How to Charge Your Users

Thursday, August 23rd from 8:00 - 9:30 pm

Ben Chow, Product Designer & Serial Entrepreneur

Directly monetizing from your users is one of the best ways to run an online business.  It aligns your business with your users, really helps you hone and understand what is driving your users to use your product, and has much higher margins than indirect methods like advertising.   However, for disruptive startups, figuring out the best way to make money is most often an iterative process which is a tough thing to do with users who are very sensitive to both product and pricing changes.  This class will not only help you figure out a good monetization strategy, but, also provide some tips on how to roll out and iterate with your user base.

We will cover three areas.

1. Choosing the right monetization methods for your business. How to decide on subscription vs. micro-transaction, freemium vs. trial period, etc...

2. Pricing and how to shape value perception.

3. How to deploy, change, and throw away monetizing features with your users.

This class is intended to help an early stage entrepreneur who is working on their business model as well as startups that are looking for new ways to monetize an existing user base.  We will look at some real world examples as well as touch upon some learnings from the early social gaming days before monetization practices had matured in the market.