Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

I’m really excited about the latest OfficeDrop integration. ExpenseMagic, an automatic expense report generation service, has just integrated with OfficeDrop. This integration is going to be particularly useful for me, since I hate creating expense reports. Now I’ll just be able to drag my receipt scans into a magic folder and ExpenseMagic will give me a completed expense report!

The key take away here, from my perspective, is that having an open API (like the OfficeDrop API) allows third parties to make your platform better, while extending their own reach. Plus, cool integrations like this one create tremendous PR opportunities.

ExpenseMagic OfficeDrop Integration Video

Yeah, it was cool enough for me to want to make a video:

Here’s the press release. Looks like we are going to get some great press on this, so hopefully I”ll brag next week about it!!

OfficeDrop and ExpenseMagic Team Up to Make Expense Reports Bliss

Scan Receipts to the Cloud and Automatically Generate Expense Reports

August 17, 2012 — Cambridge, MA –Let’s face it. Expense reports aren’t fun for anyone.

There’s got to be a better way! Enter ExpenseMagic. OfficeDrop’s searchable online cloud storage and ExpenseMagic’s ultra simple, automated expense reporting service make a perfect pair. Here’s why:

Many of OfficeDrop’s small business cloud users take pictures of their receipts on-the-go using our iPhone, iPad, Android or desktop scanner apps and save them as searchable PDFs within their OfficeDrop online cloud storage accounts.

Now mobile users can simply snap photos of receipts using any of the OfficeDrop smartphone scanner apps and add them to their ExpenseMagic Upload folder. ExpenseMagic’s team gets to work and generates an expense report that you can view and share from your mobile device or computer.

From the PC it’s even easier: OfficeDrop users can simply drag receipt scans into the ExpenseMagic Upload folder in their OfficeDrop Windows File Sync Client and ExpenseMagic will put an expense report right onto their PC. Check out this video to see a demo.

“OfficeDrop wanted to take the pain out of small business expense reports, and ExpenseMagic was the perfect integration to help us do just that,” said OfficeDrop CEO Prasad Thammineni. “We are really happy that the wizards over at ExpenseMagic were able to use OfficeDrop’s API to create such a value-added feature. Integrations like this make OfficeDrop more than just cloud storage.”

OfficeDrop users can take advantage of ExpenseMagic’s automated expense reporting for the first month for free. More information on pricing plans for ExpenseMagic is outlined here. Learn more about the ExpenseMagic OfficeDrop integrations here and here, and get the ExpenseMagic iPhone app here.

OfficeDrop is a complete cloud solution for small businesses, from digitizing documents for the cloud to storage accounts that are sharable with teams. To learn how OfficeDrop makes digital life simple with its scan-and-capture apps and services, visit www.officedrop.com.

One of my sysadmins pointed out a great post from yesterday on using a decoy on your pricing page. If done well this can be a great strategy.

I’ve used this decoy pricing tactic on OfficeDrop’s pricing pages for a while. In particular, our digital filing pricing page has an expensive plan that has nicely increased overall conversion on the page.

The main result of this decoy is increased conversion on the page. In otherwords, a higher number & percent of visitors to the page pick a plan and become an OfficeDrop user. It hasn’t really changed the MIX of plans (very few people pick the expensive plan and the same % of people pick the other plans). But I consider the decoy plan a success because it’s getting more people into our funnel.

You can see the pop here when we added a decoy pricing plan to our standard digital filing pricing page. This chart is the % of visitors who visited the page and then signed up for a plan. I.e. the conversion rate of the page. Note that there is a little dip in the beginning that has nothing to do with pricing; it’s a data error. The way to look at this w/o the data error is the two little peaks on the left are close to the pre-decoy conversion rate average; the hump on the rigth is the new average post addition of the decoy pricing plan.

What the Decoy Pricing Plan Looks Like

The decoy pricing is the “ScanPro” “ScanFive” plan on the right. (Thanks for the typo catch Pete!)

Decoy Pricing Plan

It’s designed to be expensive and to make clear that we’ve got the ability to support additional users in the plans… it’s not really clicked that often.

Anyways, check out the post I linked to above. You’ll find it very solid, and it explains why a decoy plan works.

Lincoln Murphy, the well known SaaS Marketing guy, got pretty upset at a recent TechCrunch piece on the freemium pricing strategy that posted this weekend. Lincoln says (I’m on his email newsletter list; it’s pretty good): “In a nutshell the Complete Guide to Freemium on TechCrunch is a post by someone who got lucky enough to get their post accepted so he can get a backlink to his site from TechCrunch and where he takes the results of studies and some words from high-profile VCs and weaves it together into a post for the TMZ of the tech industry.”

Ouch. That’s a little harsh. The article isn’t bad at all. The conclusion is 100% great, actually.

What is Freemium?

However, I don’t think it’s the Ultimate Guide to what is a actually a pretty complicated pricing strategy. I happen to disagree with the author’s ideas that a time based free trial = freemium. I can’t tell if my disagreement is a big deal or not – his company, FutureSimple, has a free trial offer, so it’s hard to know how much of the piece is using that as the basis for the post vs. a couple of professors he references. I disagree with the idea that a free trial is freemium so much because OfficeDrop recently made the switch from a free trial to having a free forever plan and we called it “going freemium.”

My definition of freemium is that a user will have the opportunity to use the service/software/whatever forever without having to pay for it. It may be a limited plan or limited features, it may be ad supported; whatever. It just means you can use it for as long as you’d like without paying. FreshBooks has a freemium model, but you run out of “free” pretty quickly. You can jump through hoops to keep it free, but most likely you’ll upgrade. A free trial that expires after a set number of days doesn’t meet my definition of freemium.

OfficeDrop’s free plan is driven by our mobile distribution strategy. I write a little bit about why we think apps are taking over here. But you should listen to my conversation with Lincoln – I call it “Healy Jones on Freemium.” Our free plan is a free forever plan, with some upgrade triggers baked in – search limits, storage limits, OCR limits. But it’s a pretty good product for free; we are the only company offering free high quality OCR for scanned images coupled with storage. People seem to like the plan… and they also seem to like to upgrade to paid plans. We like that part for sure!

Lincoln is putting on a webinar on kicking butt with your company’s free trials model. I think he’s got some good stuff, so I’d suggest you register!