Special Forces: Quora Battle Plan: creating a global question and answer platform that harnesses crowd-sourced information generated from subject experts and general public alike. Return on Education: offers a freemium platform that gives users fast and easy access to information globally. Claim to Fame: launched in January 2010, Quora is a pioneer of its category and aims to be the master database for answers to all substantive questions in the world. Fast Facts: • Has received $61 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital, Keith Rabois, Adam D’Angelo, Peter Thiel, and Matrix Partners. • The founders of Quora, Charlie Cheever and Adam D'Angelo have been named among the top 30 under 30 entrepreneurs by inc.com. Common “Free Service” Business Models56 Business Model Monetization Game Plan Advertising model Know as much as possible about the user and bring targeted ads. Freemium model Sell a free product and plan to convert customers to a paid plan. Limited period Start with the free product for a promotional initial period and plan to charge it later. For promotion instance, 37 Signals provides free 30 day trial offer for most products and then charge if you use later. This is a tough thing to master these days. Sponsorship If your service indirectly helps the government and/or major organizations you could model ask them to sponsor your service. Wikipedia model You could get donations from your users. Many wordpress plugins, open source tools and Wikipedia do this. This could be the future of newspapers. 56 Balaji Viswanathan,!Cofounder Zingfin.com and Quora 126 Business Model Monetization Game Plan Gillette model Printers and razors are sold less than cost, as they plan to make high margin from selling a complementary product (cartridge/blades). The printer or blade you purchased will turn worthless if you don't buy the super-high margin complementary products from the manufacturer. On the web, for instance, you could create a cloud based spreadsheet/word processor that is free to edit/create documents, but charge money for exporting it as a file to the local machine. Or you could charge high for the iPhone app that can access the data natively. Open Source Sell the product for free and plan to make money on support, customization and Model" installation. Most open source software follows this model. Usage charge This is related to the freemium model. Give the product free for low usage, but charge model" when the user is exceeding the free limits (many storage applications such as Dropbox use this model)." Zynga model Sell products through in-app purchases or to get forward in the game. Credit card model In this model, you make your product free for one side (consumers) and use the network effects to make the other side (merchants) pay. Facebook, Yelp and other online marketplaces are now getting on to this model. Upsell/Cross-sell" Sell a free product & use that to promote a premium product in the same segment. For instance, if you run a finance website, you could give stock quotes free and sell premium analyst reports and financial planning tools. Build a brand" Use the free service to get brownie points/good press and use the brand image to sell premium products (directly related or not) later. Affiliate marketing Sign up for affiliate programs related to your service and convert your users to customers of your affiliates. Sell it to Google Build a big user base that might attract a big buyer such as Microsoft or Google, who might use the user base to sell their premium products/services. Make your next If none of the previous stuff works, you could run a free venture to build your personal venture a success brand/get popular and hope to get funding for your next venture. Taking a walk down memory lane, Andrew Carnegie, the great mogul and philanthropist of his time donated $56 million between 1886 and 1919 to build 2,500 free libraries around the world. In today’s term, that’s over $1.5 billion!57 Contrast this with Khan Academy, arguably the most widely used online “library” today, with over 160 million views, was funded with a total of $7 million from Bill Gates and several other backers. 57 Wikipedia, 2012. 127.