Instead of charging doctors for its valuable productivity tools, Doximity offers them for free to maximize user engagement. This creates a highly concentrated, valuable audience of physicians, which is then monetized through targeted advertising from pharmaceutical companies, its primary revenue source.

Entrepreneurs rush to market with an MVP, often giving away the 20% of features that drive 80% of customer willingness to pay. They then spend time building the less valuable 80%, inadvertently training customers to expect more for less and making future monetization difficult.

To land its first skeptical customers like Drada, Merge offered its platform for free for two months without a contract. This de-risked the decision for the customer and allowed Merge to prove its product's value and the team's responsiveness before asking for a financial commitment.

Grammarly's free version only showed spelling fixes, hiding its advanced AI capabilities. By interspersing paid suggestions (like tone and clarity) into the free experience, they demonstrated the product's full power and dramatically increased conversions.

Standard SaaS pricing fails for agentic products because high usage becomes a cost center. Avoid the trap of profiting from non-use. Instead, implement a hybrid model with a fixed base and usage-based overages, or, ideally, tie pricing directly to measurable outcomes generated by the AI.

The biggest initial hurdle for a new product isn't getting the first dollar of revenue; it's crossing the chasm from a user trying the product once to becoming a truly engaged, repeat user. This "penny gap of engagement" is the most critical early milestone to overcome for long-term success.

StatusGator discovered a core use case by observing user inaction. When customers turned off the primary alert feature, the founders realized the 'single pane of glass' dashboard had standalone value, which led to the development of public status pages.

A key heuristic for identifying low-value "snake oil" AI products is an immediate paywall. If an AI tool is genuinely powerful and automated, it should offer a generous free tier or credits to demonstrate value (like ChatGPT or Suno). Forcing a credit card upfront suggests the product can't stand on its own and needs to lock in revenue before its lack of utility is discovered.