Dharmesh Shah explains why HubSpot ditched freemium for Website Grader, a free tool that scores marketing health on a 0-100 scale. Instead of giving away part of your core product, build an adjacent tool that surfaces customer problems and makes them want to buy the real thing.
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One of the things we launched is this free tool called Website Grader. What it does is you put your website in, like AcmeWidgets.com, and it would go do this analysis and give you a score from 0 to 100 on how good you are at marketing based on evidence from your website. Was the SEO right? Did you get the tags right? How much traffic were you getting? What's your social media presence? And it gave you a relative score, a percentile score that says, oh, you get an 87. That means you are better than 87% of the other websites we've graded. Now, what was interesting about that is that basically this was Freemium without the downside. One of the challenges you have in freemium is like, okay, I'm gonna take my solution, which is X, and I carve out a small portion of it and give it away for free. That's the kind of classic freemium model. And then I'm going to sell the premium version. Lots of startups forget the mium part, but let's assume you got that right. So it's like, okay, well, I'm gonna give away a small piece and then in hopes that they buy the larger thing. One of the big challenges with freemium is like you have to decide what that small piece is. There are issues around, well, do people devalue the big thing because some portion of it's available for free and you get bucket into something else. What we did is say, okay, well instead of giving a part of the solution away, why don't we create a tool that surfaces the problem that they have? And that increases the likelihood that they'll buy the full solution. It has worked brilliantly for us, and I think, I don't know if it's universally applicable, but a bunch of you should think about that. It's like, is there some adjacent tool that you can build that helps your customers recognize that they need you?
