1. Toni Schneider, CEO
Freemium Summit
March 26, 2010

3. 2006

4. 5 Things We’ve Learned Building
Our Freemium Business

5. YMMV

6. 1. Find the Freemium Fit

7. Go Into Freemium with Your Eyes Open
•Freemium is *not* for everyone
•Can be great (Zynga) or not so great (Yahoo! Mail)
•Marginal benefit has to be high and defensible
•Free tier must be self-sustaining
•Paid tier has to be focus, not afterthought

8. 2. Charge for the Hard Stuff

9. Who is Your Ideal Customer?
•Many options for running WordPress
• Standalone software is free to everyone
• Free hosted tier
• Paid hosted tier
•Focus revenue model on customers who have budgets to run
their sites but not the IT staff

10. Deciding What to Charge For
•We charge for things that have a well understood cost and
are hard to do
•What do you do when your main competitor gives everything
away for free?
•Compete by delivering unique features, constant upgrades
and superior user experience

11. 3. The Life of a Paid Feature

12. Domain Mapping
•Complementary to blog hosting
•Requested consistently by early WordPress.com users
•Priced above upstream provider’s charge to us
•Initial rollout: payments through PayPal only, limited
promotion
•Improvements over time: Dashboard alerts, support docs,
store payment options, more to come

13. Domain Mapping Adoption
Unit sales per week
3,000
2,400
1,800
1,200
600
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

14. 4. Manage What
You Measure

15. The Dashboard is Your Friend

16. WordPress.com Blogs
11,000,000
8,250,000
5,500,000
2,750,000
0
Jan-06 May-06 Sep-06 Jan-07 May-07 Sep-07 Jan-08 May-08 Sep-08 Jan-09 May-09 Sep-09 Jan-10
Source: Internal Logs

17. WordPress.com Monthly Uniques
250,000,000
200,000,000
150,000,000
100,000,000
50,000,000
0
1-Apr-07 17-Jul-07 1-Nov-07 16-Feb-08 2-Jun-08 17-Sep-08 2-Jan-09 19-Apr-09 4-Aug-09 19-Nov-09 6-Mar-10
Source: Quantcast

18. Which Metrics Actually Matter?
•Find your core metric
• 10M blogs sounds great, but it’s the 400k unique new posts a day
that matter
• Optimize for the revenue related metrics
• 250M unique visitors sounds great, but (for our Freemium
business) it’s the 200k paying customers that matter

19. 5. You Can Always
Make it Better

20. Best Practices
•24/7 customer support from the beginning
•Listen to user feedback: Sad Xmas, blog comments, Net
Promoter Surveys, survey.io, WordCamps
•Continuous deployment model for development
•No user lock-in
•20% contributions to open source projects
•Multi-language from day one

21. Things We’re Working On
•Pricing and segmentation analysis
•Payments/subscriptions
•AB and multivariate testing
•Premium feature discovery
•A la carte vs. tiered features

22. 2010

23. Thanks
toni@automattic.com
toni.org