Freemium Friday: Roundup of B2B Freemium News
I plan to post every Friday on interesting developments and articles on Freemium in B2B land, but we will see how long I actually keep this up 
This week is a good week to start as we just signed up to participate in the first-ever Freemium meetup in San Francisco. Three B2B Freemium gurus will be presenting:
Drew Banks, our host and head of marketing at Prezi, a cloud-based presentation software service that opens up a new world between whiteboards and slides. Drew will speak about Prezi’s rapid growth (1M users/month!) and profitability success with a Freemium business model.
Chad Heinrich a.k.a. “Freemium Fighter” is the Marketing Consultant for Avira. He has successfully marketed the Freemium business model in a wide variety of technology companies including his current gig at Avira (with 100M+ users), and previously at Dropbox and Box.net.
Todd Wilkinson is the Co-founder & CEO at WordWatch, a cloud-based app for small businesses that manages AdWords, automatically delivering optimal ROI for Google AdWords PPC advertising.
More information on the meetup here.
In B2B Freemium news these two caught my eye:
A Forbes article on Box.net Freemium model: it doesn’t go into much depth, but quotes Box’s initial Freemium conversion at 8% with little sales effort. However also mentions that now Box is hiring up to 200 sales reps: apparently enterprise sales needs a push and a shove even if you are Box.
SAP owned SuccessFactors announced a Freemium version of it’s Jam product (a Salesforce.com Chatter competitor). For now the product is only free to customers, but Dmitri Krakovsky, SuccessFactors VP of global product management, said (when asked if the company is planning to extend the freemium model to non-SuccessFactors customers): “Yes, for sure. We’re always thinking about making it a very broad tool.”