That John Martin

Dick Costolo talks about the power of free in his first Wizard post of the year:

Look, there are plenty of great business models based on charging a subscription fee. It’s also the case that we’ve all been burned by “now it’s free, now it’s not” services in the past (think ATM’s, for example….it’s free until we’re all using it, at which point it’s $2 per withdrawal). Nonetheless, it would appear that models in which revenue and earnings accrue to a company as an indirect function of its free use are the models that have the most powerful impact on the Internet today, and you work against that trend at your own peril. This is probably true even where specific industries continue not to admit it. When you add costs to using a product/service, you add friction to customer adoption (he said, stating the obvious). If somebody else comes along and figures out how to make money on such a service by providing it for free, then it’s not so much fun to be you because your competitor’s lack of friction is going to make life harder for you. And time and time again on the Internets, we see that somebody ultimately comes along and figures out how to make a lot of money by offering for free a service for which somebody else is charging.

I dropped in to Thursday’s Open Coffee meeting at the Tequila Bookworm Cafe in Toronto and was pleasantly surprised. There were a bunch of interesting people doing interesting projects and lots of good conversation to be had.

Jenn was up from Boulder showing off Yallery and regaling us of the seemingly impossible amount of startup activity in her hometown. Veronica talked a little about OTR Travel. We marveled at Bunnyhero coming in at 25M uniques according to comScore’s new Widget Metrix. And I, of course, pitched everyone on my little project.

All that and good coffee. I’ll definitely make it back next week.