4 ms·
$5/mo is not a barrier for entry into anything. Their alternative to make any dime would be to feed your text to a contextual targeting engine and serve you ad
by mahmud 16y ago
$5/mo is not a barrier for entry into anything.
Their alternative to make any dime would be to feed your text to a contextual targeting engine and serve you ads. You know how long it takes to make anything from that? No less than 100k users; for that many users, at 10 posts each user, and each post about 100bytes, they're looking at just 1GB of text a month.
A whole text mining engine, developed/integrated by 1-2 developers over 1-6 months, just to handle 1GB/mo :-( How many of those posts are read more than once? How many are shared? How many are publicly visible?
Even if you categorized the posts by a targetable "vertical", you will have about ~50 posts per vertical, and those 50 are viewed by no more than 50 people, a few times.
In other words, not fucking worth it.
For this to be sustainable by advertising they will have to make the posts public, interlinked (i.e. structured in some manner, via a social-graph maybe?) and most importantly viral content that others will seek, share and return to.
I have never seen a TODO list or a shopping list that was either viral, applicable to more than one person, or for that matter publicly shared.
So let them charge $5/mo, and let those who can afford it use the service. Developers don't need to go cheap and price themselves down to homelessness.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- extantproject 16y agoRight: we are not interested in trying to make money using advertising; we intend to make money by charging for a service that we would pay.
- extantproject 16y ago... that we would pay for ourselves.
- richtofen 16y agoI understand the impeccable logic behind not building an advertising driven model. I just wonder about the magnitude of the 'problem'[recording ThingsToDo], and the cost of the 'solution'[$5/mo]. I would be very curious to see if this sustains the business [founder salaries and server costs]. Regardless, one wishes success to the project.
- extantproject 16y agoThanks!
- mahmud 16y agoI am GTD practitioner and use Emacs' org-mode for it. If you can write an Emacs Lisp library that allows me to sync my Orgs with Redmine, I will happily pay $5/mo for it. If these guys can make a web-based Org-mode, I would pay for it too. Five bucks is nothing, it costs more per month configuring Emacs and org-mode across disparate machines.
- extantproject 16y ago"it costs more per month configuring Emacs and org-mode across disparate machines" This was one of my core frustrations when I started searching for a list system. I wanted all of my "augmented memory" in one place so that I didn't have to deal with multiple copies of the same thing and having to keep it all in sync. I also wanted to be able to access everything from any box. Thanks for your comment! Oh: and I hear 'ya about org-mode + redmine syncing. ;)
- richtofen 16y agoHm. So if there are say - 5000 customers like you, the business is sitting on a potential annual revenue of $300k. Sounds good! Are there 5000 such customers?
- extantproject 16y agoRight! Given that the Internet is about 2 billion people large I'm banking on the idea that we can find a few thousand people that Atombox will be very useful for and that they will pay for it straight-up. Sounds good to us too! ;)