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Thoughtstream is cool. But it needs atleast a 30-day evaluation for me to get a sense of how easy it would me to use. But perhaps even take the idea further. H
by vineet 14y ago
Thoughtstream is cool. But it needs atleast a 30-day evaluation for me to get a sense of how easy it would me to use.
But perhaps even take the idea further. How about the ability to create up to 30 thought streams for free. Anyone who has created that much will see its value and will want to pay?
- TillE 14y agoFreemium is almost always a losing model for small businesses. A trial would be nice, though.
- vineet 14y agoI don't know. There are many people who just expect freemium to solve all their problems. Freemium needs to be carefully applied, and needs to make sure to be aligned with evaluation needs of potential paying users. Most times startups do not work on the details to make it happen. 30-day evaluations are really helpful when an urgency exists to use a product - in my experience for lots of business sales. But now-days I often get distracted with some project and am not really able to evaluate the product the first time around. I look at freemium as an evaluation license for as long as you are not doing anything serious with the product. Ofcourse, you need to define the terms of the freemium part. Companies like Heroku do a great job with it.
- jtauber 14y agoHeroku was able to do it because it had a lot of funding in the beginning (and is now part of a public company). Very hard to bootstrap freemium, especially if there are per-user costs like with hosting. (I run gondor.io so I understand :-)
- vineet 14y agoVery good point. I am a big fan of what you are trying to do with Gondor.io. Yes, bootstrapping freemium is hard. I would love to see discussions on how to do it right. Don't get me wrong. I am revenue driven. I am not crazy about freemium. But I see way too many entrepreneurs not putting themselves into the mind of their target users. I would trivial Gondor.io as a more specific Python oriented version of Heroku. The benefits are hopefully more obvious, and I would argue that freemium is not important for Gondor.io. However, the problem I have had with micro-blogging platform is in the details, which often results in me not using it more than twice or thrice. I would easily pay $250/year if ThoughStreams worked for me, but I don't know that. Currently the site looks great and it makes me really want to try it, but I doubt that I will be able to make a decision in 30-days. I am willing to try though. Best of luck!
- jtauber 14y agoWe'll eventually offer monthly plans with a free trial but we're looking for supporters at the moment, like the 10,000+ people that paid $50 for app.net
- jtauber 14y agoOver 10,000 people were willing to pay $50 to see app.net built without ever having seen it.
- vineet 14y agoPlease don't take lessons from app.net. They may have some good ideas behind themselves, but quite frankly I have not figured what they are.