Spotify maximizes their lifetime value by having their free users become dependent on Spotify. Usually engaged via some free premium trial, users begin crafting their perfect playlists and eventually building the habit of using Spotify. Once users become very familiar with the platform, Spotify introduces deliberate pain points: limited skips, ads, the inability to select the song you want to select. All these minor inconveniences have users begin to find the most easy moat. And typically speaking with Spotify, the easy moat becomes the student discounts, family plans, and the inability to export playlists.
The New York Times is a very strict paywall, however, it’s at a very cheap price. This makes the New York Times very accessible for our financial standpoint. They essentially want for all their users to pay. They don’t want any user coming to the platform and not spending money. They price it such that users should be fine paying a long term for the subscription. Furthermore, New York Times attempts to enter the daily workflow of their customers, supported by adding stickiness with games like Wordle and other products to increase user subscription.
Figma has a sort of B2C and B2B model where the B2C focuses on providing great free features to individual designers, but steep paywall on the B2B side limiting collaboration and larger workspace controls. This enables there to be a bottom-up adoption of Figma, essentially having all the workers love and rely on the product will incentivize the C-Suite of organizations to provide the tools in order to maximize employee productivity.
