Elena Verna: recommendation

Transcript context

…I'm thinking of products like Okta, maybe Zendesk, Looker, where they probably require a lot of handholding and support and they're maybe not ready to be self-serve is your sense they should also be freemium or is it fix yourself, serve product and make that work? In all of those products, and I'll add Amplitude, it's a high friction activation as well connecting with your data source. MongoDB is standing up a database for your application is a huge friction. Twilio, Contentful, all of those are high friction products. The question is, is the high friction for which segment? If I'm a small business still, startup, I don't have high friction. I'm a team of one engineer, and I'm a CEO. I can go do it tomorrow versus if you work for a large enterprise of a thousand plus people, sure, it's a high friction. I appreciate it. You will take a whole village in order to activate something like that. So I think that there is freemium case for everyone, especially if you are trying to land a customer that you might not even wanting to monetize at the beginning, by the way, because you need to have a very good strategy behind your freemium. We talked about trial and trial is strictly for PoC, so proof of concept, and lower my friction of activation. Freemium can give you a lot more goodness past that, but there's always use cases that actually can do it self-serve, and the only limitation is the cost that it takes to either for you to provision it via self-serve because it's a complicated workflow or for them to do it. The whole innovation of our field constantly pushes that cost down, and that's why you have no code platforms really ripping through our space and enabling users to do things that you had to have teams and departments and somebody very technical do it before. So I would push on that and say you have to continue to innovate. Even Snowflake, they have their trial, even Okta has their trial now. So they all have some version of freemium that they're all going down with and it's happening in every single sector. So if you're not doing it, again, somebody else is going to do it because this is a Trojan horse into organization that is based on user focus. Got it. For a product leader or founder who's thinking about what they should make free in their freemium model, do you have a mental model of how you think about here's what you should make free or is that too big of a question for a quick answer?…

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