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The problem is monetizing a small-market product, esp. an online product. If you go the advertising route, you have to get your page views _way_ up to earn anyt
by warmfuzzykitten 13y ago
The problem is monetizing a small-market product, esp. an online product. If you go the advertising route, you have to get your page views _way_ up to earn anything; you can't do that with just one little server. If you go the subscription route, pricing is really tricky. If you charge just a little, in my personal experience a) most programmers won't pay anything, so you lose most of your market right there, and b) you'll go broke collecting a pittance from the few who will pay.
- derefr 13y agoIt feels like this is the quintessential "feature, not product" startup. The goal of these should be either: A. to acquire a huge customer base and then pivot into satisfying them with a larger "suite" offering which includes your original service as a feature, or B. to be acquired by another company with a huge customer base... and then integrate your feature into their suite. :) I could see, for example, Github buying this (and other things like it) and launching a featureful, language-agnostic online IDE that compiles against Travis-CI.