Freemium Business Model For Local Startups

Even though SparxUp Award more than two weeks have passed, but there are some things I remember, especially from panel discussion on the first day attended by Rama (DailySocial), Dhanny (Kaskus), Satya (Koprol) and David (LintasBerita). There is a discussion about how the para startup earn income from their services.

There were several answers that emerged and the one that I remember is the answer from Rama. He explained that one of the incomes that can be run by the startup is to charge a fee for the services provided, one model that can be run is freemium.

This model has actually been widely applied by various companies startup, especially overseas. I then try to come up with some ideas or some service examples freemium which are considered successful, and I found some examples on the service Quora. You can access it at the link this.

From the questions asked on Quora, there are several answers given about services that are considered quite successful in carrying out business strategies freemium They include Skype, EFax, LogMeIn, 37 Signals, Spotif, Pandora, Last.FM, Flickr, DropBox, Skype, DevianArt, Evernote, and of course many more.

Several reasons were put forward as to why the service freemium that can be successful, among others, revolves around the existence of a fairly dominant differentiator between free services and services with a paid system. The difference here does not mean that free services are only provided with perfunctory features while paid features are provided with full services and even bonuses.

Freemium usually provide a free service as a towing or something tests for users. There are several reasons why the initial service is provided for free, the first is research resources, where free services can be a data bank about the experience of using applications, developers can ask opinions and user experiences and take various suggestions to improve or improve the services they provide.

The second reason is as a pull for paid services. Free facilities become a kind of promo program where users are welcome to use the services provided, and if they are interested they can use paid facilities by getting benefits, facilities and services. value which is more.

What must be considered is of course about the differentiator that I have mentioned above, free services are of course limited in terms of facilities, but what must be considered is that the facilities provided do not provide an in-depth experience of use, the free facilities provided can be in the form of core services where the application works but without additional functions, for example DropBox, which is about file storage, so a free service in the form of a fairly complete feature of file storage services and ease of transferring files from dekstop ke cloud which is quite easy with a certain number of storage facilities.

While the paid facilities will provide more services such as a larger number of file quotas and several other facilities that are not available in the free facilities. The distinction between free and paid services must also pay attention to the value obtained by the user, where the value of this service must be clearly articulated, meaning that users will easily recognize which facilities are free and which are paid without compromising the quality of each service system, either both free and paid.

The logic is that when users find that your free product service is very useful, they will not hesitate to pay and switch to a paid service, the important thing is that the price is also not too expensive and the facilities provided do provide a very useful and effective use value.

Indeed, in practice it is not as easy as it is said, there could be research that needs to be done, apart from the startup must know in detail their services, startup also need to identify the market share in which they are releasing the product, a little research on potential users will be able to give an idea of ​​how they behave as well as data estimates, whether they will be willing to pay for certain services or not.

Not all services can also be run with the system freemium, sometimes it really is startup should really provide their services for free and find income in other ways, but that doesn't mean the system freemium this cannot be applied to para startup local, as far as I know, it is still very rare local web-based application services (minus the service provider theme) that implement paid services, some of which I know are services for collaborative work implementing this system.

So, anyone want to start a paid service provider? Or do you have an example of another service that is quite successful with the system freemium? Let's discuss in the comments column.

Image Source: freemium.org and Techvibes.com.