This document discusses how SurveyMonkey has scaled its freemium business model. It addresses key topics like maintaining discipline and simplicity, fostering virality through network effects and viral loops, raising capital strategically, optimizing throughout the customer lifecycle, and expanding products where advantages already exist like leveraging existing international users. The overall message is that growing a sustainable freemium business at scale requires focus, data-driven decisions, removing barriers to conversion and engagement, and continuously improving the user experience.
2. topics background and surveymonkey intro getting to scale discipline and simplicity virality capital taking scale to the next level internationalization optimization product expansion
5. discipline and simplicity from the perspective of a user, what makes a service/product the “best” in its category? application speed? simplicity? feature-richness? service? price?
6. virality inherent virality comes in multiple flavors network effects: applications can become more useful and powerful with usage and more users viral loops: usage of the application spreads the brand and demonstrates new use cases to potential users seeding virality is really hard a disciplined approach toward pricing, product innovation and capital raising innovation is critical
9. internationalization north america represents <15% of the global Internet population over 50% of Google’s revenue comes from international markets what prevents international customers from purchasing your service? language currency payment formats
10. optimization if you could increase one metric in your business, what would it be? users, virality, conversion, activity, engagement.. optimization isn’t just page testing opportunities exist throughout the customer and product lifecycle and experience a great data team can uncover lots of opportunities
11. product expansion expand where your existing business gives you inherent advantages reinforce the value of your core product de-risk decisions let data and your user feedback guide your decisions you don’t have to build everything yourself
12. closing thoughts think about data early engagement drives conversion active users are happy users breaking down international product barriers can dramatically increase your addressable paid user base