Freemium launch
From sales-gated to self-serve. 4657 accounts in 10 months.
edrone is a marketing automation CRM for ecommerce. Every new customer went through Sales: demo, contract, Support-led onboarding. No self-serve path existed. I saw consistent inbound traffic in GA that never reached Sales, and built the case for a freemium channel to capture it.
Freemium launched May 2025. Over 10 months I iterated on the onboarding through continuous user research and production testing.
Together with two Support team members I brought in as my freemium sub-team, we ran dozens of interviews with fresh signups throughout the project and internal sessions with Support's onboarding and success teams. With each shipped iteration we analysed how users behaved and what could make the experience more seamless.
The vast majority of users reaching edrone were small, one-person stores. No time, no MA experience, no idea whether it would pay off. They could not invest hours into understanding, configuring, or learning a tool. Everything had to work without asking them to build anything.
Early version, May 2025.
Signup
User creates an account
AI content
User sees their store's branded content ready to go
Activation
User reviews what is already on. No setup needed.
Integration
User decides to connect their store
AHA moment
User sees their first order driven by edrone
The final activation path. Value demonstrated before any commitment.
Users create an account, AI generates branded content from their store URL: newsletters, automations, pop-ups ready to send on arrival. Everything is on by default: 7 automations, popup, and identification sequence active from day one. I started with nothing enabled and tested increments until activation stopped improving. The free tier is capped at 500 messages: the minimum for a user to reach their first attributed order. Integration comes last because connecting a store means sharing contacts and product data. Users make that decision after seeing what edrone does.
The shipped onboarding.
I set the NSM as time to first attributed order. That is when users see real revenue and the upgrade decision forms.
Engineers built the foundation from May. From December, I used Codex to build improvements and fixes across the frontend, with partial support from a frontend and backend developer.
Freemium's north star metric. Shortening newsletter delivery from 13 to 1 day was a major contributor. Newsletters generate orders, and the earlier they go out, the faster users see ROI.
78% were active users, integrated with 5+ automations running.
~400 paying customers, adding 16% to edrone's paid base built over 10 years. Industry average for freemium SaaS is 2–5%.