How to find innovators with a freemium model

I have the idea to create a python library that supports the machine learning modelling step in Python (you get a UI that let's you click together your models and out comes python code). I already found that the problem is frequent and relevant enough in that niche market through some tests (people signing up to my mailing list).

The issue I see is that my users are ML engineers, Data Scientists and other technical users that work in companies or was freelancers, which feels rather like a B2B market to me.

However, since Python is open source, charging a lot of money is hard, which is why I thought a low price subscription service is more suitable (which feels then more like a B2C market). And with such a business model, I see the need to go for mass marketing.

The challenge for me is the following: I want to make a sustainable business out of it, which is why I don't want to go free immediately (unless there is no other alternative). Also, I don't want to get "bad data" (by having the STATA and SPSS modeler users out their that dump their weird feature requests on me). Instead, I want to get really got feedback to achieve product/market fit asap. That's why I thought about finding the innovators out there that pay for the vision rather than the product itself (the latter being late adopters in my estimate)

Hope that clarifies the situation.

/r/startups Thread Parent