Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog

I have been thinking about this a lot in the past hour or two, too. Though slightly off-topic:

I've been thinking that a hassle-free solution for micro-transactions needs to hit mainstream before the average internet user will be willing to pay for more things online.

Most people (including myself) would pay for more things online if it didn't involve finding your wallet and typing in your billing address and credit card information. Paypal is the closest thing I can think of, but I still get overwhelmed thinking about logging in and all that. A simple one click button that could somehow be synced with your RFID chip would be great..

On my current project, I am thinking about ways to monetize a small feature similar to the old Facebook gifts, which as stupid as those are, could potentially bring in $15 million this year for FB?
(Source: http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/facebook-digital-gifts-worth-around-15myear/) I bet FB could just charge users who upload more than 500 or so pictures $5/mo, and those sorority girls with 2500 party pics wouldn't think twice about pulling out daddies credit card.

It feels like it has become almost too trendy to give software services away for free lately. If you never charge you will never know how much people might have valued your service. If you start losing users drop the price? If you are trying to grow a user base, start out free and charge for additional features?

IMHO

http://betashop.com/ by jason goldberg

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/ founder of duckduckgo

http://blogmaverick.com/ by Mark Cuban

http://blog.pmarca.com/ Marc Andreesen's blog ( again start from the older posts)

http://avc.com "MBA mondays" by Fred Wilson( i get emailed as chapters via dailylit )

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

http://onstartups.com/ by dharmesh shah of hubspot

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/ by mark suster

"startup site:http://calacanis.com/ " ( on google to find good older posts while Jason Calacanis used to blog )

http://lsvp.wordpress.com

http://www.chubbybrain.com/

http://tom.preston-werner.com/

apart from 37 signals, venturehacks, & lean startup blogs.

~B

Interesting that Scout isn't actually a freemium app by a strict definition though.

At least, I can't see any free plans, only a 30-day trial.

I'm also intrigued by the difference in subscriber rates between freemium webapps and freemium webgames.

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/06/09/successful-mmogs-can-see-1-2-in-monthly-arpu/

The numbers from there vary from about 5% to 15%.

What can freemium webapps learn from freemium games?

yeah, the nytimes article is pretty much a summary of his blog post:

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/three-ways-to-build-an-online-media-business-to-50m-in-revenue

and YCN discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=4767