Writer, Agilist, Elder Geek
One of my goals has been to try out some free books, gathering former columns or interesting publications or just cool ideas together for useful Free books!
The first one is out – Activities For The Civic Geek! From my past posts, it’s a guide to civic geekery and great resources for citizen geeks! From gaming marathons to cosplay for charity, it’s packed with ideas. Give it a look!
– Steve
Workable apparently dropped their free membership, and their CEO Nikos Moraitakis explains why at Medium in a must-read essay.
Two things stood out for me:
Limiting design choices to things that can scale infinitely at near-zero cost is a recipe for making mediocre products.
He’s got a point. When free is baked into your model you are automatically facing a series of constraints. You can see this in most any model, but when your constraint is “limit what we charge” for that is one freakin’ huge constraint.
When someone tweets “this product sucks” readers can’t tell if this is coming from someone who got the good version of the product or the bad, unsupported one. Oh, and for every paid user you probably have 10 or 100 free ones. They will be louder, by sheer numbers alone.
He’s right. Trust me. Been there. Also he notes people who get “free” are oddly hard to please.
Worth reading. Think I need to interview this guy.
– Steven Savage
(Yes, I'm still analyzing Free, Freemium, et. al).
So as I've noted many times – and as can be noted elsewhere – giving things away for free builds trust and you can make money with Freemium. Building trust with free items is an old technique that sadly seems to need to keep being relearned by people.
Free as is rather obvious, is common now with free game demos, free comics, free online books, Freemium games, etc. We're awash in free things.