Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

Note: I was live at Facebook’s f8 developer conference yesterday, and posted this originally to the Nanigans blog, and also to BostInnovation. I’ve made some minor grammar updates here, to correct for my speed-blogging.

We’re at f8 in San Francisco today, with the keynote speeches just concluding. After an entertaining opening with comedian Andy Samberg masquerading as Mark Zuckerberg, the real “Zuck Dawg” (as Samberg called him) took the stage to deliver the true keynote. Facebook’s CTO Bret Taylor and VP Product Chris Cox followed, along with brief cameo CEO appearances from Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Netflix’s Reed Hastings. 

Overview of Announcements

Two major announcements were made at f8: (1) introduction of the Timeline and (2) development of the Open Graph.

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Pricing your application is always an issue of hot debate, with much interesting literature and guides in the space. While there are only a handful of macro models out there, or as Shelly Palmer puts it: “I pay, you pay, someone else pays”, there are variety of ways to combine and segment for various audiences.

The increasingly popular “freemium” model, brought into the mainstream by pundits like Chris Anderson, delivers a free version of your product that enables users to try it out, and then charges for up-sells in the form of services, support, or premium features.

While the basics are easy to understand in this model, getting the details right is quite tricky, as it gives rise to a number of questions: What do you limit? How much is too much to give away? What is a “premium” feature?.

While Anderson gives a little guidance (see slide 17) on how to do this, by advising that premium features should be “time limited, feature limited, seat limited, customer limited”, it’s a little too simplistic for my liking. These are challenging decisions that require you to make some important decisions on how you shape your customer experience and prioritize development initiatives, so it seems we should be thinking deeper about these ways to limit the free version, while creating the right incentives for upgrades to the paid version(s).

Let’s look at some of the key dimensions that you can use to limit your application.

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