Greathouse Storage: Fill & Download for Free

The only problem I see in this JD is that there is a mismatch of expectations between the author and the audience -- and by mismatch I mean a giant chasm fraught with danger.Remember the old adage: perception is reality? Well authoring a job description, like this, is bound to bring about the perception that you "shall not pass!" unless you are a grey/or white wizard with all of these mentioned skills in your toolbelt. This may not be the reality but this is certainly intimidating to potential talented professionals, many of whom would probably be highly competent and great candidates for your business.On the other hand, the author of this Job Description is trying to convey information about what they typically use in their tech stack. I highly doubt this company expects to find someone who is an expert in all of the skills listed, but they want to set expectations about the kind of skills they're looking for. They are not intentionally trying to set unrealistic expectations, but they are just bad at understanding the nature of seeking talent, and so they've sabotaged themselves with a bad job description.A better approach to solving the complicated problem about finding people, with these specific talents, would be to write a letter to another human as if you were inviting your friend to consider working for your company.My version of that job discription:Hi Friend,Do you have any experience with large scale applications that cover multiple disciplines?I'd like you to see what we're doing at ACME Supply Co. We've been building this distributed software system for about 5 years now and it's grown into something that needs very talented people to keep it from turning into crap. Some of the Software we wrote is in C++, Some is in Java/Scala, some is in JavaScript. If you're strong in any of those disciplines then you'll probably fit in well here. If you know Erlang then that would be really good because that's really hard to find. Our Data storage is a mix of SQL and NoSQL, which is somewhat typical these days.Our app has presentation layers on native IOS, native Android, and Mobile Web. If you have experience with any of those and are willing to learn the others then this would be a great place for you to get experience doing all of that stuff.We really need people who are familiar with deploying their apps. Our place has the kind of workflow where developers need to have familiarity with the deployment process. Any experience you have with Jenkins, Docker, Chef, etc... will be helpful but not a dealbreaker if you think you can jump in and learn those.We really have a lot of fun here. There's a lot of really talented people and we are constantly learning, evolving and trying to make things better. I'd really like you to check it out, and talk with us sometime.

Only if you have a plan to monetize such free users in some way. There are a variety of ways to do this. However, simply getting free users, without a clearly communicated path for them to become paying customers is a losing business plan.Here are some issues to keep in mind.Clear Communications – GoToMyPC was a successful free Beta because we made it clear from the outset that it would only be free for a limited time. Thus, when we flipped the switch to a paid service, no one was surprised. We failed toapprise our BuddyHelp users of our plans to charge for the service, therebyeliciting their wrath and feelings of betrayal.Consistent Rules – Freemium services result in satisfied users who have a higher propensity to pay when they feel that the rules are clear and consistent. Most users are ethical and willing to pay once they begin using the product in a manner which was previously described as qualifying for paid compensation.Make Cheaters Work – Resign yourself to the reality that some users will pride themselves in cheating. These users will sign up to multiple free trials with a variety of email addresses and user names, just to avoid payment. Such unscrupulous users will never pay. Thus, it is not worthwhile to pursue them or erect barriers to impede committed cheaters as they will undoubtedly cause friction for honest users. Hold your nose and make it difficult, but not impossible for such nefarious users to freeload.Prop Up Your Value– A convenient and effective way to segment Freemium users is to denude thevalue prop of the free service. However, care should be taken to not reduce your value prop so much that your free offering besmirches your overall brand. A worthless / worth-little free product will be an ineffectual lead generation tool.There are a variety of ways to reduce the utility of a free service, such as limiting usage (e.g., Dropbox offers 2GBs of storage free and eFax allows users to send 30-pages free each month), limiting the available features (LogMeIn) offers remote access for free, but charges for additional features) or by market segment (.edu and .org users might be given access to the free service, but users with a .com email address must pay). RightScale combines two of these approaches by conscribing its free product’s use to individual users and limiting its functionality.Good luck.

Freemium done right can lead to explosive growth. Flickr was among first companies that did it very well. You could use Flickr for free and you could get extra storage space for a small annual fee as a Pro user. I paid for a Pro account and so did many photographers I knew. I remember reading articles ridiculing Yahoo for not making it completely free and thinking that Yahoo was doing exactly the right thing.Your freemium product needs to offer enough value to entice users to promote it to their friends and also have a few must-have premium features that amplify its value. Evernote did this amazingly well. Here is a video where Phil Libin talks about tracking premium conversions per cohort and how long it took to get its users addicted enough to buy premium features. That starts at 11 minutes.Evernote's killer premium feature is offline notebooks. It is the primary reason why I am paying for Evernote premium. The second reason is business card scanning. Premium customers can snap a photo of a business card and have its text indexed by Evernote.Another example is YouTube Red. YouTube realized that some people like to stream music videos in the background and prefer to not see ads while watching popular videos. If you pay for YouTube Red, you can stream YouTube in the background and your ads are gone. I pay for YouTube Red because that enables ELLO to be usable while driving with screen off.Digital music is another good example. I am a loyal subscriber to Digitally Imported - addictive electronic music since some absurdly long time ago. The free product is a lower quality stream with commercials. Premium service increases sound quality and removes commercials.Moving on into business services, we have GotoAssist. Interestingly, John Greathouse, whose baby that is, is on Quora. GotoAssist has a very interesting freemium product. You can do remote support for free from a mobile device like an iPad, but you must pay if you wish to access remote computers from a more convenient device like your laptop. GotoAssist also will not let me access my unattended computers, which is sometimes essential. Recognizing that some technicians need only occasional access, they offer a day pass for $6.95 without forcing me to pay $69.95 for a monthly subscription.We looked at me being a paying customer of several freemium products. What they all have in common is addictive capabilities as a free product with a tolerable level of annoyance. Flickr Pro limited me to few uploads, Evernote required me to be online, YouTube annoyed me with ads and restricted me to playing it in the foreground, Digitally Imported - addictive electronic music annoyed me with lower sound quality and ads, and GotoAssist won't let me access unattended computers unless I pay.One mistake freemium businesses do is not grandfathering their early customers. They are often your hidden source of new customers. I was a big advocate for a mobile development platform. They decided to shut down my accounts for inactivity, delete my data, and basically hold me hostage unless I upgraded to a premium account. I stopped recommending their platform.You can tweak your freemium product to make certain features premium, but you need to do it without upsetting your existing customers.No discussion about freemium would be complete without Dropbox, but I am not a paying customer for that service. Dropbox was kind enough to give me enough space for free for life at a hackathon. ;) While other companies like PayPal and Alladvantage paid their users to join their service, Dropbox offered storage space as incentive to both the existing user and the new user. This created a powerful incentive to share it with friends. Some of those friends used it more, became annoyed with not having enough space, and purchased more space.Your product is a good candidate for freemium model ifUsers want to use it for a very long time and become more likely to upgrade as time passesUsers realize that although they didn't need premium features earlier, they would now offer significantly more value and thus no longer seem expensiveIt doesn't cost you an excessive amount to support free users in both human and computing resourcesWhat makes a freemium product convert users to premiumGreat value as a free productMildly annoying restrictions on free productGreatly amplified value as a premium product