Joel Liu's Library tagged monetization →  View Popular

The San Francisco, Calif.-based start-up, seeded with $650k by Ron Conway (who participated in our Downturn Event VC Panel) and other angel investors including seed fund Y Combinator, in June launched two products to help bring in revenue: The first was professional accounts (versions that users actually have to pay for), the second was Google AdSense integration into sites built using Weebly.

The company is seeing roughly 35 percent month over month revenue growth, says co-founder and CEO David Rusenko — but that includes domain sales. The company wouldn’t say specifically how many users are paying to use Weebly — that is, using the premium version of Weebly — but it is “well over 1 percent,” said Rusenko. The company has 11 million unique visitors to pages created by people using Weebly’s service.

As I noted in the comments to Roger's post, we've struggled with early stage investments in enterprise oriented web services. Sales to enterprises often require expensive sales teams and it's much harder to know if you've nailed the product/service with feedback from a limited number of enterprise customers.

It's much better, in my opinion, to go with the freemium model, give a version of the service away for free to all comers, get a lot of users, get good market feedback, then develop a premium version of the product/service for sale to enterprise customers. If your free version is popular with a lot of users, your customer base is the target for the upsell and you might be able to live without an expensive sales force initially. And, of course, keep your costs really low until you start to get revenues.