REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwire - January 13, 2011) - Zuora, the subscription billing and commerce leader, today announced that Roost, a Social Marketing technology company whose application helps local professionals get more business from social media, has delivered a paid premium version of its popular Social Media Toolkit with Zuora, fulfilling its freemium business model. Deployed in only 30 days, the Zuora solution has enabled Roost to monetize the application and optimize its pricing model to capture the full revenue potential of its fast-growing social media user base.
Founded in 2007, Roost offers a solution for real estate brokers, real estate agents, and other local service professionals to grow their networks through social media networks like Facebook. With more than 500 million people on Facebook alone, the social web provides powerful opportunities for companies offering social media-based marketing applications. With the rise of the social web and its unique effectiveness in generating trusted referrals, local professionals can go beyond blind Internet leads and use social media to grow their networks, establish their expertise, and maintain an active presence to increase their referral business. Through Facebook, Roost rocketed to more than 20,000 individual customers within 6 months of launching its Social product (in addition to more than 70 real estate brokerage customers). To capitalize fully on this momentum, Roost's freemium model offers its clients a choice of products tailored to meet their needs, including both a free version and a paid premium version with enhanced capabilities.
After exploring other subscription billing solutions available today, Roost selected Zuora as the best solution on the market to implement its paid subscription strategy, largely because Zuora was the only subscription billing and commerce provider built explicitly for the new subscription economy. With Zuora, Roost can now support the subscription flexibility required over time to meet Roost's future growth projections, including handling subscription changes, upgrades, renewals and new price plans. Roost deployed Zuora in 30 days including:
- New paid price plans for upgrade to premium
- Subscription flexibility to handle monthly and annual billing
- Online payments in a PCI-compliant manner through PayPal
- Self-service storefront click-through from Facebook to process online orders
In addition, Roost is tapping into Zuora's flexible pricing capabilities to iterate and test different pricing models that optimize Roost's revenue. With the toolkit expected to continue its rapid rate of adoption, Zuora will provide the automation, scale, and flexibility Roost needs to support its fast-growing business.
"Zuora has helped us fully transform our business to capture the full potential of the social media opportunity," said Alex Chang, CEO, Roost. "As we moved to help local businesspeople capitalize on this shift, we needed to stay focused on our core competency of building next-generation marketing tools. Zuora made it simple for us to monetize our new services and perfect our pricing model while allowing ample extensibility and scalability to keep up with the continued evolution of our subscription products."
"Roost illustrates the vast opportunities created by social media platforms like Facebook for entrepreneurs to promote and distribute new applications across a large and growing audience, but to actually make money, they also need an effective way to monetize their services," said Shawn Price, President of Zuora. "Roost is a perfect example of a company who leveraged social media to achieve rapid growth with a free version of their service, then introduced a premium version to unlock the product's full revenue potential. Partnering with Zuora gave Roost a way to capitalize on the demand quickly while giving themselves the tools to stay ahead of competitors over the long haul."
About Zuora, Inc.
Zuora's subscription billing and commerce platform changes the way subscription businesses manage and sell to customers, allowing them to bring new products to market in less time, with more flexibility and less hassle. Zuora customers are up and running within 90 days and often recognize 200% ROI within weeks. Zuora is built from the ground up by SaaS industry visionaries and veterans from salesforce.com, WebEx, Accenture, Google, eBay, Oracle and Vitria. Zuora customers include Reed Business Information, Coremetrics, InsideView, Marketo, Ricoh, Box.net, Xactly, and Cloud Central. To learn more about Zuora, please visit www.zuora.com.
About Roost, Inc.
Roost is a San Francisco-based technology company that helps local professionals get more business from social media. Roost was founded in 2007. Our flagship product is the Roost Social Media Toolkit(SM). The toolkit, built for use within Facebook, empowers real estate agents, real estate brokers and other local service professionals who rely on word-of-mouth marketing to drive referral business. Learn more about Roost's Social Marketing products at www.Roost.com.
Contact Information:
Media Contact
Maria Bradley
Reidy Communications for Zuora
(415) 704-5012