There are many who will argue that it is not a good practice to offer your service for free. Proponents of this school of thought would not agree with the idea of providing free service in the hope that it would generate more business.
There are good enough reasons not to offer free services. The first reason lies in the basic understanding of business's primary activity: sales. The most basic definition of a sale is providing a product (or service) that meets existing demand. You have no proven demand until you have enough people willing to pay for your product i.e. to part with money in exchange for the product or service you are offering. If all you have are willing consumers, but who are not ready to pay in exchange for the service or product you offer, you may not yet have found a sustainable business model.
In short, the business will grow when it finds enough customers willing to pay for the provision of goods/service. If that is the case, it would appear a risky thing to provide free services.
The second reason is that generally, people are ready to pay for what they attach value to. There are instances where we value something and genuinely cannot afford to buy it. However, we will mostly find ways to afford that which we value: we start saving to buy it at a later date, we sacrifice that which we deem of less value or look for an alternative source of income to finance that which we deem valuable. This means that if people are not willing to pay for a product or service, it may not be of great value to them. What does this mean to the entrepreneur?
It could be that the product or service is not sufficiently meeting a given customer need. As Uri Levine says, fall in love with the problem, not the solution and the rest will follow. As entrepreneurs, the main temptation is to focus on our solution. PM Paul says that the number one reason why startups fail is that there was no market need. Therefore, it could be that the reason customers are not willing to pay for our service is that we have not fully identified with their pain and therefore whatever we deem a solution actually is not so. The challenge then is to see the product through the eyes of the customer. If it solves a problem, who wouldn't pay?
Are we then advocating for startups to provide free services for their businesses to grow? Not necessarily. We are noting that there are good reasons not to offer free services, but also acknowledging that it got us started. The important thing to note is that we didn't merely offer the service for free so that we could get started. We were involved in something that we loved so much we were ready to do it for no pay, and we did it well enough until there were enough people willing to pay for it.
Now, it is not that we have attained all that we should be; neither have we reached perfection. We are not saying that we have it all together or that we have made it. No. We do not consider ourselves to have laid hold of all that we can be; but we reach forward and press toward The Goal. We do not count ourselves experts in all of this, we fasten our hearts to future accomplishments.
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