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>"having ads on the page will ruin that. I hate the idea of charging a monthly fee...Find some other source of funding?" Receiving funding or investment isn't

>"having ads on the page will ruin that. I hate the idea of charging a monthly fee...Find some other source of funding?" Receiving funding or investment isn't a business model. I'm not sure why people are so averse to charging monthly fees. Why not ask your users?

moron4hire 12y ago
Oh, I understand that completely. My concern with money right now is to cover living expenses so I can work on the project. My day job makes me a fair amount of money, and I'd be fine on less, but not 100% less if I don't already have a real plan for revenue. I guess I shouldn't have written "find some other source of funding". Really, those two thoughts were meant to be separate. I think I could bootstrap the project on my own, if I just had a plan for revenue that makes sense. Where funding comes in: Steve Blank writes: "a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." (http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-principles/ http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...) I seem to remember PG writing something similar. Right now, the project is nothing more than desktop software that just so happens to run in the browser. There is no server component, it's all client-side JS. My concern with a monthly fee is that, as a user, I know I would want something of monthly value for that fee. To charge a monthly fee at this stage would basically be holding the users' own data hostage, data they are already hosting themselves. I've thought about it a lot and I don't think a monthly fee suits the current state of things because there is no unique, recurring service that the project provides. It's 100% software right now, not service. That is not to say that I don't think there couldn't be a service-oriented component for which a recurring fee could be charged. Just that it bothers a lot of people that Adobe charges a monthly fee for Photoshop, software that runs 100% on the user's own computer.

moron4hire 12y ago

Oh, I understand that completely. My concern with money right now is to cover living expenses so I can work on the project. My day job makes me a fair amount of money, and I'd be fine on less, but not 100% less if I don't already have a real plan for revenue. I guess I shouldn't have written "find some other source of funding". Really, those two thoughts were meant to be separate. I think I could bootstrap the project on my own, if I just had a plan for revenue that makes sense. Where funding comes in: Steve Blank writes: "a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." (http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-principles/ http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...) I seem to remember PG writing something similar. Right now, the project is nothing more than desktop software that just so happens to run in the browser. There is no server component, it's all client-side JS. My concern with a monthly fee is that, as a user, I know I would want something of monthly value for that fee. To charge a monthly fee at this stage would basically be holding the users' own data hostage, data they are already hosting themselves. I've thought about it a lot and I don't think a monthly fee suits the current state of things because there is no unique, recurring service that the project provides. It's 100% software right now, not service. That is not to say that I don't think there couldn't be a service-oriented component for which a recurring fee could be charged. Just that it bothers a lot of people that Adobe charges a monthly fee for Photoshop, software that runs 100% on the user's own computer.