Freemium Summit East: Scaling a Freemium Business -- Growth and International Expansion

"SurveyMonkey has never spent a dime on marketing or sales. We had to find a way for usage to drive conversion." So said vice president of business strategy Brent Chudoba during his presentation at Freemium Summit East in New York Monday, "Scaling a Freemium Business -- Growth and International Expansion," in which he also detailed how SurveyMonkey expanded globally. In a general sense, SurveyMonkey focuses on speed, simplicity, feature-richness, service, and price, with Chudoba saying, "Too many features complicates things." The company also relied on virality, as he added, "Apps become more useful and powerful with usage and more users. Usage spreads the brand and demonstrates new use cases to potential users." One of the company's biggest moves was removing the 1,000-response cap in September 2007, as incoming data was mostly text, reducing the need to worry about performance issues, and Chudoba said, "Why are we putting this artificial cap on?" Why did SurveyMonkey go international? Chudoba pointed out that North America represents less than 15 percent of global Internet population, adding that more than 50 percent of Google's revenue comes from international markets. He also said 40 percent to 45 percent of SurveyMonkey's traffic currently comes from other countries -- mostly from the United Kingdom, Canada, and South Africa (all English-speaking), but with the company seeing its fastest growth from Brazil, Korea, and Thailand. He cited language, currency, and payment formats as the main obstacles to going global, saying, "Localizing the site was definitely a challenge. It was not easy to do. That was a huge thing for us. A lot of our users switched over to the other foreign-language versions. Chudoba also mentioned accepting checks for payment as a major step, pointing out that many of the company's users are involved in education, and "They don't issue credit cards to teachers," and adding, "Germany is a really hard market to penetrate for a subscription business. Only 20 percent of German business consumers pay with Visa or MasterCard." His closing thoughts: Think about data early; engagement drives conversion (active users are happy users); and breaking down international product barriers can dramatically increase your addressable paid user base. A great data team can uncover lots of opportunities -- optimization isn't just page testing. Let data and your user feedback guide your decisions.

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Freemium Summit East: Scaling a Freemium Business -- Growth and International Expansion

David Cohen

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David Cohen