How To Make Freemium Work: Niccolo de Masi, CEO of Glu Mobile (Part 1)

Niccolo de Masi is the president and chief executive officer of Glu a 3-D mobile social gaming company. Prior to joining Glu, Niccolo was the chief executive officer and president of Hands-On Mobile, a mobile technology company and developer and publisher of mobile entertainment. Niccolo was previously the chief executive officer of the London-listed mobile

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From Free To Premium With Ease: YouSendIt Cofounder Ranjith Kumaran (Part 7)

SM: I like that your business is simple and elegant. RK: The roots of the business were very simple. The focus was on the end user experience. It was an easy service to use and the product was not cluttered. If you look at other collaboration services there are 80 services there, most of which

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From Free To Premium With Ease: YouSendIt Cofounder Ranjith Kumaran (Part 6)

SM: What was your revenue like when you first raised money? RK: It was getting close to $1M. We were three people but we had a very bandwidth intensive service. We had a substantial infrastructure that we were building out.

From Free To Premium With Ease: YouSendIt Cofounder Ranjith Kumaran (Part 5)

SM: Do you work integrated deals with other major software vendors? RK: We have some, but the majority of the time users need to go install the YouSendIt plug-in on their own. We have done a little bit of both, and we would like to do more integrated solutions.

From Free To Premium With Ease: YouSendIt Cofounder Ranjith Kumaran (Part 4)

SM: What was the conversion ratio? RK: Over the past two years we have doubled our conversion rate on the free-to-paid subscription side to 4%. Overall, including our transactional pay-per-use which includes enterprise, the conversion rate is close to 10%.

From Free To Premium With Ease: YouSendIt Cofounder Ranjith Kumaran (Part 3)

SM: I understand there were three cofounders. Did any of you take a salary role in the beginning of the company? RK: The other guys were still consulting at their previous jobs. I was out raising seed capital to keep the company going because my former company had just been purchased. I was able to

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From Free To Premium With Ease: YouSendIt Cofounder Ranjith Kumaran (Part 2)

SM: What was the competitive landscape like at that point? RK: Right around the time we launched another small company out of Los Angeles called Dropload. It did not take off as quickly as hoped.

From Free To Premium With Ease: YouSendIt Cofounder Ranjith Kumaran (Part 1)

Ranjith Kumaran is the founder and chief technology officer for YouSendIt. Prior to YouSendIt, Kumaran held marketing positions at Verisity Design, and he was the director of sales engineering at Celoxica. He has also worked as a software systems engineer at Red Hat. Kumaran received a bachelor of engineering degree in computer engineering from McGill

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