Yearly Archives: 2013

Freemium Lies

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Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, on a fantastic new podcast called The New Disruptors:

“When we first started we were one of the first freemium companies. When we first started we had a free trial. You could use Basecamp for free on one project. If you wanted more than one project, you had to pay. But when we launched the brand new Basecamp which we re-did from scratch, we decided we were no longer going to give away anything for free, other than a trial.”

Freemium, although the term is maybe a decade old, is not a new idea. It means, simply, that a certain amount is for free and more stuff is for pay. In fact the term is exactly that, the melding of free and premium.

The problem with Jason Fried’s statement above is that Basecamp is still freemium. His “free” portion is just time now, rather than projects. And if you want more time then pay for it.

Freemium is a decades old approach, in software or outside of it. Free samples at the grocery store. Free car wash with a fill-up. Get one free if you buy one. Even free trials, a staple of software for decades, is free for a limited time. These are all models that have a sense of freemium. Get something for free, get something for pay.

More from Jason:

“A lot of these companies that give away everything for free and later on they are going to pull the revenue lever and figure out how to make money off people. It’s very difficult to do that when people are used to getting stuff for free, first of all. It also sends a message that when your stuff is free, it’s not really worth that much. You don’t give things that are valuable away for free. No one does. Last, a lot of people use these free products and then the company goes away because it’s not sustainable. What a bummer.”

We all give away our time and I can’t think of a more valuable thing to give away. A product can be valuable but pales in comparison to this. Free is marketing, that’s all, and there are different ways of leveraging free marketing. Some companies have done very well with this “free to use forever with restrictions” model. Google launched Docs this way. Flickr hosts billions of photos this way. Evernote has over $100 million in revenue because of it. Now, 37signals has backed off freemium and so has Google Docs. That’s fine. That may be a smart business decision and don’t deny Jason the opportunity to do that with 37signals. But I find it disconcerting that Jason wants to forget that this model was critical to his success. Freemium is part of why 37signals is where it is today.

Oh, Jason, and if you are only giving a product away for free? That’s not called “freemium.” That’s called “free.” And I wouldn’t trust that to be around, either.

Open Season

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I have been thinking about Facebook Home but haven’t quite gotten the right words together. If you are unfamiliar, Facebook Home is an app that brings all of the Facebook functionality front and center on an Android device. App, though, is too simple. In short, installing Facebook Home means giving up control of your device to Facebook. Facebook Home takes over the entire thing. If you understand Facebook’s business model (selling you) and care, this should scare the crap out of you. Everything you do on that phone will be tracked by Facebook: every call you make, every place you go, every text you send, every app you use. Facebook will know it all. It’s The Police’s Every Breath You Take (lyrics) for the modern era.

As I said, though, I wasn’t certain what to write. There is so much to consider here. What I wrote above was the first thought. The second was the implications to Android. The third was the implications to Google. And then I read Matt Drance’s piece on the topic today and thought I might as well just link you to him. Incredibly well put:

Google knew what it was doing when it made and marketed Android as an “open” system. It surely anticipated forks by handset makers as a manageable risk as long as Google kept advancing the system. But I wonder if it expected something like Facebook Home: an inside-out heist, made by a company after the same exact user data and advertisers Google is after. How it chooses to respond in the near future should give us an answer.

Read the entire article, available here.

Nothing Stands Still

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Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, is credited with saying, “Nothing is permanent except change.” And thus it is on this blog and within Infinity Softworks.

Since January 1, 2012, when I made a commitment to write every day excluding weekends and a mini-vacation between Christmas and New Year’s, I have written 321 posts. That’s over 325 total week days during that time period.

For most of it I was very happy with the experiment. My goal was to only include posts where I could provide some accompanying commentary. But in the past few months, as constraints on my time have increased, I feel that has gotten harder to do and the strain of churning out a new post every day has caused me to get sloppy. As we were figuring things out last year, posting every day was a critical piece of my learning. But now, as we move from discovery to execution, the need isn’t as strong and the topics are harder to come by.

So I’m giving myself permission to stop writing every day. While this may mean I post more than once per day, it more likely means that there will be days when I don’t post at all. And if there are articles that I want to share but don’t have specific commentary, I might just save up a few and post them together like I did last week.

I hope you will continue visiting me here, reading what I write, and commenting more often!

Backlog 2

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Yesterday I posted a number of interesting business articles that I had saved away for a rainy day. Today I give you a backlog of “weekend reads” to peruse.

  • The Day My Grandfather Groucho and I Saved ‘You Bet Your Life’ by Andy Marx: Fascinating story about one of the first and great all-time quiz shows.
  • The Innocent Man (Part 1, Part 2) by Pamela Colloff: The story of a Texas man who spent 25 years in jail for not killing his wife. Couldn’t stop reading this one.
  • We Are Alive by David Remnick: Bruce Springsteen grapples with the differences between the realities of his song material and his life at age 62.
  • A Life Worth Ending by Michael Wolff: Grappling with end-of-life issues and the nasty trade-offs in US medical care. My grandmother is at this stage so the article really hit home.
  • The Once and Future Liberalism by Walter Russell Mead: Thought-provoking piece on US history. We are a nation built on liberal ideas, he argues, whether Democrat or Republican.
  • Not Fade Away by Robert Kagan: Interesting argument on why the economic death of the US is greatly exaggerated.

Hope you’ve got some time to read this weekend. Some are really long but all of them were fascinating, sometimes thought-provoking articles. If you have time for only one, make it The Innocent Man. Unbelievable article. I guarantee you won’t be able to put it down.

Backlog

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I’ve accumulated a number of really good posts that I never seem to get around to posting. I thought, instead of sharing them one at a time, that I will share them in a group here instead:

I have been influenced greatly by each of these articles. In particular the last two, Subcompact Publishing and Augmented Paper, are amazing treaties on the future and design, respectively. Hope you take the time to read them all.