

EasyBroker Says Adios to Freemium - rubyrescue
http://www.easybroker.com/blog/2010-06-easybroker-says-adios-to-freemium/

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tptacek
'patio11 has been making a related point for over a year here: not only do you
not want to be doing "freemium", but you also want to be wary of having a
very-low-cost option. The lower you price, the more problem customers you end
up with. Your most price-sensitive prospects may also end up being your most
entitled-feeling and least enthusiastic users.

It's like Steve Blank says in _Epiphany_: especially when you're getting
started discovering customers, you want to be zeroing in on the people who are
committed to solving the problem you're trying to help solve. The people you
want to work with have budget for your solution. The people who don't have
budget, you don't want influencing you now.

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rubyrescue
Most important point - _I...was assuming we weren’t good enough to charge for
our product which I’m finding is a very common problem with tech CEOs_

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necrecious
It sounded like they were building two product instead of offering a taste of
the full version.

It is easy to figure out which feature to include in premium and which to
limit in free, features that saves time.

If you can view 100 house listings per page, limit free to only 5. Time and
convenience is something people pay money for.

Always develop for premium users and if it accidentally makes the free service
better then that's a bonus.

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zck
Keep in mind that they're targeting real estate brokers, who would use this as
part of their job. EasyBroker's clients are more likely to spend money for
several reasons: brokers are more independent in their jobs than other people,
so they may be used to buying tools on their own. Brokers are using this for
their job, directly using the software to make money. EasyBroker is used as a
major tool -- managing contacts, property listings, websites, etc., for
brokers, a large part of the job.

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phreeza
Very refreshing to read straight up reasoning. I was expecting a lot of spin
(I wonder what they wrote in the message they sent free users)

Instead some really good points for a fully paid model. They can be more
targeted in their acquisition and measuring. Makes sense.

~~~
patio11
_I wonder what they wrote in the message they sent free users_

A close reading of their first paragraph suggests they merely turned off
signups but let the account type unchanged. This is essentially what I did
when I got rid of anonymous guest accounts on BCC (because they converted
terribly). The great majority of them will "age out" (go inactive), and as
long as it isn't hindering ongoing development you can just keep them in the
DB as a sop to your early adopters. (When it does start to become technical
debt to maintain two code paths, you can actually disable the accounts, offer
them an upgrade path at a discount, upgrade them for free, etc etc.)

