The freemium – unless the whole organization is aligned around it – is a growth strategy rather than a business model. A free service is provided to a majority of users, while a small percentage of those users convert into paying customers through the sales funnel. Free users will help spread the brand through word of mouth.
Is a freemium a business model?
You create a product or software, you make it available for free on the web, thus (if the tool is good) it gains visibility quickly, and you call your company a freemium business model.
Looking at things from this perspective makes you confuse your business strategy with your marketingstrategy. This can be extremely limiting.
A marketing strategy will focus primarily on acquiring users, leads, or potential customers for the business.
A business strategy looks at understanding the whole logic of your business to find a viable and potentially scalable business model.
To understand this key difference let’s look at the whole story behind freemiums.
The origin story
On March 2006, venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote an article entitled “My Favorite Business Model” which said:
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.
He mentioned examples of this successful business model at Skype, Flickr, and a few others.
According to Fred Wilson, the core advantage of a “Freemium business model” is fast customer acquisition. But he made clear that it had to be as frictionless as possible:
A customer is only a click away and if you can convert them without forcing them into a price/value decision you can build a customer base fairly rapidly and efficiently. It is important that you require as little as possible in the initial customer acquisition process. Asking for a credit card even though you won’t charge anything to it is not a good idea. Even forced registration is a bad idea. You’ll want to do some of this sort of thing once you’ve acquired the customer but not in the initial interaction.
The main aim was to “eliminate all barriers to the initial customer acquisition.” He didn’t have yet a name for this kind of revenue model.
Giving it a name
At the end of his article, Fred Wilson had clear in mind what the Freemium business model looked like. However, he didn’t have a name for it.
That is why he invited people to comment and to come up with a proper name for this business model. A commenter, Jarid Lukin suggested the name Freemium model.
Thus, service and product wholly free and frictionless, where most users don’t pay, and a small base of users pay for a product that has premium features.
Over the years Fred Wilson kept emphasizing the importance of free. Today the freemium business model has taken over also the gaming industry. But it has also become the most debated business model in the software industry.
On the power of free
Building a free product and making it available to anyone and then expecting to make money isn’t the right strategy.
Instead, the “free” within the freemium, if appropriately used, can be a lever for quick success.
As Fred Wilson pointed out in October 2008 “freemium is far from dead, in fact, it may be the business model de rigueur.“
What did he mean? He recounted in a later article:
Facebook is a perfect example of freeconomics at work. A woman who works for a major media company was in my office recently. She quoted her CEO as saying “why doesn’t Facebook just charge a monthly subscription fee, they’d be making money hand over fist?”. Well I believe that if Facebook did that, they’d be vulnerable to other networks offering a free service. And certainly not every one of those 200mm+ users are going to cough up a monthly subscription. But by offering a friction free service, they have built a powerful and growing network that they are now starting to monetize in various ways and that they will monetize even further in additional ways. And they are super hard to compete with because they are free.
The new Free! plan is in fact Freemium – where a small number of people subsidise the majority, who get it for free. But “Freemium” models have existed since antiquity, they work in some situations, don’t work in others. This is also likely to be true for Digital goods. The issue lies in the price sensitivity
This point is critical, as freemium is not a size fits all (the “free” in it is meant to make money).
In fact, that also depends on the cost structure of the company offering the service. Also, freemium seems to work well in conjunction with advertising spending.
Think of the most popular services and apps we use today, like Facebook and Google. Those are free but not freemiums.
In short, users do not pay for the service, it gets subsidized by another player (in Facebook and Google cases there are companies investing in marketing budgets), and that comes with a cost for the users (privacy, conflicts of interests). This is at the core of asymmetric business models, that are highly scalable.
In fact, millions of users are accessing them for free and with the least friction possible. Thousands of businesses are paying and financing those services through advertising.
This is also the power of the hidden revenue business model. In other cases, free needs to be offset with a different monetization strategy, just like the razor and blade monetization strategy. Where you get something for free, but then a complimentary service associated is costly.
Freemium is not a size fits all
In 2015 a SaaS company, Baremetrics, started to experiment with the Freemium, business model. In short, they created a version of the product that was entirely free.
That product version allowed users to switch to the premium if they wanted to add specific features or capabilities.
In fact, in 11 weeks over a thousand accounts were created. The math on those new accounts wasn’t exciting, but it worked. As explained on the Baremetrics blog:
So, of the 1,000 accounts, 461 were actually eligible to even think about becoming a paying customer.
Of the 461 eligible paying customers, 53 actually upgraded.
53 as a % of 461 = 11.5%
Considering a 3-5% conversion rate on B2B the rates from the freemium seemed to be promising, until…
Beware of the cost structure
As pointed out by Baremetrics on the experiment they run with the freemium:
Quickly, we started coming up against a lot of performance and database issues. Within a few weeks our “free” customers were outnumbering our “paying” customers and the amount of data were both storing and processing had doubled.
This, in turn, created an adverse effect on the revenues:
In short, the freemium resulted in higher server costs and the loss of active paying customers, rather than an increase in revenues.
Free isn’t free after all
With the advent of Open Source and mass-scale free services like Google, Facebook (and many other tech giants become part of our daily routines) the assumption that everything needs to be free has become pervasive.
Yet, besides the matter of whether free is after all good for the users, let’s take a different approach. Is free good for your business in the first place?
Yes, but only if you acknowledge the fact that sustaining the free infrastructure will be extremely expensive.
A company like Grammarly that has implemented successfully a freemium business model knows it well.
In Grammarly’s case, a browser extension might seem a simple thing, yet as the Grammarly engineering team specified:
These extensions may look easy on the outside because they are low profile and easy to use. But it is actually a complex product supported by a full team of engineers. We have been developing and perfecting it for 6 years.
That is why the engineering team has implemented a branching model to reduce manual tasks, which as you can imagine, on a user base of 20 million might be impossible to keep up for a company with a few hundred of employees of which only about 24 people in support, according to LinkedIn:
Grammarly branching model to eliminate as many as possible manual actions, architectured by the engineering team (Source: Grammarly Engineering Blog) as an example of how tech helps to support Grammarly growth channels. In these cases, technology and engineering are the most important marketers, as they enable a free product to scale, thus making the brand resonate with millions of users across the world.
This raises a critical question to understand whether to go for the freemium or not.
Is “your 1” big enough to pay the bills for them all?
In September 2009 MailChimp went freemium. Its user base went in one year to 450,000 users. Ever since MailChimp has grown into a successful company.
As pointed out one year after the experimentation with the freemium-based model, a critical question to ask is “whether or not your “one” is big enough to pay your bills yet.”
MailChimp didn’t start as a freemium. When they launched the company back in 2001, they didn’t even have a free trial.
They didn’t have an idea of what the freemium was. They only started to consider the freemium model as a viable option when they realized that that paying customers were able to keep them going with the other nine unpaying customers.
As remarked by MailChimp:
We’d never consider freemium until our “1” was big enough. Enough to pay for 70+ employees, their health benefits, stash some cash for the future, etc.
Are you using the freemium just to get VC money?
In the Silicon Valley archetype “users” have become the most important asset a company seems to need to be eligible to get billion dollars of capital.
However, this system – I argue – is broken because it draws on the myth that once you have users then monetizing them is easy.
However, for anyone that has ever tried to grow a startup you know that monetization is the hardest part.
It might seem a trivial concept for small business owners that to build a sustainable business you need to balance things up so that your revenues will exceed your expenses.
The so-called “profit” seems to be a thing of the past. Thus, they use a large user base to get VC money to keep growing revenues without focusing on profits.
Cases like ConvertKit are a great example of why generating profits is critical for your business. Many counterargue by mentioning cases like Google and Facebook.
Yet they forget that Google and Facebook were extremely profitable not long after they launched their services and I would not define them as freemiums (those are asymmetric business models subsidized by the core customers, made of businesses and enterprise clients).
Freemium business models that work: Dropbox case study
Dropbox generated over 90% of its revenue via its self-serve channels to convert users in paying customers through in-product prompts and notifications, time-limited free trials of paid subscription plans, email campaigns, and lifecycle marketing. Dropbox generated over $2.1 billion in revenue in 2021, with an average revenue per paying user of $133, based on 16.79 million paying users.
Dropbox is a classic example of a startup that managed to grow at a massive scale thanks to its freemium model:
The free basic account has a storage of 2GB. The free plan also allowed Dropbox to benefit from massive network effects. The more people joined in to get the free storage, the more people they invited. To speed up the organic growth of its user base, Dropbox also built incentives that allowed users to get more free space if they invited more users to join!
How to align your business model to a freemium offering
The primary advantage of a freemium model is the fact it can be used as a powerful marketing tool. Indeed, if you offer a great product or service for free, the chances are that you won’t need much salesforce to bring you more paying customers.
However, that highly depends on the customer profile (are you selling to individuals or to organizations?). In that case, you will need to align your sales team around the free service, just like in the Zoom freeterprise model.
Instead, if your product is simpler, and it targets smaller, individual customers, you’ll have to experiment with conversion marketing tactics to allow free members to become paying users quickly and at a sustainable rate.
This is a critical difference between marketing vs. sales and why your free service will become your best companion to scale up growth!
The more you move from consumers to enterprise clients, the more you’ll need a sales force able to manage complex sales. As a rule of thumb, a more expensive product, in B2B or Enterprise, will require an organizational structure around sales. An inexpensive product to be offered to consumers will leverage on marketing.
Freeterprise: Free dominating also the enterprise space
A freeterprise is a combination of free and enterprise where free professional accounts are driven into the funnel through the free product. As the opportunity is identified the company assigns the free account to a salesperson within the organization (inside sales or fields sales) to convert that into a B2B/enterprise account.
Free also became a powerful way for brands to gain traction in the enterprise space.
As I explained in Zoom’s business model though, the whole organization needs to be structured around the freeterprise model, where on the one end the company seamlessly uses the fee product as an entry point within companies.
And on the other end, salespeople with the ability to build a strong relationship with the account can get the whole company on board, thus transforming a free professional account into a potential enterprise customer.
Of course, this leads the organization to skew its resources toward building an army of qualified salespeople to handle the volume of leads generated by the free offering (in 2019 Zoom spent 54% of its revenues primarily on salespeople headcounts).
What questions should you ask before you go with a freemium?
So that you know what key questions to ask that person to make sure the freemium is the right growth tool for your business. Some of those questions are:
Do we have the resources to sustain a free product? Many forget that a free product still requires a lot of maintenance, updates, support, or else. If you don’t have those things in place, your free product won’t be good, which will make it flop quickly.
Is the free product cannibalizing my premium offering? It might sound obvious to some people, but engineering a free product isn’t easy. Do you know how much of that free offering is enough to be valued? Do you know how to strike a balance between what you offer for free and what instead should be paid? Is the free product in line with your overall business strategy?
Is the freemium in line with my overall business model? For instance, if your organization is primarily structured on a sales team, which works with enterprise customers a freemium might make sense as it enables your brand to be known by more people. But will the fact that more people will know my brand to be a way to speed up the process of acquiring another potential enterprise customer? If not, is a freemium aligned with a business strategy where I want to get the lower end of the market?
Below is an example of what a freemium decision tree might look like:
Key metrics to track to understand whether the freemium is working
To make the freemium business model work it is critical to look closely at a few key metrics. Some of those metrics are matured from the gaming industry but are also used by traditional freemium business models:
The average cost of serving a free user
The rates at which free users convert to premium (paying) customers
DAU (Daily Active Users) is used to show the number of people who engage with the product, or service on a daily basis. For other platforms, other metrics like monthly active users might be more appropriate
Daily Sessions: The number of play sessions a user engages in each day.
CPA: Cost Per Acquisition or Cost
A final remark on how to do the Freemium right
I want to close this article with the extract from the MailChimp Freemium business model. The reason is, MailChimp has been one of the most effective companies in applying the freemium, and this is the greatest lesson learned:
I think there are too many startups out there who are interested in going freemium because that big “10” number is so attractive. This is dangerous when they don’t even have the “1” yet. How will they pay their bills while they figure out how to “monetize?” Answer: they will need to borrow that money. Does your VC have the patience for the long term, while you try to figure out how to “monetize” and build up that measely “1” number? Answer: No — no they don’t. Build up that “1” before you chase the “10.” After you’ve got your “1” all set, use VCs to help you chase after that “10” (if you must). That’s my personal opinion. Disclaimer: I’m wrong about 99% of the time.
An effective business model has to focus on two dimensions: the people dimension and the financial dimension. The people dimension will allow you to build a product or service that is 10X better than existing ones and a solid brand. The financial dimension will help you develop proper distribution channels by identifying the people that are willing to pay for your product or service and make it financially sustainable in the long run.
Business model innovation is about increasing the success of an organization with existing products and technologies by crafting a compelling value proposition able to propel a new business model to scale up customers and create a lasting competitive advantage. And it all starts by mastering the key customers.
Digital and tech business models can be classified according to four levels of transformation into digitally-enabled, digitally-enhanced, tech or platform business models, and business platforms/ecosystems.
A digital business model might be defined as a model that leverages digital technologies to improve several aspects of an organization. From how the company acquires customers, to what product/service it provides. A digital business model is such when digital technology helps enhance its value proposition.
A tech business model is made of four main components: value model (value propositions, mission, vision), technological model (R&D management), distribution model (sales and marketing organizational structure), and financial model (revenue modeling, cost structure, profitability and cash generation/management). Those elements coming together can serve as the basis to build a solid tech business model.
A platform business model generates value by enabling interactions between people, groups, and users by leveraging network effects. Platform business models usually comprise two sides: supply and demand. Kicking off the interactions between those two sides is one of the crucial elements for a platform business model success.
A Blockchain Business Model is made of four main components: Value Model (Core Philosophy, Core Value and Value Propositions for the key stakeholders), Blockchain Model (Protocol Rules, Network Shape and Applications Layer/Ecosystem), Distribution Model (the key channels amplifying the protocol and its communities), and the Economic Model (the dynamics through which protocol players make money). Those elements coming together can serve as the basis to build and analyze a solid Blockchain Business Model.
In an asymmetric businessmodel, the organization doesn’t monetize the user directly, but it leverages the data users provide coupled with technology, thus have a key customer pay to sustain the core asset. For example, Google makes money by leveraging users’ data, combined with its algorithms sold to advertisers for visibility.
In an asymmetric businessmodel, the organization doesn’t monetize the user directly, but it leverages the data users provide coupled with technology, thus having a key customer pay to sustain the core asset. For example, Google makes money by leveraging users’ data, combined with its algorithms sold to advertisers for visibility. This is how attention merchants make monetize their business models.
While the term has been coined by Andrew Lampitt, open-core is an evolution of open-source. Where a core part of the software/platform is offered for free, while on top of it are built premium features or add-ons, which get monetized by the corporation who developed the software/platform. An example of the GitLab open core model, where the hosted service is free and open, while the software is closed.
Cloud business models are all built on top of cloud computing, a concept that took over around 2006 when former Google’s CEO Eric Schmit mentioned it. Most cloud-based business models can be classified as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), or SaaS (Software as a Service). While those models are primarily monetized via subscriptions, they are monetized via pay-as-you-go revenue models and hybrid models (subscriptions + pay-as-you-go).
Open source is licensed and usually developed and maintained by a community of independent developers. While the freemium is developed in-house. Thus the freemium give the company that developed it, full control over its distribution. In an open-source model, the for-profit company has to distribute its premium version per its open-source licensing model.
The freemium – unless the whole organization is aligned around it – is a growth strategy rather than a business model. A free service is provided to a majority of users, while a small percentage of those users convert into paying customers through the sales funnel. Free users will help spread the brand through word of mouth.
A freeterprise is a combination of free and enterprise where free professional accounts are driven into the funnel through the free product. As the opportunity is identified the company assigns the free account to a salesperson within the organization (inside sales or fields sales) to convert that into a B2B/enterprise account.
A marketplace is a platform where buyers and sellers interact and transact. The platform acts as a marketplace that will generate revenues in fees from one or all the parties involved in the transaction. Usually, marketplaces can be classified in several ways, like those selling services vs. products or those connecting buyers and sellers at B2B, B2C, or C2C level. And those marketplaces connecting two core players, or more.
B2B, which stands for business-to-business, is a process for selling products or services to other businesses. On the other hand, a B2C sells directly to its consumers.
A B2B2C is a particular kind of business model where a company, rather than accessing the consumer market directly, it does that via another business. Yet the final consumers will recognize the brand or the service provided by the B2B2C. The company offering the service might gain direct access to consumers over time.
Direct-to-consumer (D2C) is a business model where companies sell their products directly to the consumer without the assistance of a third-party wholesaler or retailer. In this way, the company can cut through intermediaries and increase its margins. However, to be successful the direct-to-consumers company needs to build its own distribution, which in the short term can be more expensive. Yet in the long-term creates a competitive advantage.
The C2C business model describes a market environment where one customer purchases from another on a third-party platform that may also handle the transaction. Under the C2C model, both the seller and the buyer are considered consumers. Customer to customer (C2C) is, therefore, a business model where consumers buy and sell directly between themselves. Consumer-to-consumer has become a prevalent business model especially as the web helped disintermediate various industries.
A retail business model follows a direct-to-consumer approach, also called B2C, where the company sells directly to final customers a processed/finished product. This implies a business model that is mostly local-based, it carries higher margins, but also higher costs and distribution risks.
The wholesale model is a selling model where wholesalers sell their products in bulk to a retailer at a discounted price. The retailer then on-sells the products to consumers at a higher price. In the wholesale model, a wholesaler sells products in bulk to retail outlets for onward sale. Occasionally, the wholesaler sells direct to the consumer, with supermarket giant Costco the most obvious example.
The term “crowdsourcing” was first coined by Wired Magazine editor Jeff Howe in a 2006 article titled Rise of Crowdsourcing. Though the practice has existed in some form or another for centuries, it rose to prominence when eCommerce, social media, and smartphone culture began to emerge. Crowdsourcing is the act of obtaining knowledge, goods, services, or opinions from a group of people. These people submit information via social media, smartphone apps, or dedicated crowdsourcing platforms.
In a franchained business model (a short-term chain, long-term franchise) model, the company deliberately launched its operations by keeping tight ownership on the main assets, while those are established, thus choosing a chain model. Once operations are running and established, the company divests its ownership and opts instead for a franchising model.
Businesses employing the brokerage business model make money via brokerage services. This means they are involved with the facilitation, negotiation, or arbitration of a transaction between a buyer and a seller. The brokerage business model involves a business connecting buyers with sellers to collect a commission on the resultant transaction. Therefore, acting as a middleman within a transaction.
Dropshipping is a retail business model where the dropshipper externalizes the manufacturing and logistics and focuses only on distribution and customer acquisition. Therefore, the dropshipper collects final customers’ sales orders, sending them over to third-party suppliers, who ship directly to those customers. In this way, through dropshipping, it is possible to run a business without operational costs and logistics management.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
