Monetizing an application – how do I?
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009Long/short:
I have a Very Good Idea that nobody’s doing yet.
I ran it by someone in the problem domain, and he agrees not only is it a Very Good Idea, but yes, he hasn’t heard of anyone doing it.
We begin fleshing out an application to fill said need.
We’re at the point where we’ve only invested time and energy into the design phase, but that’s about to change. Brainstorm lists have transformed into user stories, and user stories are starting to have documents that look an awful lot like functional specifications.
I’m not really into extensive requirements gathering if I don’t know the problem domain very well – I’d rather develop via tracer bullets and a few prototypes of basic functionality to make sure we’re going about it right.
The frustrating part of this idea:
I don’t know how to make any money off of it.
It’s a chicken/egg issue – if there’s a ton of users then there’s a resource for people to pay for. If there’s no users, there’s nothing worth paying for.
But in order to attract users, you have to give it away.
So, what is the right business model?
- Premium Membership, a la Monster/Dice/Ladders?
- Advertisements that pay via clicks?
- Give product away but sell support? (same chicken/egg trap applies here)
- Something brilliant I haven’t thought of?
This thought’s occurred to me – maybe the problem isn’t solved because there’s no money in solving it.
Probably not giving out enough information to get help, so here’s the nutshell:
We want to be a document harvester for certain classes of documents that relate to specific standards.
The information is already captured for other purposes; we’re trying to archive it in a format that allows querying/modification/usage of said documents.
Sort of like a data library. There’s more to it that’s specific to the problem-domain that differentiates the product, but that is the nutshell.
Like any library, if it’s three people’s book collections it doesn’t give us a lot of utility.
When it’s 5000 (and we’ve got a dewey decimal system of some sort) we start to see some power.
Hive-mind, infinite retention of knowledge. . . that sort of thing.
It almost feels crass to ask, “how do I get mine if I invent this?”
But a guy’s gotta eat.
So how do I get mine if I invent this?
(just an aside – I think this blog gets 20 visitors a month. It’s funny to query the audience when aware of its size; it makes it an act akin to prayer. “Help me, oh illustrious few who could mentor me in this strange journey!”)
