Free to Freemium: Lessons learned from YouSendIt.com

http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/03/09/free-to-freemium-5-lessons-learned-from-yousenditcom/

by sadiq • 17 years ago

39 8 17 years ago

andrewchenblog.com

Slzr• 17 years ago

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

tectonic• 17 years ago

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

kbrower• 17 years ago

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

patio112• 17 years ago

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).

DenisM• 17 years ago

>>>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.

patio112• 17 years ago

See here:

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

nategraves• 17 years ago

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.

jackchristopher• 17 years ago

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

Free to Freemium: Lessons learned from YouSendIt.com

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