It’s a horrible feeling, and it comes with a ready-made explanation that most people reach for within about a day: they’re freeloaders, or I give too much away. Both theories let you stop thinking, which is a big part of their appeal.
My own starting position was about the advice you get next. You’re told to keep nurturing. Another email, another free thing, give it a bit longer and they’ll warm up. I think a lot of that is a polite way of not asking anyone anything, because nobody on that list has been asked whether they’d like to buy, so nobody has had the chance to say no. Fine. Let’s look at whether it holds up
Does free change how people decide?
The best-known experiment on free things involves chocolate. In 2007, Kristina Shampanier, Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely let people choose between a Lindt truffle and a Hershey’s Kiss. (opens in a new tab)With the truffle at 15 cents and the Kiss at 1 cent, 27% of the people who took a chocolate went for the Kiss. Then the researchers knocked a cent off each. Truffle 14 cents, Kiss free. The gap between the two chocolates hadn’t changed, and 69% took the Kiss.
One cent shouldn’t move that many people, and it did because it was the last cent. The authors’ conclusion is that zero behaves like a category of its own, separate from small prices. It was chocolate and pennies, so I wouldn’t carry it as far as a £2,000 package. What it does is stop me reading a download as a small amount of buying interest. People respond to free on different terms from a price, so what someone does with a free thing is a poor stand-in for what they’d do with a priced one. The study says nothing about whether people who take free things go on to buy. That’s a question for the people who took them.
What happens to the people who took the free thing?
I have some of those people, because I ran 100 Reps free in 2023. The idea was to spend 100 minutes a day on your business for 100 days and log what you did, and when I looked at where all that logged time had gone, about 60% of it was content. The whole thing grew out of that experiment. Then I tried to sell it. The first paid attempt, in 2024, flopped. Through 2025 I tried three or four more versions, and they sold one, then two, then none. The version I sell now is all of those attempts squashed together, with the positioning, messaging, pricing and offer sorted.
So I went back through the records to see what had happened to the people from the free version. There were 106 registrations for the 2023 challenge, and the later 100 Reps Club records hold 93 participants. I put the two lists side by side. Thirteen people were on both, matched by email address. Another seven matched by name with a different email, which I’m counting as probable, because people change addresses and two different people can share a name. That’s twenty people from the free challenge who turned up again in the paid era. Ten of them are linked to Round One in July 2026, and the other ten carry Beta tags.
Twenty out of 106 is not a lot, and I’d be careful about what it says. “Linked to Round One” means they’re in the records. I haven’t checked Round 3 or the annual renewals yet, so I can’t tell you how many of the twenty paid, or how many stayed. What I can say is that some people who registered for the free version came back for later ones, and the freeloader theory doesn’t have much to say about that.
Why would someone take a free thing and not buy?
There are at least four explanations, and the records don’t let me choose between them.
One is that patience worked. They liked what they got in 2023, stayed around, and came back when there was a version they wanted. That is the case for nurturing, and I’d been arguing against it.
Another is that the paid versions weren’t good enough. My own explanation for those flops is that I overcomplicated them and didn’t believe in them enough to push them through. If that’s right, plenty of people may have looked at those versions and passed for good reason, and I’d have been blaming them for my problem. This is the explanation that puts the problem on me, and it’s the one I’d look at first in a client’s business. Before you decide your audience are freebie people, look at whether the paid thing gave them a good reason to say yes.
A third is that life moved. Money got easier, work calmed down, or a decision finally got made. Nothing I did in 2024 would have touched that.
A fourth is that the free thing wasn’t a download. A hundred minutes a day for a hundred days is a lot of effort to give anything, and anyone who stuck with it for nothing has shown you something that a person who ticked a box for a PDF hasn’t. Registering for the challenge doesn’t mean someone finished it, so I’d want to know which of the twenty did. That’s a hypothesis, and it means “free” covers a wide range of things. The chocolate study only covers the one that costs the taker nothing at all.
Then there’s what I can’t see. The records show the people who came back. The other 86 don’t appear in the later records I checked, and I don’t know why. Nothing here shows that free attracts buyers. It shows that some people who took the free version turned up in later ones, which is a smaller claim.
How do you find out which explanation applies to your list?
Each of the four explanations should leave a different trail in whatever you already have. Who paid, what they took first and how long ago is where I’d start in most businesses, and it’s what I was doing here, with fewer records than I’d like. If patience worked, I’d expect people to have kept opening emails in between. If the offers weren’t good enough, I’d expect to see people look at a sales page or reply and then go. If life moved, there would be a long gap and then a return. If all they wanted was the free thing, there would be nothing after it. Purchase history, old enquiries and analytics can answer some of that, and a conversation with someone on the list adds the reasons that records can’t show.
I came in with a view about nurturing and some of it has survived. The advice to keep going gets handed out without anyone looking at what the list has already done, and I’d still want that looked at before another email goes out. What the records show is that some people from the free version turned up again later, and they don’t say why. The number I’d most like is what happened to the other 86.