

Free to Freemium: Lessons learned from YouSendIt.com - sadiq
http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/03/09/free-to-freemium-5-lessons-learned-from-yousenditcom/

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patio11
_in reality there probably aren’t a lot of 10% lifts left after the first
handful_

I am genuinely surprised by how many I find even years after starting my
business. (And in where they are, too. All that work on the application,
marketing, SEO, etc etc and the thing that pushed me over the day-job line
took me all of one Saturday to implement on a lark.)

In regards to cost of customer acquisition: time you spend playing with your
conversion funnel does _wonders_ for this number and as your COCA decreases
you start to have all sorts of fun options. With a price increase and a few
recent lifts in conversion it is now economical for me to advertise on
keywords I couldn't before at prices above where my competitors can profitably
match. This results in a winner-take-most kind of situation on the AdWords
auction -- good news for me (and for Google).

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DenisM
>>>And in where they are, too. All that work on the application, marketing,
SEO, etc etc and the thing that pushed me over the day-job line took me all of
one Saturday to implement on a lark

Can you share details on what was it? Thanks.

~~~
patio11
See here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484668>

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nategraves
I think whether or not you're able to subsist off of ad revenue depends on
your situation and goals. A friend of mine can make $900 a week off of CPM
revenues. While this wouldn't be enough money to run a 10 or even 5 person
startup, it is plenty for him to cover his rent, car payment, and costs of
living.

At the same time, I've been talking to a friend who is looking to start up a
website that follows more in the footsteps of YouSendIt. We've had several
conversations on whether its more valuable to offer a service for free to
build market share and then suffer the pains of losing users when you switch
to a paid model or charging from the beginning and seeing much slower growth.
I appreciated that the article at least addressed the fear of switching to a
paid model, but I would have been interested to hear how Kumaran thinks
YouSendIt would have done if they would have launched with a freemium model
already in place.

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jackchristopher
Did the site crash? I'm getting the "Failed to Connect" message.

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Slzr
I am starting to think that ads based websites are just urban legends.

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tectonic
If I didn't live in SF, I could live off of absurdlycool.com, which is all
ads.

~~~
kbrower
thats fantastic, i would have to move somewhere very cheap to live off of
filleritem.com

