Category

Product

The Freemium Myth – more data

My last post with some thoughts on product pricing has received a ton of traffic, comments and email. Clearly this topic is one that a lot of entrepreneurs care about (and struggle with). A few people pointed me to a great post by Ruben Gamez of Bidsketch on the Software by Rob blog that talks about freemium plans and why, in Ruben’s view, they aren’t always drive the results companies are looking for. It maps well to my thinking (I directly called the freemium model into question in my pricing post). There’s some great data in the post – definitely read the full thing. Here’s a few that caught my eye: Bidsketch started out with a freemium model. Ruben carefully…

Pricing models, the freemium myth and why you may not be charging enough for your product

I’ve been pulled into a number of product and pricing meetings recently (for reasons unknown I’ve become the Foundry pricing and productization guy). I thought it would be helpful to put some of my thoughts into a blog post and hopefully spur some conversation in the comments and over email. With any broad topic, there are always exceptions to the general rules. There are also few absolutes and much of this advice varies depending on your specific product and market. And keep in mind here that I’m dealing generally with web services of some kind in the advice below (not consumer apps and not enterprise software). With those caveats, here are some ideas on pricing models: – Beware of too…

Killer UI

One of the companies I work with is in need of some first class UI help. Ideally we’d like someone who has a great design aesthetic and who also can code that design in Ruby or PHP.  However for the moment we can use someone with the former talent (who can wire frame up their work which we can then get coded) since we’re looking to get our basic prototype up and running. The company is based on Boulder, but the designer doesn’t necessarily have to be local.  Email me directly if you’re interested (or know someone who is).

Sonos keeps getting better

If you’ve read this blog for a while you’ll know that Sonos is one of my favorite all time inventions.  For those of you living in a closet, Sonos is a system that allows for wireless streaming of music throughout your home with the ability to separately control dozens of music "zones".  You can easily stream music from various online sources (or your own music library) and their controller makes it easy to create play-lists, cue up music and play different tunes in different parts of your house.  If you have ears, you should own one of these. Last week Sonos announced a bunch of new features – free integration with Pandora (I was already paying for this – it…

Your chance to play designer

If you’re like me, you spend most of your days pining away for the life that would have been had you followed your true passion into product management and design.  Ok – I’m being flip, but we all have opinions on the way the sites we visit look, feel and work.  So here’s your chance to weigh in on an important design decision and help out a Foundry investment in the process. Lijit is coming out with a new thumbnail feature in their search results (very cool) and can’t decide how to best lay out those results with the picture.  So they’ve tossed it out to their user base (and other interested – or at least opinionated – parties).  So…

Know what you don’t know

[see the bottom of this post for an invite code to a new service that helps solve the problem I’m describing here] It’s probably passe to say that we live in an information economy.  It’s also probably not correct anymore because really we live in an information NOW economy.  Staying on top of the topics that are important to you and your company has never been more important.  And with the explosion of media sources (particularly on-line) this has never been more of a challenge.  Back in the day, large companies would outsource the function of knowing what was said of them and their competitors to various "clipping services", so named because they would line up the major new outlets…