Check out the latest post from Grasshopper:

“A piece of advice to web entrepreneurs just getting started: rather than becoming consumed with starting the next Google or Facebook, focus on creating a remarkable company with a niche target market that solves a problem that you yourself have had. Here are four and a half great videos from six entrepreneurs to help you focus, get inspired, and launch a successful startup.”

See videos from David Heinemeier Hannson of 37signals, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin and more.

Check out all of the videos from “4.5 Videos Every Web Entrepreneur Needs to Watch”

Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures presents an in-depth look at the Freemium model in SaaS companies.

What is Freemium, you ask?

Well, Freemium is defined by wikipedia as “a business model that works by offering basic Web services, or a basic downloadable digital product, for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features.”

In his book he defines Freemium as “A marketing tactic where a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor has both a free and paid version of their product.”

Some of the areas Lincoln Murphy’s book addresses are:

• Freemium is Not a Business Model
• An Understanding of Free
• Freemium Success Requires Internal Reflection

Last week was a great week at Chargify. The team is normally spread out across the USA, but last week we all worked together in Sacramento, CA.

Two exciting and useful developments happened over the weekend:

1. iPhone App: our brand new Chargify to Go! app is available for free download from the iTunes App Store. Keep track of your signups, total customer count, monthly revenue, and annual revenue.
2. Freemium Model Support: our fees are based on the number of paying customers that you (our customers) manage through Chargify. That’s what’s on our pricing page right now. But we have also added a “Freemium add-on package”.

As a startup, we face many of the classic trade-offs between getting things done quickly and getting them done the best way possible. The right answer is usually somewhere in the middle. Since we’re dealing with our customers’ money and business transactions, we err on the side of doing things slowly and methodically, especially on core issues.

GATEWAY COVERAGE

Hundreds of people want us to add other payment gateways. This is absolutely true for people outside the USA, because they can’t use our currently-supported gateway, Authorize.net, which means they can’t use Chargify. And that’s a shame!

We’ve been gathering info since November on what gateways people want. In parallel, we’ve been investigating ways to add gateways - quick ways vs best ways.

If you’re a developer, you might ask why we don’t write code for each of the different gateways’ APIs. Especially with things like ActiveMerchant (in Rails), we should be able to add gateways very quickly. Yes, but…

Welcome to the Bullring, the blog dedicated entirely to empowering entrepreneurs and developers to start and run successful businesses based on recurring revenue models. 

Let’s lay it out there. Recurring billing is a pain in the ass. Credit cards get declined for a million different reasons, you have to deal with upgrades/downgrades, proration, refunds, credits, customer communication, fraudulent transactions, and the list goes on. It’s no small task to implement a system that handles all of the potential pitfalls of billing on a recurring basis.

Acronyms can be corny, right ?

Sorry that this post is so long! It covers 3 years of experience, as well as my recent journey with some great folks to help provide a solution to a problem that’s been affecting entrepreneurs, web startups, and SMBs over the past few years.

The businesses I’ve been involved in since 2006 are all about billing the same customer repeatedly. The product never “ships”. Instead, the product is something that flows continuously from us to our customer, and money flows back to us.

Consequently, billing customers involves more than it used to.

BAM!

The activities that surround recurring billing touch many parts of a business. These activities, added together, can be seen as a business unit, just like Marketing or Human Resources. As a business unit, BAM can include all of these things: