When setting up a freemium business model, it is important to have the right complimentary products. This slideshow is a set of cue cards that can help you find these. For more information see www.freemium.eu

1. #Freemium tool Brainstorming for alternative complimentary products Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License

2. #Brainstorming Brainstorming utilizes one of the best ways to get god ideas, which is to get a lot of ideas. Amongst creativity experts it is widely recognized that one great source of getting good ideas is to get a lot of ideas. While brainstorming it is important not to evaluate the ideas as they come up. If you evaluate the ideas on an ongoing basis, people will intuitively be less likely to mention their ideas. This will greatly inhibit the number of ideas and thus the number of good ones. Don’t panic, you will get a chance to evaluate them afterwards. 1

3. #Method If it is possible for your session, I would greatly recommend that you brainstorm with a group of people and an external facilitator. But it is also quite possible to facilitate it by yourself. You start by supplying all the participants with post-its or small pieces of paper. When you get an idea, you say it out aloud and write it on a post-it. For each of the subjects, you should have an A3 size paper on which you place the post its. Use 5 minutes to brainstorm on each of the questions; initially no idea is too ridiculous. Even though a certain question seems like it makes no sense for your business, put some ideas down. 2

4. #Deluxe products The band Nine Inch Nails, gave their 2008 album Ghosts I-IV away for free. To compliment this they sold, among other things, a $300 deluxe box CD. The 2,500 copies sold out within 3 days. What deluxe product could you create ? 3

5. #Subscription As a regular member of LinkedIn you can use most of the features for free. However if you want to have certain advanced features, you have pay a subscription. LinkedIn makes 75% of its revenue from this and other sales. How can you create a subscription based service? 1

6. #Royalties for extended use Common Craft produces sorted 3-5 min educational videos, explaining concepts such as social media, wikis or even the US presidential election in an innovative format. They put the videos on YouTube for everyone to see. If you want a higher quality for watch in the workplace, you can buy a DVD. How could you sell high quality versions of free content? 1

7. #Selling a physical copy In 1999, the author Paulo Coelho put the Russian version of his book “The Alchemist” up for free download on a web page. Without having done any further PR, the sales of his books reached 10 million after 3 years. He used the proliferation of the free PDF book to sell more physical books. Do you have a physical equivalent for the free product? 1

8. #Selling concerts or talks In 2008, Radiohead let users decide for themselves how much they wanted to pay for the album. While it was not technically a free product, a lot of people downloaded it without paying and the release created attention. On the basis of this attention, the band played for a San Francisco audience of 60.00 where they previously played for 25.000 What could your equivalent of a concert be ? 1

9. #Paid inclusion Traditional academic journals cost something to buy. In open access publishing, the journals are free. The costs are paid by those who contribute. How can you create a product where you can get paid for inclusion? 1

10. #seminars, workshops or conference calls In the search engine optimization business, it is customary to give away a lot of knowledge. Most of these companies make part of their money by conducting workshops or conference calls. What sort of seminar, workshop or conference call could you create? 1

11. #Sponserships In China, a lot of bands get their main income from corporate sponsorships. In the same way, many athletes are funded by sponsorships. How could you get a corporate sponsorship? 1

12. #Complimentary content www.flatworldknowledge.com supplies quality college textbooks that are free to download. Besides selling physical copies, they make money by selling study aids and the content in different formats, such as audio. What sort of products could the users need when using your free product? 1

13. #Sale of related products When you buy electronic equipment, the store often offers financing and insurance for the product. The stores actually make a big part of their profits by selling these products for external providers. What related products could you sell to your users? 1

14. #Booking of colleagues Successful experts in a field often get a lot of request from possible clients. Not having time for all of them, many experts refer such requests to colleagues in their field. Since the client initially got in touch because of the expert’s knowledge, there is sometimes a fee for the referral. How could you book professionals in your industry? 1

15. #Merchandise The freemium business model is sometimes ridiculed as the T-shirt economy; because merchandise T-shirts are obvious examples of complimentary products for free music. Even though this is meant as ridicule, Americans spend $40 billion on decorated apparel. What sort of merchandise could you sell? 1

16. #Support & implementation Example: Every year IBM pays $1 million worth of programmer work on the open source software Apache. They use their expertise generated from this to sell support and implementation. What sort of support or implementation could you sell? 1

17. #Evaluation Once you have looked into the brainstorming, you need to cut down on the ideas. Place all the ideas on a wall or a table. 1 First go through the xxxx different areas. Each person says if they think this area might be relevant for your business. If there are any areas where none thinks it might be relevant, such areas are removed. 2 By butting a small mark, each participant gets to vote for 3 individual ideas. The ideas that have gotten no votes are removed. 1

18. #Evaluation 3 The remaining ideas might be used for getting relevant complimentary products for your business. Now it is time to figure out if it is something that people would buy. Go out and talk to current and potential users. 1