CatchFree Wants To Become The Hub Of The 'Freemium' Ecosystem

Good sold, you went straight in with a story about Big News, noted. That is why you are the head of Big News. Alright. OK. Please welcome to the stage from CatchFree, Sean Ellis, the founder and CEO and Eugene Mandel, the CTO.

Okay, will you bring the signs up.

Alright. Hi, everybody. We're very excited to be here today. This is Eugene Mandel and I'm Sean Ellis, and we're thrilled to be launching Catchfree with you today at TechCrunch. So before we do that, I'm going to go into a little bit of background on what lead up to Catchfree. So, Catchfree has been an epiphany that's been 7 years in the making.

During that time I worked with several premium startups including Dropbox, LogMeIn, Zobni, Lookout, Webs, WordPress The list goes on and each time I kept hitting my head against the same frustration, which was that unethical businesses are eroding our trust in the concept of free. So that's anything from a fake free product, which is really a trial but they're making us, they're tricking us into thinking that it's actually a free product to a useless free version, where it's cripple ware for a paid version, to a dangerous product where there may be spyware in there.

For a lot of users, especially mainstream users it's just not worth the risk of trying a free product and they're missing out on some great apps and services. So the epiphany that I had was that if we can take that information that we all know about the great products that are out there and the ones with the hidden catches, that we would be able to organize that into a resource and that resource would make it a lot safer and easier for people to find the best free products and avoid those with hidden catches.

So that's vision for Catchfree and we're excited to launch it right now, so please open your browser to catchfree.com. Hopefully everybody watching will open to catchfree.com as well and what you'll see there is a box which says, "Which free app do you love?". We are going to write an Ever Note there.

Ever Note is a company that does freemium really well, a great free product, they build a relationship with their users and so we're gonna tweet that out to our followers and ask them to share something that they love. So we started this process about fifteen minutes ago and it's supported by a lot of the best freemium companies that are out there.

You may actually have a little trouble getting into the site right now because it has actually gone viral and we were at 10 megabytes per second on traffic when we walked up on stage so... Eugene's gonna take you through the resource that we're all working to build right now, and he'll explain more.

Thank you, Sean. Ok so the first thing you can do on Catchfree is a fast and easy verification whether a free product is safe. Let's say that you heard some good things about Lookout and you want to check for yourself if it is safe to use. here, you immediately can see that user sentiment is very positive.

It's highly rated on Catchfree. It has tons of likes on Facebook, and even faster than that. Anytime you see this Catchfree heart logo, it means that this product is a top user peak in its category. Very easy to verify. Sometimes you don't quite have a particular product in mind, and then, Catchfree provides the safe environment to explore the world of "Free".

We make it really easy by narrowing it down to specific things you want to do. We've done a lot of user tests and we saw that mainstream users, once they're not scared, they really love to explore. Now let's say that you're browsing through those categories and this one catches your eye. I can share my desktop with others for free.

From here it's very easy to find the best provider. The structured data on this page helps you wrap your head around how to pick one. For example, in this LugiSee component, our users identify and vote up What are the most important features when choosing a product, in this case what should be easiest for viewers to connect.

Q;a provide additional flexibility for this information in every category top user feeds are featured on this page both are safe feeds but in addition to that, those that feature this heart logo are committed to our proposed principles for premium companies. So as we see that it's extremely easy and fast way to find the best app free, the best free app service that does exactly what you wanted to do and now back to you Sean.

Thanks, Eugene. About now, you're probably wondering how we're going to make money when everything on the side is free. Well, it turns out there is a really valuable businesses being build with a freemium model so having multi billion dollar businesses in single categories and most have no way to buy growth until now so Catchfree is actually gonna offer profitable CPAs to premium businesses, we're also going to give you credits for inbound people that you send to Catchfree but this program is going only to be available for top user picks in each category.

So users are in control with Catchfree and that's a really important principle for us. Speaking of users, what do they think about Catchfree? We've been testing for a couple of months and this is what a few had to say.

They offer free apps, software and services. I like that idea.

We will definitely come back today.

We will be back for sure and I will write it down and remember it and look forward to sharing it with others.

I think one of the reasons I will be comfortable using some of those products I am looking at is because I see other products here that are already like this.

So Catchfree is going to be very popular with users. So far they love it. We have a lot of people try it and that's very typical feedback. We're also confident that we're going to be able to acquire a lot of them. I already talked about this first thingthat we're giving. Sharing and viral, that's on fire right now, so obviously, that's going to work because there's lots of viral loops that we're able to optimize.

Search this will be the most comprehensive resource about free apps and services, perfect for search, demand generation would probably not need to get there, that's Catchfree perfectly timed. Catchfree everyone.

I think it's, I think it's so cool that so many of you early users are stock photography models. They're a really hard demographic to get.

Alright, so, I don't know who to start with, so, who, like me, is terrified of browsing for free apps.

So, one thing which I did not understand. Are you gonna have a button in every note that says one Catchfree and we are sort of ranked X on Catchfree to the start loop?

What we'll have is actually this badge; the heart badge that Eugene showed you. That any time you see that they know it's a top user pick, and they follow the recommended principles for a good premium business.

But that's from the Catchfree side.



That's actually going to be a badge that's carried on the site that participates in the program. Okay.

The skill was lot like a Site Adviser. What Site Adviser was.

Exactly...

I was thinking the same thing.

How do you kind of compare and contrast? That was like a really good idea, good company. You know, Nice outcome, but not a gigantic company.

I think what we have to look at with this is that free is really the future of all things digital. There's gonna be a free player that competes in every category. If you read Harvard business review for the June addition of just this time they say the title of a 5 year study is competing against free and they talk about it's game theory.

If you have a threat from free, you have to counter with free and they beat up on how Microsoft has done that on others. So when you play it out with game theory, free is where it is headed and it 's really hard to acquire customers if you have a free business model. So this is going to be the answer for them to require customers who will sit in the middle of that ecosystem.

So today most of that traffic goes to download.com and those kind of types. If you type in "free something", download is typically ranking first. You guys are just going to use a CO get in second?

I think download.com or any traditional distribution hub, what you're seeing with that is a playing field that's tipped toward paid customers, paid products? Because they have economics that are ten times the price you can pay for a user? And so free gets buried in there .I worked with 15 freemium businesses taking them to market and each time it's impossible to do demand generation and we are going to be a great place for them to do that.

Do you charge for the review to make sure that the app complies with your specifications?

No, we don't, what we have is, anybody can be on the site, users vote apps up to the top. And in any given category only the top 2 user voted products qualify to be in the program.

How do you know a new app comes out and how do you know it meets your minimum standard, they just search, they follow your code and you don't have a actual review of it.


We will definitely do a review if they want to be in the program, but it's a bit of a freemium model all in itself, that they won't be able to get a lot of benefit if they don't want to be in the Catchfree network but if they're in the Catchfree network, they're going to both contribute traffic to it and get traffic from it.

But if they're not in the network, they don't get to use the heart with the check mark?

They not goint to get the heart with the check mark if they're not on the network.

And the user gets no guarantee that they follow your rules?

That's right, but what they will know is that they're voted to the top of their category, so they're going to feel pretty good about it.

So the only assurance that I have that an app follows the rules is that they're also agreeing to pay you for referrals.

They don't necessary have to pay. They need to be in the network and a lot of them are not going to necessarily pay: they are going to send a lot of traffic to the network. And if they send more people, then they don't have to pay.

But they'd be willing to pay, depending on how the traffic balance goes. They're committed to...

Exactly, exactly. And from all the ones that we spoke to, the price that we're setting is really fair. It's based on a profitable CPA for them. So every body has said that its a no-brainer that they would pay.

Did you say you were going to start also an in-app download product?

No.

You are not going to do that.

No, not at this point.

Because thatwhy, because that seems like where everybody's making money, so if you could be a verified, clean, ad network, wouldn't that be the way to get distribution because it's very hard to even get users to SEO but not through whether using the apps.

I think that ultimately there's a company called Open Candy that Yeah that does that well, that does that does that well and what I found, I've used Open Candy with a few companies and, what I found is that the referrals that I got through that it was a convenience stuff. Yeah, ok I guess I'd take a little bit of dropbox with my zodney or vice-versa, but they really haven't researched it, and drilled into it, and they're not back converted.

hat these are people who are going to find a lot of information about that app and really know what it is before they convert to it and with premium you have to engage them on the free before you get any of the value of evangelist and upgrades.

So from the user perspective are you going to be, is the user looking for free things or are you going to build vertical sort of communities more curated around interests like kids apps, for example, or where a lot of value is Yeah, all of the above right. So you can browse through the site, a lot of people start with Google right now and because of the structured data that we offer, I think there will be a bit of a crunch base effect where, the best result enough times is to the structure data. You start going start to the source and so we think we will be able to take a search volume that way, but it's going to be really good discovery as well.

I actually expect to hit a million uniques today through the program that's going, it is blowing up right now.

Okay, we're out of time, so a round of applause Catchfree. Alrighty, so now, Roger, your gonna sit this one out 'cause you are an investor in Cohort so.