"Free is only a tactic, though, not a business model." - GigaOm

By Vasudev Ram

I saw an interesting post by Fred Wilson:

Tenacity And Persistence Pays Off.

Fred's post also had a comment by Philip Sugar, to which I replied, asking for more info, and he replied, with a link in his comment to this post: The Penny Gap. That post had an interesting quote from an article on GigaOm:

[ To be fair to these VCs, they’re not advocating doing everything without pay. They’re suggesting free as a tactic towards getting paid in other ways: through advertising, or by premium services (as in a freemium model), or maybe even through being acquired by a company with a large wallet. Free is only a tactic, though, not a business model.

Conflating the two misleads web application developers into thinking they don’t need to do the hard work of figuring out what’s really of value to users before they build and launch their online service. ]

The GigaOm post is here: Free: a Tactic, not a Business Model



- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

Share |

Freemium model needs a rethink (*)

http://www.sramanamitra.com/2012/04/18/freemium-conversion-rates-and-more-avg-ceo-j-r-smith-part-7/

(*) Good point by Sramana Mitra in the post linked to above.

Similar point about software services companies, IMO: those that compete only (or even mainly) on price (and the majority of smaller Indian ones do that), will mostly fail (*), or at best, stagnate. I've worked with some of them, and seen the results, so my opinion is based on experience.

(*) "You  can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." - A well-known saying.

- Vasudev Ram

Interesting take on freemium at AVG

http://www.sramanamitra.com/2012/04/16/freemium-conversion-rates-and-more-avg-ceo-j-r-smith-part-5/