Basic User Monetization

Take-Home Task

Take-Home Task

Prepare a presentation that walks us through a piece of work you are most proud of in your career so far.

This is an opportunity to demonstrate how you think, how you communicate with stakeholders, and the impact of your work.

Take-Home Task

AGENDA

01 02 03 04

Context & Problem Implementation Impact & Outcome Reflections

Task @ Issuu Inc.

2026 Abhishek Dwivedi | Issuu Inc’s work

Monetization

Agenda

Context and Problem

01

The problem or business opportunity you were v addressing

02

Why this work mattered

Context and Problem

Issuu’s SaaS freemium model 75%

24%

Basic

Starter Free

1%

Premium 19$

Optimum 40$

269$

No of Flipbooks

Unlimited

Unlimited

Unlimited

Unlimited

Number of pages

500

500

5000

5000

File Size

100 MB

100 MB

500 MB

2 GB

Feature

Feature

Context and Problem

Issuu’s SaaS freemium model 0.75%

0.24%

99%

Basic

Starter Free

0.01%

Premium 19$

Optimum 40$

269$

No of Flipbooks

Unlimited

Unlimited

Unlimited

Unlimited

Number of pages

500

500

5000

5000

File Size

100 MB

100 MB

500 MB

2 GB

Feature

Feature

Context and Problem

01: Problem or Business Opportunity

Business Opportunity

At Issuu, a large portion of highly engaged free users were not compelled to upgrade.While paid users stayed on the same paid plan for years. The opportunity was to rebalance the freemium model as well as structure the paid tiers while creating a clear & fair upgrade moment tied to real value.

Context and Problem

02: Why it mattered?

Issuu was a mix of value and feature unlock as users moved up the tier. There was so much value in each plan that users stayed on the same plan for years, whether its Basic or Premium plan. This mattered directly to revenue growth and the long-term sustainability of the business.

Implementation

01

Stakeholder Landscape

02

Tools, Processes or methodologies used

03

Challenges encountered & how you handled them

04

How the work was delivered

v

Implementation

01 : The Stakeholders

Marketing

Execs: CEO, CTPO and VP’s My Team: Design and Engineering

Sales Data Analytics

Customer Success

Implementation

02: Tools, process and methodologies

Miro Hotjar VWO (A/B testing) Mixpanel Braintree Usertesting Inc

Miro: User journey mapping and mapping how our most valuable features were distributed across different plans.

Qualitative and Quantitative: We did a series to user interviews to understand the “value metric” & Data analysis to understand the engagement and retention curves.

Corrily (Pricing)

Implementation

3 core value metric

Basic

Starter

Premium

Optimum

No of Flipbooks

Unlimited

Unlimited

Unlimited

Unlimited

Number of pages

500

500

5000

5000

File Size

100 MB

100 MB

500 MB

2 GB

Implementation

1st test of core value metric

Basic

Starter

Premium

Optimum

No of Flipbooks

5

Unlimited

Unlimited

Unlimited

Number of pages

500

500

5000

5000

File Size

100 MB

100 MB

500 MB

2 GB

Implementation

03: Challenges encountered The most significant challenge was to craft a clear messaging and building alignment across teams and broader company, along with the technical challenges.

Creating the Story

Identifying the challenges

Potential growth for current business

Challenges

Free Users Opportunity Space

APIs Gating content

Paid Users

Legacy Customers Rollout

Low

High

Low

High

Low

High

Low

High

Implementation

04: How the work was delivered Pre- work

D-day

⟶ Creating chort of users for phased rollout (by age & region)

Technical Setup

⟶ Sending a legal email 30d before plan change

⟶ 5 latest documents will be visible

⟶ Segmenting users with in cohort by number of active publications.

⟶ After 5th all documents will be gated meaning only the first page will be visible and next page will an overlay of “blocked by publisher”

⟶ Aligning standby teams in tech and customer success. ⟶ Establishing FAQ Slack

⟶ How Embeds are gated vs publications (legacy users)

⟶ Review the setup ⟶ Monitor the conversion rates ⟶ Case by case resolution of first cohort of “angry” users. ⟶ Understand the rollout complexity and emotional burden of users

Post release ⟶ Learning from first cohort of release we gave free upgrade for 1 year of Starters to some users ⟶ Fixed the error in gating mechanism ⟶ Prepared the next batch of rollout

Impact & Outcome

01

How was success measured

02

The Result of the work

03

How was work finally received

v

Impact and Outcome

Measure Success

Result

Work received

Free to paid was the northstar KPI. We did also monitor the churn and retention

Major uplift in free to paid with 10k additional users converting to paid tier in a quarter

The results were overwhelmingly positive and it became the stepping stone of the pricing and packaging discussion and further initiatives.

⟶ Primary KPI : Free to paid conversion

⟶ 20% jump in Free to paid

⟶ Secondary KPI : Engagement (Churn from basic)

⟶ Some users played with 5 publications by re-uploading documents or by deleting old ones

⟶ No. 1 roadmap initiative for resource allocation in future

⟶ We monitored feedback across channels to monitor health of the initiative

⟶ Some users complained esp non profit organisations who were given free upgrades

⟶ Feature factory v/s value creation ⟶ Major infrastructure initiatives got focus and attention ⟶ Investment in right features such as Lead Gen and Shortened links

Reflections

01

What did you learn?

02

How would you have done it differently today?

03

Why did you chose this project?

v

Reflection

What did I learn?

Done differently?

Why did I chose this?

Value can be created not only by new features but by distributing value evenly across the product & by making existing value more accessible.

Craft a shared success story of the company rather than individual team successes.

The most cross functional initiative I ever worked on. Real growth work with results directly tied to revenue goals

⟶ Appetite for change

⟶ I would try multivariate test

⟶ Scope and Impact

⟶ Engineers love to see the revenue impact more than business will ever do!

⟶ Involve adjacent technology teams earlier than needed.

⟶ Learning curve

⟶ Pricing psychology

⟶ Over communicate

⟶ Every product and its users are unique (in terms of what they value)

⟶ Find culture ambassadors in every department (Pushing against the wind esp with Marketing/CRM)

⟶ Building consensus is equally hard if not more than building tech

⟶ Real revenue uplift

Conclusion

Learning

All questions and their answers are inside the company, sometimes the way to find the answers changes the outcome.

Solve the whole problem with the right friction in place.

Conclusion

THANK YOU v

Any questions?