If you're going to offer a trial version of your product, base the trial on number of uses or some other metric that would suggest I've actually tried it out—not days since I installed it.
Just to pick on one (but this happens all the time), a few months back I read about and installed a Mac outliner application called Process. I ran it once, but didn't have time to delve in. I just fired it up to try and look into it a little more, and I was told that my 7-day trial was over, and now it wouldn't do anything unless I paid for it.
First of all—seven days? That's not much of a trial if I did use it regularly (whether or not that actually helps sales because it gets people while they're enthusiastic, I don't know). But my scenario can't be that uncommon, and you're just throwing lots of hard-fought potential customers out the window.
Just to pick on one (but this happens all the time), a few months back I read about and installed a Mac outliner application called Process. I ran it once, but didn't have time to delve in. I just fired it up to try and look into it a little more, and I was told that my 7-day trial was over, and now it wouldn't do anything unless I paid for it.
First of all—seven days? That's not much of a trial if I did use it regularly (whether or not that actually helps sales because it gets people while they're enthusiastic, I don't know). But my scenario can't be that uncommon, and you're just throwing lots of hard-fought potential customers out the window.