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Fred Wilson’s Favorite Business Model

March 27, 2006

Our favorite VC blogger, Fred Wilson, described his favorite business model in a post back on March 23rd. Jerid Lukin, from Flatiron portfolio company Alacra, came up with the name: the Freemium Business Model.

Fred described the Freemium Business Model like this:

Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

We are experimenting with the Freemium model with the Big in Japan toolset. Presently we are quitely releasing each tool (PodServe was first, second came elfURL, then a reskinned FrankenFeed, then InstantFeed, then QwikPing and currently in demo mode is FeedVault and soon to be released is SocialMail and MailFeed) in quite alpha/beta. Once we launch the complete set of tools we will launch our ‘pro’ or premium level paid service offering for each. The idea is to always offer a free version of each tool. Hopefully our Freemium model will work as well as other great tools like Flickr, Skype, Trillian, Newsgator, Box.net, and webroot.

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Uncategorized 

Comments

2 Responses to “Fred Wilson’s Favorite Business Model”

  1. Jason L. Baptiste Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 1:26 am

    I’m digging the name of this business model. I finally get to change our executive summary from upgraded services and posts (very boring) to something catchy. I’m curious to see customer retention rate on this model from some services. By upgrading, you know they are power users and value the services.

    -Jason L. Baptiste

  2. Is the Freemium Model Dead? : Texas Startup Blog Says:
    November 3rd, 2008 at 1:48 pm

    [...] it or not.  I first wrote about the Freemium business model back in 2006 in a post titled, “Fred Wilson’s Favorite Business Model“, defined as “Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, [...]

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