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A comment on Messaging Is the One Thing People Do More Than Anything Else on Their Phone. Parent comment

Re:Messaging Is the One Thing People Do More Than Anything E... by Fnoord on Sunday January 08, 2017 @01:14PM (#13351051)
What I am saying is that it has been done before. I'm just stating some of the hurdles. If you can license or otherwise come to agreement, avoid those hostile protocols (know before you do a lot of work who/what is a hostile), or just make a plugin implementation and host the 'dark' plugin on Tor or w/e you should be fine.
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Re:Messaging Is the One Thing People Do More Than Anything E... by peterschroeder on Sunday January 08, 2017 @01:36PM (#13351166)
I totally agree and am grateful for all of your feedback!
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Re:Messaging Is the One Thing People Do More Than Anything E... by Fnoord on Sunday January 08, 2017 @02:15PM (#13351367)
You're welcome. I got one question for you btw. I take it you work for-profit. How do you plan on making money with your product?
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Re:Messaging Is the One Thing People Do More Than Anything E... by peterschroeder on Sunday January 08, 2017 @02:31PM (#13351452)
Great question! This has been something we have really struggled with. We want to be as user-friendly as possible and to so we need to give some things up. We aren't going to store messages, blast ads, or anything intrusive like that. For this reason, we have a few options.

Option number on is we release a free version with limited capabilities and a upgradable version from $.99-$4.99. This isn't the desirable route because the more users we have on our network, the better it will work. We want to encourage anyone and everyone to join.

Option number 2 (the route we will take) will mainly consist of monetizing businesses who want to use the platform. Much like Snapchat, this will consist of sponsored content, geo options, and other business-centric features. This option will require us to scale quickly, but I am pretty sure it is the route we are going to take.

For the first few months we are going to bootstrap it and focus on user experience and not focus on monetizing users at all. As we scale and grow our user base we can start focusing on things like that.

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