LiveMarket 30 day trials converted 54% of testers to paid subscriptions

Context

Car dealers use the SaaS platform AutoGate to manage leads and inventory. The data/insights product LiveMarket is part of Autogate, and car dealers use it to analyse their stock (as well as the competition) to price cars competitively.

Problem

Poor product discovery and signup friction. Users fully sales-gated; couldn't self-explore features like inventory analysis or pricing recommendations. Hard to grasp benefits without hands-on testing.

Hypothesis

Introducing freemium would eliminate barriers, enabling self-serve discovery where users could test core value firsthand and convert organically, reducing sales dependency while scaling adoption.

My role

I owned the full product design process from discovery through rollout, collaborating closely with Product, Engineering, and Data teams as well as the Marketing team for GTM activities.

Solution

  • In-app-driven discovery flows leading straight to 30 day trial activation, bypassing sales gates and manual intervention via Salesforce.

  • Embedded in-app benefit tours with live walkthroughs of essential features.

  • Contextual post-trial upsell mechanics in AutoGate informing users about the end of the trial phase

Outcomes

  • 4% of users who discovered the free 30 day trial did start one

  • 54% of dealers who started a free trial converted to a paid subscription

  • +$50K expected annual revenue with converted dealers in fist 6 weeks

Key learnings

  • Discovery friction, not the absence of freemium, was the true growth blocker - the sales-gate completely obscured product value from potential users.

  • Sales team still want to make deals (e.g., 45-day free trials) rather than hand off self-serve leads

  • People need proactive nudges (e.g. sales teams informing them about the free trial in sales calls), not as much pure self-service as we thought.

Future improvements

Evolve to a persistent always-on freemium model with aggressive multi-channel discovery, including in-app prompts and targeted email sequences.

While automation is hard to achieve, this project showed that when it works (even with sales teams nudging), it removes massive friction - this can and should be applied to other products in the AutoGate ecosystem.