RS161: Optimizing Freemium with Ed Freyfogle

February 07, 2019 00:34:53
RS161: Optimizing Freemium with Ed Freyfogle
Rogue Startups
RS161: Optimizing Freemium with Ed Freyfogle

Feb 07 2019 | 00:34:53

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Show Notes

On today’s episode, Craig speaks with his guest Ed Freyfogle about freemium software and services.

Ed is a developer and Co-Founder of OpenCage Data. Today, he explains the day-to-day challenges of running a business and why freemium is an important facet of OpenCage’s success.

Topics:

Resources:

OpenCage Data

Ed’s Website

Ed’s Blog

Ed on Twitter

Episode Transcript

00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here’s Dave and Craig

00:20 Hello this is Rogue Startups, episode 161. Our guest today is Ed Freyfogle? Are you a bit under the weather as well?

00:29 Also a bit of a cold. It’s, it’s actually sunny here in Barcelona, but somehow I managed to pick up a cold this week. It’s just that time of year. I think everyone, everyone is a bit sick so it just going around.

00:41 So Ed was on the show, Gosh, I don’t know, a couple months ago. Ed. Um, but you’re back today and we’re going to be talking all about freemium, right?

00:48 That’s right. Uh, yeah. So, so we run the kind of freemium version of freemium and a there’s pros and cons around it. So, and I know as a listener to the podcast, I know it’s something you’ve been toying with and experimenting with as well for some of your services.

01:14 So, you know, on the, on the Castos side, you know, our plugin is absolutely a hundred percent free and will always be, um, and so that’s kind of our version of freemium there. Um, and I think overall it’s really solid, you know, the term of freemium is a marketing, no customer acquisition channel pricing strategy, and for us it, it absolutely is. I mean, seriously, some of podcasting is where the vast majority of our customers come from. Uh, so in that respect, I think freemium works for us, the baggage that goes along with it as the, the support, um, that we are kind of obligated to, to sustain for those free customers. Um, but I think it’s a relatively small price to pay for the marketing channel that it gives us well in, in our case, we run a geocoding service, so it’s an api based service and our users are software developers. They’re kind of relying on this as critical infrastructure. Yep. And so there’s zero chance no one would ever purchased this product without first having the chance to test her extensively.

02:08 Okay. And so you have to give people a way to test, um, and obviously if we. So then you ask a question about, you know, is it a time limited test, do they have to put in a credit card when they start the test? And that’s just in our market of developer. So the very, very common use case in our situation is developer gets the task of he needs to do some geocoding, okay. Needs to integrate reading into their service. So the developer then finds our service or knows about our service hopefully or has been recommended. Our service columns registers, tests it for awhile and at the point that he’s happy with the service at that point, then he goes to the person who and can actually make the purchase. So. So if we were to require a credit card at up, I just don’t think it would work because the developer is not going to make the case that our services the best unless he’s tested it extensively. And, and there’s no way he’s gonna go say to the product manager or whoever has the credit card to make the case that they should enter the credit card before he’s tested extensively.

03:21 Yeah. So have you guys looked at, instead of freemium doing a longer trial? No credit card up front, but a 30 day trial, they would be able to evaluate the service in the same way. Right? Yeah. The problem with that

03:35 in, in our case. And so what happens if we get to the end of the 30 days and the guy hasn’t finished testing.

03:45 Yeah.

03:46 So what are we going to do? Cut them off. And then if we do cut them off, he’s just going to register again. Yeah, we’re not, we’re just creating a weird artificial barrier that prevents him from doing his work.

03:56 Okay.

03:57 And so I don’t think that’s particularly useful.

04:01 And so you guys have a freemium barry or trigger or whatever, have a certain amount of API calls or data or something like that. Right? So

04:12 our services is measured, our pricing is based on the number of API calls you make and the product that one, one approach that people take with freemium is you can have a free, let’s say basic or limited version of the surface and then if they want more features, either they’ve become a customer in our case because we want him to test, we need to, we give him the full 100 percent version of the service. So you know, our, our API makes no distinction between is this guy a free and own the pretrial or is he a customer? Give you the best possible answer we can every time. Um, but what we do restrict as you can, if you’re on the free trial, you can only do 2,500 requests a day. And once you hit that limit, then your cutoff for for 24 hours or until midnight. This creates some problems though in that what we now see are a lot of people basically trying to register multiple times. So let’s say you need $5,000 a day instead of upgrading when you hit 2,500. Some people know, some bad actors try to register multiple for multiple

05:22 free accounts plus one or plus test or something like that in their email address. Is that what you’ve seen most people doing? Correct. There are a bunch of different techniques and frankly

05:34 it’s funny because people come to our site and everyone does the same five little tricks thinking that they’re super clever and I hate to say it, but they’re not super clear. It’s usually pretty obvious.

05:48 Yeah. Plus like, so it would just be like, you know, Craig plus test at [inaudible] dot com would be one. Right. What, what are some other for people who might be facing

05:58 the student you’ve seen? Well, the problem, we’ve always had those problems or surfaces been online for um, you know, four or five years now and we’ve always kind of had this problem that one point I should make is that the services that, the issue has gotten much worse for us than the last couple months because, uh, our, our biggest competitor, which is Google, they offered geocoding as part of their Google maps platform. They raised their prices significantly last year, which was phenomenal for our business as a and drove many customers to us, but it also means a lot. So the people who used to kind of use and abuse Google service have now come to our service and so it’s become much more urgent that we kind of deal with this. There’s kind of two reasons. On the one hand, you know someone is cheating. It gives you a kind of a bad, a bad field, but also you can’t let it become the case.

06:51 That word gets around that as possible to cheat because you can’t let that happen. Otherwise we undermine our business. So we had a blog post that we. This whole conversation kind of started from a blog post that we did a couple of weeks ago where. So one technique that many people did is they would go to these kinds of temporary email services and I don’t know if you’ve seen these things like mail nadir or 10 minute email or there’s a whole host of them. And the idea is you basically you created a forwarder. So you go to Mayland Adr and they give you a random address that will forward to your real address and there are different variants, some are permanent and some are kind of short term one day or whatever, or 10 minutes to so that you can get out of giving your real email address to a surface like ours.

07:38 And unfortunately this got. This, became so common that people are using this, that we’ve now had the signups from these sites. And it’s unfortunate because we really do a lot to try to, I think services like that apple legitimate use case in that we believe heavily in protecting people’s privacy. And we have, we have several different features or options. Of course we’re fully GDPR compliant where we’re in a European business. Lots of our customers are European, uh, lots of our users are European and we were fully compliant there, but we go above and beyond that and we have various different privacy features and we really collect the absolute minimum amount of information that we, that we need. And we in fact that really all we need is an email address. And that’s purely so that we can then email you if you’re, if you’re hitting the limit and say, look, it’s time for you to become a customer and then if you do become a customer, obviously we need to send you an invoice and things like that. So, but we’re not really asking for. We do optionally ask a few questions but it’s not required, you know, it’s a shame because we’re doing everything we can to protect the privacy of our users to be a service that the values privacy and then you see people kind of abusing this, they don’t trust us and they put it in these temporary addresses which ad. But unfortunately there was a high correlation between people using these temporary addresses and cheaters.

09:01 So. So you guys saw like a big spike in just the number of signups that are used to stay under the API limit. How did you find those correlating to people converting down the road? I’m sure it was lower, but like a after you’ve cut that off, have you seen like your new trial to conversion rate change from what it was before this new search started?

09:23 No, not so much. It’s hard to say because our overall usage has changed a lot in the last couple of months because of this surge of people fleeing from Google. The thing also with our service, and this might be I, I sometimes think is a topic for maybe for a talk at a microcosm for something, is that our services utility

09:46 people don’t

09:48 become a customer of our service because they liked me. They don’t become a customer because, you know, I have good marketing emails. I mean those might be minor contributing factors, but fundamentally they become a customer that they need the service and if it’s not a, it’s not a, it’s not a nice to have some other discretionary purchases. It’s a must have. Yeah. So you either absolutely need it or you don’t need it or you needed only temporarily or whatever. Yes. So actually we’ve um, you know, as a result we’ve gone, we used to experiment with things like drip marketing and stuff like that. And what we saw as it really didn’t work, it didn’t influence because as I said, the user is, they either needed or they don’t. And it doesn’t matter how convincing my I can list out all the features and all the benefits and tell everyone why we’re great if you don’t need it, you don’t need it.

10:35 Let’s do a fair amount of like community involvement stuff. Right? Because your platform is based on an open source tool set, right?

10:41 Yeah. So, so the big differentiator of our services that the data that we, that we build our service on is open data and that gives people. That has several different advantages that some customers really value, but it also has the benefit. But there’s a large community behind that. Yeah. The biggest service that we’re built upon as a something called open street map, which has millions of contributors all around the world and we’re trying to be quite active in that community. So you know, we’re members of the open street map foundation, we sponsor events, we contribute back to some of the software, things like that. So that’s kind of brandon,

11:19 a lot of your marketing tactics hadn’t worked. That involvement in the community does work. Like if you weren’t involved in the community with the business suffer.

11:29 It’s always hard to, no, we’ve always been in the community, but I do, we do see, you know, we do ask people when they sign up as a, as an optimal question, how did you hear about us? And definitely there are lots of people coming because of our involvement. The community. Yeah. Um, and frankly it’s kind of a, it’s something we want to do because our service

11:54 is built on top of it.

11:55 And actually this raises a good point in that. So now what we do when someone signs up with their 10 minute email, um, are there temporary email, you know, we, we show a little pop up, comes up and says, look, sorry, we’re not going to let you sign up with that email. You need to use a, a non temporary email. And then we’ve got say, look, you know, bye bye. Bye. Playing Fair. It helps us give back to the open data community. And then I have linked to a page where we list out all the different things that we do and hopefully you’re trying to trigger some sort of field trip, but I just want people to understand that there are real people behind this service and we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we are trying to.

12:37 Yeah,

12:38 we really tried to help our customers or we think our prices are very fair and that’s the feedback we get from the customers. And you know, as I said, our free trial is kind of time unlimited, you know, we’re not trying to trick people were trying to provide a legitimate honest service and hopefully

12:56 I know, hopefully people can see that

12:59 and then say, okay, this is someone I want to work with.

13:01 Yeah, no, I mean it’s interesting. I think that being like a business that builds on top of an open source product like we do with serious similar podcasting, being an open source wordpress plugin is interesting. I think overall it’s really good. Like I think most open source projects should be backed by a company, um, because they have the staying power, you know, like you guys are not going anywhere anytime soon. Even if you do, you’d sell the business to someone else who’s going to continue to support it. But the danger, I think in open sources, like some guy in his basement builds this thing and then businesses or hobbyists start building on top of that and then the thing goes away because the guy gets tired of it.

13:44 This week I was talking about the open source community, the software community, and they were saying one of the challenges that we have now is the community. It’s become so open source has become so big and so mainstream that previously it wasn’t possible to hide in the community. So if you were in the community but not contributing, you know, people you kind of got, I don’t want to say public shaming, but it was obvious that this guy is a user and not a contributor. But now open source is so big. It’s easy for people to free ride.

14:19 Okay.

14:20 And so, and what can we do to encourage to make sure it kind of the next generation of people also give back and of course within their means, I mean, we’re, we’re a small business so obviously I’m not,

14:30 we’re not going to be doing the same a contribution to, to open street map as a, as a google or something where, you know, we don’t have those resources, but within our means, I think we do quite a lot and, and we do try to, we do that because we think it’s the right thing. But of course we also tried to use it, uh, as a marketing channel so that people become aware of our surface, you know, recognize, recognize that we’re doing the best for camp. We started including in some of our, our support replies to free plugin users. You know, they ask for a feature or they want, hey, why doesn’t it do this? Or you don’t accept this parameter or something. And we, we started saying a fair amount. Like if you’re a developer, we’d love for you to, you know, work on this, but a pull request, we’d love to include it in the next version of the plugin.

15:15 And it’s funny how people’s tone change when you say that. Like we’re kind of constantly adding to the free tools that we provide, which I think we should because we’re the where the, uh, you know, kinda keepers and maintainers of them. But I think when people come to you saying like, hey, why doesn’t your free tool to do this thing? And we come back and say, hey, it’s open source. If you know php, just, you know, right there. And some of the pull request and we’ll share it for everybody. Gives them a little perspective about like, Oh yeah, this is not just like you providing a free thing. It’s all of us contributing to this free thing. We just happened to be the ones that are responsible for doing the most part of it. I think. Yeah, it’s a fine line and it’s very cultural. I think some people have the mentality of the customer, I pay you to solve it. Other people.

16:07 But I do think in terms of all the interactions around that, it’s about one part is the message. The other part is the tone of the message. Right? I know for sure for sure. Well, we tried to do with the, uh, with the people who sign up on temporary email address. So we say, look, you know, we get that you’re concerned about your privacy, but unfortunately these types of services have been abused in the past, so we can’t let you just hung up like this. Yeah. Yeah. So let’s go with the kind of supposition that every business probably could benefit from some version of freemium, a, some level or some form of freemium. Uh, you guys do like a, a volume limited of the kind of full product. There is also, like you mentioned like a light version that some people give access to that as you guys thought through your use case of like a, the light case wouldn’t really work in our, in our instance, our business model because of the type of customers we have.

17:06 How would you suggest other people kind of look at this and say like how can they turn their business into having a freemium model? Well, in our case the main driver of it is as a. it’s kind of a try before you buy idea, people try so different from business to business and industry to industry, but particularly when your user base is technical. So in our case, as you know, they really, developers want to understand what am I getting? How does it work? What are the features, what are the, you know, does it do this, does it do that? And so you really need to expose it to them. I think services like yours have a much bigger in

17:50 that you can let people try for a certain time and hopefully in that window of opportunity

17:55 you get them to actually

17:57 upload their data, configure it, customize it, and all these kinds of things. So now, now if they quit, they, you know, they’ve lost that time and I got a better hook in that regard. You know, it’s interesting. I think that for me, when I look at freemium, it is the like getting to the point of value for free and then there’s a point of better value down the line if you become a paying customer and we’re looking at pretty soon probably offering for sales camp for our referral marketing tool, offering a free version, um, based on the amount of referred revenue in your business. So have you changed all of our pricing to be based on referred revenue into your business instead of. Currently it’s based on the number of refers are participants in the, in the programs. So we’re gonna start saying no, not, you know, the first year is up to 500 participants, but it’s going to be, the first year is going to be up to thousand dollars and referred revenue per month or something like that.

19:01 And I think that’s very smart. Yeah, I mean we’re kind of putting all of our eggs in the basket at that point because we basically say to use our tool, you have to be integrated with stripe, which is fair. I mean, most people are and I think we’re going to do a free version instead of a trial to say everybody starts and the first whatever, $100 or $500 in referred revenue is free so you can use the tool as long as you want and the thing for me as a business owner, the thing if I was looking at this, it says this takes all the risk away of using this tool because I can use the whole thing and get a set up on my site and if it works great and I’ll start paying money. If it doesn’t, it’s nothing lost for me and I don’t have this. Like you mentioned this artificial barrier of like weirdness with like a 14 day trial and all of my developers off for vacation for a week. Then my trial needs to be extended and all this kind of weird stuff. I don’t know that. So I guess what I’m saying is like the freemium trigger is aligned with the value of your product gives. I stood up some weird time variable

20:03 that makes a lot of sense to me. Actually. I was, I was listening to your recent episode talking about

20:08 the, uh, the struggles we’ve had with

20:11 camp of getting people to, to do the integration and that’s hard because yeah, you need that, you need them to take an action and of course you can, you know, try to make it as simple as possible for them to take the action and they have a video or tutorial or whatever that shows how easy it is. But

20:26 fundamentally you need to take the action. I was, that got me thinking, I wonder if there’s a way you could do something, I don’t know how you would do this in a cost effective way, but

20:36 I was thinking about services.

20:39 I remember when paypal first came out and

20:42 you know, this was a totally new thing, people transferring money on the Internet and people were like, well it’s not safe. Like how can I just send money to an email address? And paypal actually did the thing where it may be for a certain amount of time, but when you signed up, you know, they put $5 in your account. There’s a way I don’t. Again, I don’t know better than I do here, so maybe there’s some way that like after they integrate, you trigger some like fake transaction or a microtransaction where they actually then see this is what’s going to happen when, when the referral happens and they see it come in to their stripe account. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like I don’t know how you, how you do that and in a cost effective way and maybe there’s not a way to do it but, but you know, when you have these services where there’s a high barrier.

21:33 So in the case of pay pal, it was trust and you know, people didn’t trust money on the Internet at that time or in your case, it’s that they have to do an integration, you know, you really need to think about how do I, how do I lower that barrier? And so of course one way is of course making it free. So in your case, right now, you have the barrier that not only do they do the integration, not only do they have to, um, which is, uh, which is a non minor integration, right? Because we use stripe and stripe account is the core of my business. Right. And I know I’m going to think twice before I integrate something with that. Right. Do I really trust this service and I have no doubt stripe as all kinds of controls and so I’m not really that worried that anything bad could happen.

22:16 You’ve got to find a way to make that as frictionless as possible and perhaps even give them a reward. You know, like I said, like you know when you do it, we’re going to, we’re going to show you it works. We’re going to put $5 in your account or something. I was able to do that because they had huge vc funding and kind of the marketing channel and and probably you don’t, you don’t know what’s interesting. Some of our competitors charge to do this. Actually it’s the opposite way around and I wonder if there’s like a psychological thing that gives more credibility to what they’re doing.

22:53 It’s a mandatory one time, whatever it is, hundred dollars, $500 setup thing where you get on the phone with the engineers and you guys all set it up all at the same time. I can’t imagine demanding that, but I think it gets to the point of like putting the barrier up in front of people kind of squirrely and saying, okay, we’re going to get over this hump somehow. Whether it’s incentivizing them with money or saying if you want to use our service, you have to kind of work with us to get to to set it up. I know infusion soft still does that even after they’ve gotten their ass kicked in the last few years by other kind of smaller, more nimble providers that allow self self sign up and stuff like that. But I think that for a tool, I don’t know, maybe like yours maybe like sales camp that requires a lot of integration. Having like

23:46 a really defined setup time and process is really important to allow your customers to realize the importance of it. You know?

23:55 Yeah. In our case, they literally have to call our API so I can’t do that for them, but what we can do is we’ve created a lot of sdks and the different programming languages and so, you know, if you tell me, oh, we use php that I can say, alright, well here’s our php library or the PHP tutorial, here’s how you do it. And of course all of that code is open source and yeah, you know, you can trust it,

24:18 but fundamentally

24:20 they need to do it. And in our case, the use cases are so divergent and the different technical infrastructure that they’re grappling with, you know, there’s no way to really. There’d be no way we can really do it for them short of providing the SDK.

24:34 Sure, sure.

24:36 But we, we, what we did do is we did also think of different audiences. So another good example would be, you know, the usual cases an engineer comes with us, but sometimes we do have, let’s say more of the product manager or the business person and these people are not software developers. So for them, we built, for example, an integration, a, an excel plugin, so you know, they can just install the macro in excel and then stick in their api key and geocode in xl and so that way they can at least I see. Okay. The surface does what I wanted to do. Now it’s worth me, you know, telling my engineer.

25:14 Yeah. And so that’s like a part of your service or it’s like a free giveaway. That’s totally fine.

25:21 Free. If you go to our list of sdks or tutorials, there’s one in excel, how to, you know, you can do it in Google sheets or whatever.

25:30 That’s cool. That’s cool. I like these like engineering as marketing kind of things. These little products that. Yeah, they’re fantastic.

25:37 Well there is, there is one other challenge that we see coming back to freemium and around that by, by making all these tools. So. So we have the challenge to the degree that you can use the free trial up to 2,500 requests per day. And so we sometimes see customers or users, people on the free trial who are, you know, they’re using, they’re using everyday $2,500. So it’s obvious that they are using our service in production. Right. And that’s why we really try to brand our free trial as a free trial. Not a, it’s not, it’s not freemium in the sense that you can use it forever, you can use it forever. But what we tell people is if you’re using this in production, if your business is depending on the service, you should become a customer.

26:23 Yeah. Okay. Kind of soft guidelines around that or do you like good?

26:30 Obviously because it’s how do I know what the guy is testing or whether he’s actually depending on it, but obviously if you see someone who is using it every single day for an extended period of time, you know, at some point that’s not testing. Yeah. Right. So. So then the

26:44 question is how do I convince that guy? Okay, it’s time to start giving us money. Not always the easiest conversation. Yeah. Yeah.

26:51 And then sometimes I’m like, look, is this even a good use of my time because you know, me chasing someone to get them to become one of our, what we call an extra small customer. Not really,

27:02 that’s probably gonna be more work than a big customer. Longer term. Somebody liked it. Yeah. Interesting.

27:10 But my fear is more if I let it become the standard and known that you know, you can kind of cheat by just using the service and definitely no. Then we have a problem so and so we have, we have, and this is something that’s pretty valuable to other people. So now we take a much more kind of layered approach of how we treat people who are doing free trials. So you go all the way from the people who previously we let them sign up with a temporary accountant now we block them through to someone signs up there on the pretrial. They’re obviously testing through to, they are, we see that they signed up multiple times with like the plus and their name or based on their Ip address or even based on their usage patterns and saying, you know, we can, we can see the data that they’re sending us two and you can kind of make some assumptions about that and any way we can try to detect, okay, these, these accounts are acting in a coordinated way and obviously there they’re working together so as to avoid becoming a customer through to the people who just have a low volume but they are using depending on our.

28:15 So, so you have just kind of radiation and you need to figure out what is the right message for each of them and in some cases of blocking them. In some cases it’s asking politely that they become a customer and trying to explain why they should become more in, in some cases it’s eventually then escalating that dialogue and eventually turn them off. And that’s a challenge to figure out the right tone for each, for each. Each of these

28:39 players. So I want to ask about sort of like being on the receiving end of a competitor, like Google raising their prices and you guys seeing and not just a bunch of more customers but maybe a different type of customer coming into your business now. Overall it’s been a net positive for you. You know, you guys have like new things. You’re dealing with all these new people coming in expecting stuff for free or we’re trying to get stuff for free. But overall it’s been a net positive for you.

29:06 Well I, you know, I was joking with my co founder, he a huge great and the, he really assault a lot of problems in our business and puts in even made some clever things. But for last year really employee of the year house to be sergey and Larry from Google. They them raising their prices. The best thing that could happen for us.

29:29 So, but unfortunately obviously is not repeatable. Right. So. But it has, it has brought. It’s raised our volume, the number of signups. We get thrown a lot. Some of those people are bad actors trying to cheat us, but the summer customers, um, and, and we’ve also had some, some of them are quite big customers that also presents the challenge. Of course the bigger customers of course expect a different level of support. Also expect a different sales process in terms of, you know, the, the guy who comes now he needs to, he evaluates our service, maybe he likes it and then he needs help getting it through their internal purchasing processes, you know, that kind of thing. And then what kind of ammunition do I need to give him so that he can navigate his way through that, you know, they expect a different billing process. So big customers, you know, the vast majority of our customers we built through stripe via credit card. Obviously when someone wants to become a big customer and they say, well I’m going to have to invoice you, you’re probably gonna have to say yes. But that requires, of course changes in our process, you know, who do you know, the invoice get paid, how can we, you know, some of that we’re doing in a very manual way.

30:44 Those enterprise customers, if you have five of them and you only have to worry about invoicing five people a month, it’s not a huge deal, right? It’s like it is. But there are also painful but not, it’s not intentionally, but they’re just used to dealing with big companies, you know, and they’re just not, uh, they’re not nimble or you know, or what do you do, you know, our invoicing system that sends the invoice automatically. What if it doesn’t get through their spam filter? You know, you’ve got to, how are we going to solve that? We’ve got to chase that. We have, if they forget to pay, you know, it’s just, none of it’s rocket science, but some of it, a lot of it’s new to us, new problems for us. So it’s required some adjustment on our side of changing our processes and learning. And as a result of this, do you think you guys are going after enterprise customers more or just like taking what you get and hoping, hoping they stopped coming up?

31:32 Both. So we are probably, well, uh, I mean it’s not that we didn’t go after enterprise customers before, um, but now that we have a few, you can use those as ammunition to get others right studies and things like that and it gives you more credibility and you can say, look, you know, x works with me and why works with me, so probably you should. Um, but at the end of the day, you know, we’re still, we’re so tiny, so we got we to be nimble and take what we can get. Um, but it’s definitely made life more interesting. So it’s um, it’s been a fun couple of months and uh, yeah, the, you know, now we’re kind of the, we kind of had two waves with Google raised their prices in terms of they announced it and then you had lots of companies who saw the announcement and we’re on the ball and started looking for alternatives and then the price increase. Actually happened and then you add the second wave of people who got a big bill unexpectedly and we’re looking for an alternative and now kind of the, the, you know, the parties kind of drawing to an, the people who are still now with regard probably are just going to suck up the price increase and take it. So now the question, okay, we got this, we moved to a new level, but now how do we keep the momentum going?

32:55 Yeah. Right. Because that’s a one time event.

32:57 That’s right. But on the positive side, we now have some more money to play with, you know, put into marketing. Yeah,

33:04 sure. So let’s see, that sounds like a good problem to have, right?

33:11 There are worse problems.

33:14 Cool. Uh, so we’ll have a link to the blog post you guys wrote regarding this kind of a keeping freemium, clean and organized in your business and we’ll link to that in the show notes here. But for folks who want to kind of reach out and get in touch, what’s the best place?

33:30 Great. So our service is open cage data.com. If you need any geocoding please give us a try. You can. Best Way to get in touch with me is probably on twitter and that’s my twitter handle is fry fogel, which is impossible to spell. It’s F r e y l awesome. And yeah, basically in Barcelona. So if any, any listeners that are in Barcelona, one of my goals for this year is to try to get more of a Sas, uh, Microsoft’s kind of scene going here. There are a couple of us and sometimes we meet up for dinner or something. We’ve talked for a long time about trying to formalize that a bit more and maybe once a quarter of a dinner or something. And so that’s a project I’m going to work on. Anyone wants to get in touch? Please do. So

34:16 yeah, I’m coming down. We’re coming on vacation in a few weeks and I hope to, we’ll definitely get together and hopefully we can get one of those meetups going steady. Good.

34:23 That would be great.

34:24 Awesome man. Thanks so much.

34:26 My pleasure. Nice work with the podcast, man. Happy Listener.

34:29 All right, cheers. Bye.

34:33 Thanks for listening to another episode of startups. If you haven’t already, head over to itunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes for each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey that over to rogue startups.com. To learn more.

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