What do you do when everyone loves your product but no one’s paying for it? That was the challenge facing Beautiful.ai. Founder Mitch Grasso nailed the product, but to build a sustainable business, he brought in operator Jason Lapp as CEO.
In this conversation, Jason shares how Beautiful.ai killed its freemium tier, introduced a credit-card-gated trial without losing momentum, and learned to serve both self-serve and enterprise customers at the same time. He also explains how to listen to customer feedback without becoming a feature factory, and why non-technical founders shouldn’t try to know everything about the tech stack.
If you’re a founder wondering when to put up a paywall — or how to balance PLG with enterprise sales — here's a playbook.
RUNTIME 46:20 EPISODE BREAKDOWN(3:35) “ The timing of us coming together was really fortuitous for beautiful because he had already built the first version of beautiful and put it in market.”
(6:28) “ Microsoft and Google report that there's close to a billion people that use presentation software on a monthly basis.”
(10:51) “ At a certain point after getting in market, you start to get a different set of signal.”
(14:52) The free trial period is a great opportunity to learn about what customers value most.
(19:56) Leverage “emotional” feedback to improve the customer experience.
(23:46) “ We do have a guiding principle, which is: on the customer side, we generally don't build for one customer need.”
(26:17) Beautiful.ai uses NPS surveys to gather feedback from enterprise and individual users.
(28:49) Since pivoting to paid, they have separate teams for enterprise and individual customers.
(23:02) “ We think about an ICP, and then we think about an IECP, meaning the enterprise as a whole.”
(33:57) Capturing behavioral and attitudinal data to understand customer behavior.
(37:18) How the broader rise of generative AI has influenced GTM strategy.
(42:33) Jason shares some advice for non-technical CEOs.
LINKS- Jason Lapp
- Beautiful.ai
- AI Isn’t Coming For Jobs, It’s Coming For Inefficiency
- Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value, Teresa Torres
- Everything You Need to Know About Freemium Pricing, Kyle Poyar, OpenView Partners
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Thanks for listening!
– Walter.
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