Hot answers tagged monetization
15
Bootstrap if:
This is your first business
You don't know what you're doing
You'll probably just pee lots of money up the wall
You want to keep control
You have no plans to float or sell
Consider VC if:
Having the money will make a big difference
If the factor stopping your growth really is cash, and not experience or something else
You know what you're ...
15
OK, so this may not be exciting to lots of people, but I think you're doing something interesting!
Firstly, there is room for an intermediary in this space. People who write email newsletters want an audience, and they pay for that through direct site advertising. If you can reach new audiences, or the same audience more cost-effectively, you have a value ...
11
In the case of Stack Overflow, users under 200 rep (and by extension anyone not logged in) sees more adverts. SO gets a huge number of page views from search engines and the majority of those will be new, unregistered users.
With the traffic SO gets, it's incredibly easy to make a lot of money, even via Google Adsense. But SO makes more money by selling its ...
10
@Ross's comment is key here.
You need to decide who your customers are going to be. Is it Google, or the people listing courses, or the people who visit the site.
Currently your customer is Google, and what you make will be limited by how popular the Google Adwords categories are that you attract. Obviously this isn't enough at the moment and presents a ...
8
The person who pays the bills IS the customer.
NO company makes money by not charging the customer.
They may have a business model which makes money by not charging a user of their services -- but they do not make money by not charging their customer.
A start-up that fails to understand who their customer is will be in trouble.
If you are providing a ...
7
There are two main ways an LLC owner can obtain money from the LLC:
Withdrawals: This is money distributed to the LLC owners after net profits have been calculated. You need to show a profit to take a withdrawal from the LLC. How withdrawals are taxed depends on whether the LLC is taxed as a partnership or a corporation (see more on that below).
Guaranteed ...
7
William, I love tumblr but it is mostly a non-commercial social service (unlike Facebook which is an ad network masequerading as a social service). I use it for personal scrapblogging, and the majority of blogs on tubmlr are not monetized because they are also used for personal reasons. As a community, Tumblr feels a bit like a modern LiveJournal. It's just ...
7
All of my businesses now are subscription based. Over the last 10 years i have weaned off retail and consulting because i have done so well with subscription services.
Here are some concerns looking at your pricing:
Your development cost seems VERY Low. If you are building a very basic subscription service, and plan to integrate with merchant accounts, ...
7
In most cases you would charge the employers a fee for listing their job openings, or for searching resumes and CVs. (See Monster.com, HotJobs, careers.stackoverflow.com, etc.) Most companies who place job listings are used to having to pay for them, especially in cases where the job seeker has special skills or is hard to find.
You might also consider ...
6
A great resource that might help:
Seth Godin has covered this question in his manifesto titled The BootStrapper's Bible.
He even priced it accordingly for the bootstrapper, free. You can download it here:
http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/8.BootstrappersBible
Its probable a bad idea to bootstrap if you have easy access to a lot of capital, need a large ...
6
To develop a business, you need to think about it as a business. Most businesses don't have only one product. What you DO have is a happy customer base who have a good relationship with your 'brand.' I would start with that.
You can look at your users. Can you segment them in any way. Are they in particular industries, companies or individuals, in certain ...
6
The customer is always right, except when they aren't.
If you ask a group of people eating in a restaurant, would you rather get this meal for free or would you rather pay for it? What do you think their answer will be?
If the majority of your customers have great things to say about your service, the odds are they would be willing to pay for it. Asking ...
6
There are quite a few honest and not so honest ways for a company to make money without charging customers directly.
A company may limit the free service and charge for add-on features. (The Fremium model)
For sites that have a "provider" and a "consumer", they can charge only the provider side for listing a product/service. (craigslist, zocdoc, ebay use ...
6
Technically, DropBox is using the Freemium approach. You have a certain level where it's free, but if you start using more than the average user, you are asked to pitch in a bit.
Dropbox does this with storage space, but there are a lot of ways you can actually track this (Maybe bandwidth is a larger cost for you, charge based on that).
This is one thing ...
6
Consider adding some premium features that people can pay for, some ideas might be:
- SMS Alerts (they cost you money, so is a justifiable premium feature)
- iPhone App
- Ability to see average statistics from other users
- Include support
Basically it would turn you towards a freemium model, but it sounds like it could be successful for your type of ...
5
You seem to have a very executable plan already - go for it!
The idea sounds similar to what Mahalo is doing - check out this interview with Jason Calacanis. There is plenty of niches to be filled.
Tips:
For setting up - There are hosted Wordpress solutions. Fast and easy.
For managing it - Best to do it yourself in the beginning - but when it gets ...
5
It is obvious from your examples above that those web site calculators vary by almost two orders of magnitude in their answers. Clearly there is something wrong in their assessments.
Web sites have value for three basic reasons. Those separate reasons will help you with your question.
A domain name itself, regardless of the web site may or may not have ...
5
The revenue streams that immediately spring to mind are:
Sell your own service (perhaps a premium level?)
Sell other people's stuff to people (affiliate marketing)
Sell eyeballs to other people (advertising space)
Sell good feelings to people (donation button)
Sell your soul (paid reviews for merchandise)
Sell good feelings to other companies (sponsorship)
...
5
There's plenty of advice on app monetization floating around, but unfortunately not a whole lot of hard data.
I don't know how reliable your datasets are, but for te sake of illustration, let's quickly calculate Monthly-Recurring-Revenue (MRR). If you sell at 1$ and substract commission you should receive 0.70$ per sale. 0.70$ * 3 Sales/day * 30 days = 63$ ...
4
I'm a techie-type so the first thing I do is make sure I have an API in place, then use the same API to build the front-face of the service (without exposing it publicly). I agree with Alain that you don't need to expose it until much later, but if your own app is hitting the same API from the start it gets stress-tested and you can then open it up later ...
4
It really depends on the ideas and the value to others, not on the fact that it's a web API.
There are places you can post new web APIs for exposure, but of course that's not money.
Requiring an account (with security token) makes it possible to track use for later monetization, so that part is not hard (or at least, you just have to do it once).
The real ...
4
Wow, thats impressive. I gotta tell you first of all, 20K is an impressive number and you are lucky to get that many people. Can we have a link?
You can try co-founding the business with someone else who you trust. Keep most of the equity to yourself but give them more money because they'll be spending more time with it.
You can try selling the startup ...
4
Selling to one of the potential advertisers would tank the site, because blasting with ads is exactly what they'd do. So if you care about the integrity of the community, that's out.
Of course a co-founder is the obvious choice -- someone with enough equity that they're extremely motivated and devoted. Often great co-founders for sites like this come from ...
4
Obviously without any information on what this start-up service is, it's hard to say. But some quick feedback.
5.CPA costs - ???
There's bookkeeping, managerial accounting, and taxes. A CPA can show you how to do your own bookkeeping, help you understand accounting, and do your taxes. Ballpark a $1000-$2000/yr depending on the complexity.
...
4
Have you optimized your site for SEO?
Depending on your level of traffic, you may have to invest some time and money into growing your traffic levels. If you're not optimized for SEO yet, I'd spend my initial dollars on organic Search Engine Optimization, so that you begin to grow traffic to your site. You gotta get traffic before you can start making ...
4
I'm from Flippa and would endorse most of the comments here. I'd expect it to sell for around the $2,000 mark but it would depend on a number of factors. This would include level of audience engagement (eg do they hit one page and leave or do they come back regularly for extended durations). The medical/health niche is furthermore quite broad - the specifics ...
4
Maybe look into amazon affiliates and linkshare? You can review/suggest books and products and get affiliate income.
To add: You should have a list and send these people a newsletter every so often. Offer informative tips on diet, exercise, etc and maybe some products or books here and there. The weight loss niche is one of the most profitable you can ...
4
I believe security can be monetized, and that people will pay for excellent security. You will have to offer far more than just SSL (https) for uploads and downloads however. As just one example of what people might want consider audit-ability of who downloaded the file?
If all I want to do is transmit something securely, why wouldn't I simply encrypt it ...
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