7. Go Into Freemium with Your Eyes Open
•Freemium is *not* for everyone
•Can be great (Zynga) or not so great (Yahoo! Mail)
•Marginal benefit has to be high and defensible
•Free tier must be self-sustaining
•Paid tier has to be focus, not afterthought
9. Who is Your Ideal Customer?
•Many options for running WordPress
• Standalone software is free to everyone
• Free hosted tier
• Paid hosted tier
•Focus revenue model on customers who have budgets to run
their sites but not the IT staff
10. Deciding What to Charge For
•We charge for things that have a well understood cost and
are hard to do
•What do you do when your main competitor gives everything
away for free?
•Compete by delivering unique features, constant upgrades
and superior user experience
12. Domain Mapping
•Complementary to blog hosting
•Requested consistently by early WordPress.com users
•Priced above upstream provider’s charge to us
•Initial rollout: payments through PayPal only, limited
promotion
•Improvements over time: Dashboard alerts, support docs,
store payment options, more to come
18. Which Metrics Actually Matter?
•Find your core metric
• 10M blogs sounds great, but it’s the 400k unique new posts a day
that matter
• Optimize for the revenue related metrics
• 250M unique visitors sounds great, but (for our Freemium
business) it’s the 200k paying customers that matter
20. Best Practices
•24/7 customer support from the beginning
•Listen to user feedback: Sad Xmas, blog comments, Net
Promoter Surveys, survey.io, WordCamps
•Continuous deployment model for development
•No user lock-in
•20% contributions to open source projects
•Multi-language from day one
21. Things We’re Working On
•Pricing and segmentation analysis
•Payments/subscriptions
•AB and multivariate testing
•Premium feature discovery
•A la carte vs. tiered features