4 ms·

Basically only two types of (online-only) consumer subscription businesses are making significant amounts (7-8 figures) of revenue: content businesses (hulu, sp

• akumpf 14y ago
  After seeing all of the responses come back with big company names and a somewhat dismal outlook on small/lean companies and finding a path toward sustainable revenue not from ads, I got to thinking about why that is... The biggest hurdles seem to be around critical mass (many things only get interesting when you have a certain amount of users/content), lock-in (users' inability to easily move between new services), and silos (apps only working with themselves, or at best, other apps on a single domain). More thoughts here: http://blog.chaoscollective.org/post/32205575097/where-the-internet-went-wrong-and-how-we-can-fix-it http://blog.chaoscollective.org/post/32205575097/where-the-i...
  • ig1 14y ago
    My response isn't to say you can't make profitable consumer subscription businesses in other areas, just that if you're looking to make a large VC funded business then consumer subscriptions is a very hard space. There are definitely small but profitable consumer saas businesses. For example fitness/weight loss apps, 23andme (although no longer), sleep management apps, pinboard, etc.