Here are four approaches to offset a failing freemium model.

1. Free trial

2. Tailored, hyper specific free products for lead gen

What’s so appealing about free products is the potential for viral adoption and rapid, cost-efficient growth in product usage. Companies like Clearbit have cleverly tapped into those benefits with tailored, hyper-specific free products that appeal to their target buyers without cannibalizing their paid offerings. 

3. Product qualified lead (PQL) engines

One way to achieve this is to sell entry-level versions of a product to individuals or teams within larger enterprises as part of a land-and-expand business model. These offerings create a self-funding customer acquisition engine that allows companies to more seamlessly break into large companies from the bottom up before eventually selling an enterprise-wide deal.

4. Anti-lean startup approach

Rather than starting out with a minimum viable product, getting it out the door quickly and then monetizing later, some companies are reversing the playbook and becoming “anti-lean” startups. These companies, including AI personal assistant x.ai, take a more thoughtful and ambitious approach to building their products. The happy consequence: their products solve a clear need, stand apart from alternatives and attract customers that are willing to pay for them. 

Lately I’ve been talking to more entrepreneurs that have product/market fit and are working to find a repeatable customer acquisition process (see 5 Steps to Startup Success in 30 Words). Now, sales and marketing metrics become critical and it’s time to figure out what works. Christoph Janz has the best Google Sheets Dashboard for SaaS companies:

Defining your company’s growth using a model helps identify high leverage “inputs” (areas of your business that you have control over) that can amplify compounding growth over time. Additionally, these high impact growth models help you choose which metrics to measure—and set goals against—to get a clear understanding of your growth progress.

We’ll dive into four common models and show how to derive a set of high-signal metrics for each one:

• User generated content (e.g. Yelp, Stack Overflow, Genius)
• Viral invite loop (e.g. Venmo, Snapchat, Zynga)
• Paid acquisition (e.g. Handy, New Relic’s campaigns)
• Two-sided marketplaces (e.g. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Segment)

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