FMYI | For My Innovation

Let’s talk about Ning. This is a timely topic since Ning has been in the news lately for replacing their CEO, cutting staff, and ending their free version. But occasionally we’ll get questions about how our service compares with Ning. We both offer platforms to create a social network for a group of people. Here are the main differences though:

Differences between FMYI and Ning

1. Ning is usually for public networking. FMYI is only for private invite-only groups, and we offer many levels of access permissions.
2. Ning was created for people to network and communicate with each other, like a more social version of older tools like Yahoo Groups, or Google Groups. FMYI is specifically for collaboration, meaning the team of people are working together to achieve goals, such as managing projects, tracking contacts, and sharing resources in the workplace, in a class at school (college, university, or other higher education environment), or as part of a membership/networking association.
3. Ning no longer offers a free version. FMYI has offered a free version for years, and always will.

This brings us to a big question: why does FMYI believe in a free version? We think it’s important to let people experience what we’re all about without a limited time trial period. It take a little time for you to get to know us in terms of inviting people in to your site, experiencing the free email and phone support we offer, and trying out all the features we offer as activity ramps up in your site.

We feel like the more time you spend with us, the more you’ll like us, and be interested in our upgraded features. But no pressure if you don’t want to upgrade, because you’re helping us to spread the word about FMYI with the people you invite into your FMYI site. And this viral word of mouth referrals are important for us to reach new clients. Tools like SurveyMonkey has had a commitment to providing support to their free users, and they’ve grown tremendously as a result of people spreading the word.

So if having a free version is great, why did Ning stop offering one? A company has to make money, and Ning is smart to focus on boosting their revenue. At some point, even in this age of cheaper cloud computing, the cost of hosting millions of free users starts to have a major impact on the bottom line. If the percentage of paying users is in the single digits, that makes it tough unless you have major venture capital (2% of Evernote users pay but they have $25.5 million in funding) or other revenue streams to fund the product (less than 4% of Google Apps users pay but 95% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising).

For FMYI, although we provide free support for all users, and free generates paying leads for us, our business development focus isn’t on the freemium business model. We spend most of our time generating revenue from our large corporate customers. This is key for the bootstrapping portion of our how we’ve grown over the years. It’s the notion that we try not to spend more than we earn. And we have a singular focus on providing a great collaboration platform, not on other activities that could distract from the quality of our service or our responsiveness.

What do you think about the importance of free versions?

-Justin