The Freemium Summit sounds to have been one of the more interesting “about social media but held in meatspace” events. It was a single day (Friday, March 26) focused on “models that combine a free offering with a premium, paid offering.” This is way late by web standards, but nothing has happened in the last couple of weeks to make the summit’s content obsolete. Here’s some coverage worth checking out, with a sample quote from each post:
- Tom Tunguz: Free users are assets, if you can control the cost; now go and read the rest of Tom’s post, even if it means you don’t come right back to Changing Way.
- Liz Gannes at GigaOM: Don’t spend money on marketing, do offer flexibility and data exporting to eliminate buyers’ regret, make sure to capitalize on and value goodwill, and only charge for things that are hard to do.
- E. B. Boyd, channeling Toni Schneider, CEO of WordPress parent company Automattic on à la carte premium offerings: We didn’t want to [offer a tiered model] because we wanted to constantly launch new features and charge for them individually. It gives users a choice to just pick the ones that they want.