Can We Ignore Churn Early On at a SaaS Company?
Jason Lemkin has my juices flowing again. He’s published a blog post with the suggestion that you should ignore churn and length of sales cycle as key management metrics when a SaaS company is young. I’m with him on the Sales Cycle–it’ll be all over the map in the early days. But on churn? Nope, [...]
Is Freemium Compatible with Enterprise Software?
Is the freemium model compatible with traditional enterprise software? Yes but it requires a significant shift in the way you go to business as well as design and build the customer experience.
MIT Traced Twitter’s Rise Through Conventional Social Nets
Researchers at MIT have concluded from a research study that the spread of Twitter occurred through traditional social channels. That might not seem earth shaking because, well, how else would a new social technology spread? As the report notes, “MIT researchers who studied the growth of the newly hatched Twitter from 2006 to 2009 say [...]
Freemium Mechanics
I read an interesting blog post by Ruben Gamez titled Why Free Plans Don’t Work. If you are interested in freemium business models or any of the variations on the theme, this is well worth reading however I take issue with a couple of points. First and foremost, Gamez uses a statistics breakdown (in %) [...]
Pitfalls of Free Content and Inbound Marketing
Let me start this article by saying it’s not intended to be a negative article against free content or inbound marketing. Rather, I want to talk about some of the strategic considerations when you use these tactics. I believe wholeheartedly that, properly employed, there are no better tactics for building your customer base and [...]
Get Satisfaction Pricing and Plan Changes
Plans and pricing changes at Get Satisfaction as part of a continual effort to optimize the goto market strategy for web based selling.
Freemium 101: Customer Conversion
At Get Satisfaction we have had a freemium model from day 1, at then it was just free, no premium offerings existed so we’ve lived through a couple of key transition points and now are optimizing a model we know works. We have 2 primary channels to market, an enterprise business that mimics what every [...]
A Pair of Killer Pricing Articles for Startups
Must reads for any startup are Jeff Nolan’s “The Myth of Freemium and Related Pricing Topics” and VC Seth Levine’s “Pricing models, the freemium myth and why you may not be charging enough for your product.” I’ve written about my own experience with Freemiums and price changes at Helpstream. Some high points from these two [...]
Apigee – Brief Notes
Sonoa renames its self to Apigee, simplifying it’s offerings along a freemium model.
The Myth of Freemium and Related Pricing Topics
Seth Levine recently wrote a great post on pricing topics for software as a service companies; I agree with what he writes and can relate given a project I have been immersed with that goes to this very topic. Web startups reflexively over complicate their pricing strategy and/or undervalue what they are offering by making [...]
