by Jason Rothbart

Many Web 2.0 companies have tried to make money by charging for their product, but it can be hard work – especially if the product started out as free. Jott, a voice to text transcription service, is an example of one that took the plunge and succeeded.

Jott moved to a paid model following a successful free beta. I spoke with Jott CEO John Pollard to learn how they did it and how it is working out for them.

Jott is a great tool if you haven’t tried it. It is a voice-to-text service where you call a number on your phone, dictate a note, schedule a meeting, or write a to-do and the service transcribes your voice into the appropriate message type;

it even creates an object on Outlook automatically. The service had been in “beta” status and completely free. Recently, they came out of beta and rolled out a paid model with multiple plans for different usage and features.

Jott still has free service, but it’s been put together such that if you are a frequent Jott user, you’ll be very tempted to upgrade. The upgrade itself is less than $4 so I suspect many people will go for it. Jott has a variety of plans to choose from including free, basic, pro, pay-as-you-go, etc.

The company based these plans largely on user behavior and lots of data. When they started the company, they knew they would ultimately have a free and paid version, but had to learn the rest along the way. For example, they had to find out if their customers were home makers, road warriors, students, professionals, etc.  Read More