Business model
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Facebook, early 2006 Sometimes, you need to be horribly, embarrassingly wrong to remind yourself to keep an open mind. This is my story of my failure to understand Facebook’s potential. In 2006, I was working on a new ad network business that experimented a lot with targeting ads with social network data, broadly known as “retargeting” now. The idea was that we’d be able to take your interests and target advertising towards them, which would lead to higher CPMs. As part of this project, we did a meeting with Facebook when they were ~12 people. I had read bits and pieces about the company in the news, but since I was a few years out of college, I hadn’t used their product much.
Why I doubted Facebook could build a billion dollar business, and what I learned from being horribly wrong
Click to download Freemium spreadsheet Background on this discussion Last year, the stupendous Daniel James co-hosted a talk with me on Lifetime Value metrics for subscription and virtual goods-based items. You can see the video/outline for the talk , Daniel’s commentary , and a mindmap of the talk (scroll to the bottom of the post). As part of the talk, we worked on a spreadsheet model for freemium businesses that we didn’t get enough time to work on – so I’m going to cover it in this post!
How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model i
Evernote , the multi-platform app that lets you capture notes, audio and images when you are on the go, and then access those mementos wherever you want to next, has carved out a position as one of the more consistently useful services out there for smartphone consumers. The growing number of users is a testament to that. In June, at the LeWeb conference in London, CEO Phil Libin noted that Evernote now has 34 million users, having reported 25 million as recently as May. And while paying users are a much smaller fraction, they are growing at a similarly strong rate: now they’re at 1.4 million versus 1 million in May.
Evernote's model