Shipping accounting software with no billing system — the “free period” launch (2013)

Settling the order first

A company selling accounting software left the mechanism for collecting its own money until last. The freee released in March 2013 had no billing function at all; president Daisuke Sasaki announced that “we are in a free period at the moment” while that function was being built behind the scenes. The integrated design presumed that invoicing, receipts, the till and payments would all be threaded into one line, and that takes time to construct. Finish the core first, put collection behind it. The order was a choice to establish whether the product would be accepted before establishing what it was worth.

The 3,300 businesses registered in two months were accumulated during the free period. How many of them went on paying ¥980 and ¥1,980 a month once July came cannot be traced in the press of the day. Gathering users for nothing and then moving them to a charge leaves nothing at all if they fall away at the switch. Even so, the company kept widening: payroll in October 2014, company formation in June 2015. The integrated approach that Sasaki himself called hard to build, he pursued on the side of widening rather than narrowing.