A micro bubble bursting in the productivity arena?

Posted by Andy Brice
Aug 20, 2015 at 10:00 AM

zoe wrote:
It must be very tough out there for smaller companies to market their
>products/systems to the diverse landscape of large & small companies,
>individual freelancers, and academic/nonprofit users.

It’s certainly a challenge to be noticed in such a crowded space.

>I’ve repeatedly read that the ultimate cost-benefit analysis is revenue
>vs. support for each class of user. Users who pay less (or nothing) tend
>to become money LOSERS for a company, even if they are evangelical. An
>article I read about the death of free-tier software said that free
>users do recruit more users; the only problem is that they recruit more
>FREE users. And they all need lots of hand-holding, which costs the
>company lots of time, money and manpower.

Only large companies have any chance to make a ‘freemium’ model work. Even then, most of them seem to be running at a loss (including Evernote, last I heard).

It is simply not economical for a small company like mine to support thousands of free users. The support burden would kill me. Especially as free users often seem to be the least skilled at using a computer.

—
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com