A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

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KG Charles-Harris is a serial entrepreneur whose current startup, Quarrio, is involved in big data using AI.

As longtime readers know, KG writes here whenever he has time, which he hasn’t had much of lately. His most recent post on leadership was a two-parter (you can read it here and here in case you missed it).

Today, I need to share some great news about KG and his startup Quarrio. (KG would be writing this, but he’s sick.)

Quarrio is a business intelligence product built on top of Salesforces’ platform.

What we do is Business Intelligence for Salesforce. How we do it is quite a bit different. With Quarrio we make it simple to analyze Salesforce by using conversations. We help you understand what’s happening to your opportunities, leads, accounts – just about anything in Salesforce — by simply having conversations.

Simply put, you ask questions in plain English and immediately answers in plain English, along with graphs, charts, etc., if apropos.

That ability will be a little slice of heaven for anyone who needs to get information from the dashboard.

Now for the great news.

Salesforce opened a new incubator today.

The new space, called the Salesforce Incubator, finally opened on Wednesday. Located in San Francisco’s SOMA district, where a lot of startups open shop these days, Salesforce Incubator will house 14 startups for the next 5 months for free.

And Quarrio is one of the chosen!

“Freemium” isn’t a winning strategy for enterprise software, as Dropbox can attest.

In general, incubators are useful, but, for an enterprise startup using Salesforce’s platform, the focus, connections and access of the Salesforce incubator are unparalleled.

Obviously, it will be an intense five months.

Image credit: Salesforce

Back in June, when money got tight and investors started focusing on profits, instead of the emperor’s clothes, we considered why freemium isn’t an enterprise play.

Cheap doesn’t work, either.

Competing on price means keeping costs down.

Keeping costs down typically means skimping on headcount.

That skimping often happens in customer service/support.

Cheaper customer service frequently means online help or offshore outsourcing.

Neither option is known to keep enterprise users happy.

And while inertia may retain consumers, enterprise is quick to walk.

Like the man said, good ain’t cheap and cheap ain’t good.

Image credit: CB Insights

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

If you doubt those words, just take a look at the difference between Egnyte, and Box and Dropbox.

Founded in 2007, Egnyte never offered free anything, has taken only $62.5 million (nearly half of that in 2013) in funding and says it will be profitable by year-end.

Box and Dropbox are not even close, with their millions of over-hyped, flavor-of-the-last-few-years hypergrowth users who pay nothing.

Nada.

Consumers used to pay, too, when the service was viable enough.

Angie’s List started in 1995 as a paid subscription service and boasted a 73% renewal rate in 2015.

In 2008 the mantra of hypergrowth exploded, driven by the the fremium model, but converting free users to paid turned out not be all that easy.

Many companies are now trying to sell their multi-million consumer products to corporations and are learning, to their chagrin, that corporations don’t care about freemium, let alone the media hype that drives consumer adoption.

Matt Weeks spelled it out perfectly in a guest post on NTR’s blog that’s well worth your time.

…hypergrowth without a hope of unit economics that lead to profitability has always been a fool’s errand (…) at some point there must be a path to profitable and repeatable unit economics.

Put more simply, the real goal of your startup is sustainable profit.

And there’s always Marc Andreessen’s advice, which really rules out the ‘free’ in freemium.

Marc Andreessen has two words of advice for startups: Raise prices. (…) “The No. 1 thing — just the theme and we see it everywhere — the No. 1 theme with our companies have when they get really struggling is they are not charging enough for their product. It has become absolutely conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that the way to succeed is to price your product as low as possible under the theory that if it’s low-priced everybody can buy it and that’s how you get the volume.”

Don’t bemoan it; own it.

Image credit: HikingArtist