Understanding Freemium - How to Create and Grow Paying Customers
Wednesday, August 12, 2009 at 11:30PM Many thanks those who attended tonight's Seattle Tech Startups meeting. I know there is a rule to never say anything negative about yourself, but it was evident in my delivery that I was not as well prepared as I should be. I apologize. Preparation is something I recommend frequently to my clients and coworkers, and quite frankly, I waited too long to settle on and finalize my message.
Lessons learned sometimes need to be re-learned . . . I will continue to iterate to optimize my presentation skills.
I hope you find the PowerPoint slides helpful as you consider if and how you will approach Freemium. Take a look and read through the slides I did not cover, as well as the notes included for some of the slides. Also, keep an eye on Pricing Observer as I post more actual examples of various approaches to pricing.
As I mentioned, there is much to consider and the duration of today's talk didn't allow for details around topics such as:
- Customer Insight
- Value Proposition Framework & Messaging
- Competitive Intelligence
- Pricing Research & Strategy (and all that goes into it and it affects)
- Choosing Actionable & Relevant Metrics
- Market Opportunity Assessment & Monitoring
- Linking Strategy to Execution (The Value Play Book)
- and much more
Thanks once again for attending and contributing to Seattle Tech Startups.
Some of you have already connected with me about meeting up for deeper discussions, for others I would be happy to sit down and discuss your opportunity, don't hesitate to contact me.
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Reader Comments (2)
Very nice post and presentation.
It is very important to discuss and clarify some concepts in order to not mix them.
Interesting the points discouraging fremium as well, since it is not that simple the implementation.
Maybe, in another post, you could indicate and comment some examples of very well designed strategies of fremium models.
Thanks,
This is a great post- and presentation. I especially liked the focus on having a metrics- based plan around how you price and divide the free from paid. One of the tips I can resoundly second is launch your beta with a pricing page. That lets you get immediate feedback from potential customers on whether or not it works (or is feasible).
When we launched our private beta, we had one pricing plan. We quickly found through feedback to our pricing page that for some users, it worked great for- and others, not so well. After further research- we quickly realized there was no technical difference between these two types of customers, and it was our price inflexibility that was an inhibitor. We updated our pricing and saw immediate benefit.
Freemium can be a stickier wicket in that you've got to differentiate the free from paid clearly at the get go. We talk a bit about this on our blog.
Great presentation again, i'm going to forward it on :)
Tim