; do I buy a license for a disk usage visualizer, or do I pass because I only use it once? If there's a timed demo I can do my task and forget about it again.

Audio Hijack is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used. Your takeaway is misguided.

It's much more about aligning the freemium window with the urgency horizon.

A two-week trial won't convert a user that's solved their issue within that window.

I see you weren't around when such shareware was the norm.

With a two weeks trial, the effort to reset the app whenever the restriction popped up was minuscule, hence nobody paid money for it.

Bingo. The best trials are those that allow the user to determine whether the product is capable of solving the user’s immediate problem without actually solving it unless the product is purchased.

Probably. I use a lot of trial and free software 1 - 3 times in a single week. I love that its an option. But if everyone forced me to pay I would probably have to.

This. It's not an app that you would necessarily use every day, so basing the trial on a certain number of days wasn't a good fit.

It's a shame that HN doesn't appear to have a "save comment" feature beyond just upvoting, because this is a neat and succinct statement I'd like to remember.

Click on the comment’s timestamp. The “comment thread view” (don’t know what to call it) has a link to favorite it.

Do you own anything Apple, because few bucks for app is nothing, if you just spend several hundreds bucks for monitor stand or RAM. :)

Thanks, useful to know!

If only there was a product that moved this link to a more convenient location! I would buy it on the spot!

The "Refined Hacker News" browser plugin adds the "favorite" link on top of every comment.

(It's one of the few browser plugins I use.)

It's more complicated than that. People have the highest intent for a product early on (ie, at the moment they sign up). That is when they are most likely to pay, and by paying, they make a commitment and invest the time to get value back out of the product.

A free trial gives them a chance to waffle, and usually by the end of the trial they have haven't put in the effort to decide they want to buy the product, so they don't. Paying earlier also creates a commitment bias.

I've seen this over and over again in products. You want to give people enough usage that they can have confidence the product is worth paying for, but not enough time that they waffle.

> all sales come from a sense of urgency

all coerced sales come from a sense of urgency. Not the same thing.

> That doesn't mean that urgency has to come from a place of in-authenticity

In-authenticity is a subjective term here, but are there competing incentives against offering a "use only once" price alongside the full product or a subscription model? You bet.

This is almost certainly why the bug changed everything.

It's really hard to do time limited trials in any durable fashion, where that encompasses more than a single runtime of the program. Something, somewhere, has to persist some kind of indication to the program as to when that period started, and you can always modify it, nuke it etc.

It's more like for many people the software is a solution to a temporary problem ("job to be done", in a recent MBA fad phrase). Once you get the job done, satisfied or not your need to buy Audio Hijack is diminished.

How does it compare to Audacity or OBS or other free tools? With so many written and video tutorials on capturing audio with Audacity and OBS, it seems like a high bar, especially for a single use.

Audacity can do most of the audio editing functions of Audio Hijack.

OBS can replicate the audio routing (though not as smoothly) though I'm not too familiar with its audio processing capabilities. I mostly see OBS and Audio Hijack as complementary products.

That said, Audio Hijack is so good for routing and processing audio that it's not even a competition, AH all day.

I've done so much mischief and tinkering with AH just because it's so easy. You can reroute audio between applications, fiddle with L/R channels and filtering, and pipe it through to others, all on the fly. I've used it for everything from being a DJ in zoom calls, to setting up presentation audio, to setting up a virtual sound board that repeated audio snippets I collected in real time from the conversation, to connecting a facetime audio call from one teammate into a zoom meeting.

There's so much flexibility and setting up the workflows is a breeze. AH hurdles the bar IMO.

That being said, it's a real heavy lifter (along with Loopback) for music production. (Sample size: 1)

What always happens with me is that I'll install the plugin, activate its trial ( as part of the installation process in my mind), then completely forget to get around to testing it until the trial is up.

I know it kind of falls under "user error," but I really wish these plugins had a metered trial period. Like 8 hours of actual usage instead of starting the clock from the time of activation.

Yeah it could be like a mark in a book.