phil_Hill

The Great Freemium vs Free Trial Debate | 3 Great Stories

philhill — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:56:13 +0000

There’s always a goo debate around what’s best Freemium vs Trial vs Paid for a software product. What’s mote never seems to be a right or wrong answer about this. Here’s 3 stories: they share similarities but they all have their unique flavor.

This topic is very current for me since I’m in evaluation mode as to what we should do with Flashissue.com from a pricing POV.

At the end of the day it comes down to what makes more money and this can only be determined by experimentation with different options, so take your pick.

The Great Freemium vs Trial Debate.

It’s generally accepted that startups should start charging as soon as possible. But for SaaS web apps the question is often whether to use a Freemium or Free Trial business model.

What is ‘Freemium’?

Freemium is a model often used by B2C services such as Twitter, Flickr and Evernote, where the user gets a Free version of the product by default and then is asked to upgrade when they want extra features beyond what the free plan offers. The signup rate is usually very high and the ratio of free users to paying users is usually very high (obviously).

via The Great Freemium vs Free Trial Debate – Stu Green.

Evernote Takes Off

After taking 992 days to reach 5 million members, Evernote said today it has now hit 10 million members just 208 days later. It has also eclipsed 400,000 premium members, putting the company well on its way toward its goal of 1 million paid users.

Evernote hit 5 million users on Nov. 10 last year and was up to 6 million users by the first of the year. It’s since grown by 67 percent in a little over five months to 10 million users with the last million signing up in 32 days. It had 3.6 million unique visitors in the last 30 days, up 70 percent since the beginning of the year. And perhaps most impressive is Evernote’s paid conversion growth. Premium users have more than doubled from 201,308 on Jan. 1 to 424,736 now, a 111-percent jump.

“Ten million users seemed like an inconceivable number when we were getting ready to launch the service into open beta less than three years ago. Well, it wasn’t literally inconceivable; we actually put it on business plans and investor pitch decks and everything. Yup. 10,000,000 users in three years. That what we told people. We had really pretty graphs showing the projections. Reality is much more impressive than projections,” wrote CEO Phil Libin in a blog post.

via Evernote hits 10m users as premium membership takes off — Tech News and Analysis.

Mailchimp comes to the party late with freemium

On September 1st, 2009 we announced that MailChimp was going freemium. On that day, we had 85,000 users. Now, slightly more than a year later, we have more than 450,000 users. We grew our user base five times in one year.

Earlier this month, we actually doubled our freemium plan from 500 subscribers to 1,000 subscribers. So now, even more people can take advantage of MailChimp’s powerful email marketing and social features. We had been averaging around 30,000 new users per month (about 1,000 per day), but since we increased the freemium plan this month, we’re seeing +2,000 new user days.

Another thing that’s increased dramatically since going freemium is the number of lunches I’m invited to; seems entrepreneurs and VCs really want to “pick my brain” about how freemium is doing for us. Usually, it’s because they think freemium might be that silver bullet they’ve been searching for. It can be, but you’ve really gotta be careful not to point that bullet at yourself…

via Going Freemium: One Year Later | MailChimp Email Marketing Blog.

The Shared Experience Of Absurdity | Guerrilla Marketing Ideas

philhill — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:31:28 +0000

When i watch something like this I think guerrilla marketing. These guys are just having fun but it’s a short step to turning these types of stunts into something you can use for your business.

Given that i had a bizarre past life as an Improv actor myself, I felt very comfortable contacting some old friends at an Improv troupe in Atlanta to see what they could throw together for me. We’re see where it goes…

Charlie Todd: The shared experience of absurdity | Video on TED.com.

Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service

philhill — Sat, 05 May 2012 20:58:54 +0000

Last week i emailed a friend who created a very good marketing automation product (Pardot). He pointed me to the article below by PaulStamatiou.com (ex-Atlanta tech alum).

I have a problem and it’s one that’s plagued me with each of the five tech start-ups i’ve been behind and this ugly beast has reared its head again with my latest venture (FlashIssue).

My problem: I need a messaging service for acquiring, retaining and engaging users of my software service.

A user signs up to try our product on our landing page and the fun begins.

I know what i should be doing but i cant find a way to do it. There are many scenarios to address and i should be hyper focused on messaging each and everyone with a specific message but i cant.

Examples:

A user signs up, browses the product but does nothing: They should be getting an email asking “what’s up, did we *f-up* somewhere”.
A user tries it once but doesn’t come back: They should be drip fed emails teaching them about the product. Ideally based on the features they used.
A user posted something on our Uservoice forum suggesting a new feature: She should be nurtured with a whole new level of messaging.

I’m pretty familiar with the marketing automation products like Pardot, Marketo, Hubspot et al but they’re not geared up for software start-ups. They specialize more on the complex sales life cycle and they’re over engineered for the task at hand.

The other answer is to glue something together using mailing lists through Awebar, Mailchimp or Mailgun.

I’ve got enough on my plate, i dont want to manufacture another product so i can sell my current product.

I’ve yet to find a service that helps me manage this process. At the end of the day, all i need is an email service product with a dash of CRM, specifically designed for messaging users of software products.

The post below is an excellent illustration of what i mean.

Ironically, my new venture, FlashIssue, is itself an email services product.

It addresses another deficiency on the email land scape (the difficultly of getting content into email campaigns faced by DIY marketers and small content producers).

I will be looking at some of the products mentioned in the comments after the article, so we’ll see…

Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service21 Dec 2011It was the middle of our Y Combinator batch this summer.

Akshay and I had a decently functioning version of Picplum that we were continuing to test and polish up. At the end of our office hours that day, Paul Graham said our product was good enough and that we should stop coding and start selling & marketing.

I think about this quite often.Picplum at YC office hours in July. Photo Credit: Garry Tantl;dr Trying to draw attention to the importance of lifecycle marketing. I build up the case, talk about where lifecycle marketing makes sense, show an amateur first attempt at it, then proceed to layout a grand idea for a lifecycle email marketing service I want to see someone build.

Please share this post.I was in that mindset when I decided to sit down a few weeks ago and hammer out some code that would help with that typical engineer approach.. get code to do it for you. One of my perpetual to-do items in the few months following our launch was converting users that signed up but never did anything into users that sent out their first batch of prints.

The latter is more or less our definition of an activated user. You can find more info about Picplum in my lengthy post-launch article, Thoughts on Picplum Automatic Photo Prints.

via Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service — PaulStamatiou.com.

Microsoft Invented The iPhone In 1991 – See The Picture

philhill — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:35:57 +0000

Talk about missing the boat or being the 5th Beatle. It’s amazing how Microsoft pretty much nailed the iPhone 20 years ago.

They’ve got email, wi-fi and even GPS (that’s the amazing one for me). They did miss the Web, Photos, Music and Angry Birds but not bad all the same.

Apple had the balls to develop it when they had their ah-hah moment and Microsoft didn’t. This speaks the to the DNA of each company.

Enlarged picture.

My Visual Resume

philhill — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:05:22 +0000

I’ve just created an infographic of my career. Check it out!

The Most Useful Website You’ll Ever Find: Einstein In Your Pocket

philhill — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:21:08 +0000

One of my most favorite websites out there is called WolfraAlpha. Probably, it’s the most useful website you’ll ever find because you can ask it just about any question and it’s answers it for you. Asking the math ones is what i use it for most.

Give it a go…

WolframAlpha.com

Your must-have companion article:

The Massive List of Genius – People With the Highest IQ

by JOHN P.

The other day I sat down to watch The Princess Bride for about the 10,000th time. Man that is a great movie! Anyway, when I was watching the part where Vizzini, the Sicilian, was answering the question as to how smart he is, he said:

“Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons.”

So, I decided to mosey on over to the Interwebs and find a list of people with the highest IQ ever measured, and lo and behold I couldn’t find one! So for the sake of future searchers, I compiled the following information. Enjoy.

Read on…

How Curating Content Gives You Better SEO & More Web Traffic

philhill — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:01:47 +0000

Some interesting facts on content curation from our experiences at flashissue.com – phil

We’re great believers in content curation at FlashIssue.

Whether you are curating content for a newsletter or curating it for your blog, it’s a powerful marketing tool that gets results that should translate to more engagement with your audience and more ultimately more business.

In short, curating content gives you better SEO and more web traffic.

Try searching Google with the term “curated newsletters”. Here’s what i got. You can see the original article i was reading on ClickZ and a few places below you can see the curated version i created on our blog site.

via FlashIssue: How Curating Content Gives You Better SEO & More Web Traffic

Never, Ever Compromise: Hiring For Culture Fit | Elad Blog

philhill — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:49:28 +0000

This is one of the best posts i’ve seen on hiring and cultural fit. I subscribe to the “inexperienced” hire angle at flashissue.com but it does come at somewhat of a price. at times it can be very energy sapping having to mentor newbies through a business when there is so much to be done and it becomes so tempting to opt for more-experience-and-less-mentoring. hiring people you’ve had from previous start-ups can be answer because you know you get the culture bit right.- phil

Your company culture is the foundation on which everything you do rests. Your culture acts as an unwritten set of rules that drives behavior and cohesion across the company.

Cohesive, insular cultures are more resilient and can withstand shocks to it (e.g. pivoting multiple times) as well as can be extremely motivational / draw out the best in people (e.g. engineers at Palintir sleeping under their desks in their belief they are helping national security, the emergence of Google’s “don’t be evil” doctrine).

Bad Culture Fits Lead To Pain

Most companies do a poor job of enforcing a common culture or are willing to sacrifice the cultural aspects of who they hire in order to “get someone effective” or “to fill a need”. This typically backfires in a big way over the short to medium term. Every single founder I know who has compromised on culture fit has regretted it due to the disruptions it has caused their company (having to fire the bad fits, creating a crappy work environment, good people quitting, trust eroding between co-workers, product moving in the wrong direction, bad actors building power bases, misaligned incentives emerging in the organization, etc.)

via Elad Blog: Never, Ever Compromise: Hiring For Culture Fit.

Understanding Viral Growth of products like Pintrest

philhill — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:28:10 +0000

Here’s an old but goody i just found while digging through my Evernote clippings. It quantifies & explains how some products like Pintrest get that explosive hockey stick growth (find themselves with 30m users and then get snapped up for $1bn). It’s also a good metric to measure and strive toward if you have an web application of your own you are building. – Phil

In this post, you will learn is that there are two key parameters that drive how viral growth happens, the Viral Coefficient, and the Viral Cycle Time. To fully illustrate the arguments, I have included two spreadsheet models (embedded) that you can play with interactively to see how viral growth works. There is a risk with this level of depth, that some readers will find this too technical, and if you find yourself reacting that way, may I recommend that you jump straight to the conclusion, which is under the heading Lessons Learned towards the bottom of the article.

via Understanding the key variables in Viral Marketing | For Entrepreneurs.

Finding Free Government Money For My Business

philhill — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 18:47:44 +0000

I’m trying to work out what’s up with Government Loans. I’ve never applied for an SBA Loan although I have had some experience with SBIR (technology grants & loans). If you’re interested you can use the government search tool. – phil

Loans and Grants Search Tool

To help you identify what government financing programs may be available to help you start or expand your business, use our “Loans and Grants Search Tool” below.

Use the Government search tool here…

via Loans and Grants Search Tool | SBA.gov.