Feels like we have two options for making money.
1. Focus on the viral aspect and charge for upgrades like backup, long version control history, more templates, more pages, PDF conversion, larger file uploads, etc.
2. Focus on the enterprise and make it like an Enterprise wiki. Make features more suited for Intranets. Make it a pure pay product. We feel we have a big win in this field for the typical user because of our obsession with ease of use.
Sunny
If this was my service I'd do the following: 1) Everyone runs ads, you get the revenue (no revenue split) 2) Charge $5/month to take ads off 3) Charge $10/year for custom domains (make you you get a good affiliate deal for domain name reg, too) 4) Charge $XXX/year for large traffic sites (where XXX gives you a good profit on your costs)
Nice job, BTW.
Sunny
A former company of mine did this. Many users hate ads on their personal sites and will gladly pay a reasonable amount to have them removed. Many also have no interest in making money off their sites. Besides doing a rev share complicates things a lot more.
From what I understand, ads perform pretty poorly on blog sites (very little intent). That being said, you COULD try to go niche (say, make the best "blogging about products" platform and intent of the reader might be radically different).
Golden. Imagine every startup company that will sign up for a free site, then they get a bit more successful and want more than three pages or whatnot.
Same with the people who go from casual blogging to putting out a ton of posts.
One of the key differences we believe is the table of contents on the side. Blogs are a modern representation of newspapers, magazines and other periodicals. One of our goals is to see if we can make a modern representation of books.
One nice thing that we have found is that many of our staff actually have multiple sites for different uses. We use one each for our two companies. I've got one between my wife and I. I have one to keep personal notes. It doesn't feel like we are using them just because we built it either.
In many ways I use it like a wiki but organizing a wiki has always been a weak point for me. I always end up with orphan pages with no links to them. Also, wikis are almost categorically ugly for some reason. On the other hand, blogs are often beautiful.
One of our design goals was to be "beautiful." Please check out our template designer. We think it might be one of the best in the industry (blog, website builder, or otherwise).
Sunny
AKA: Challanger (Upstart) vs. Incumbent (Traditional)
1. Orbs throws you into the workflow without asking for anything. That is quite attractive compared to the traditional (CityMax) model. I really prefer to divulge my information if and only when I like the product.
2. I have decided: "Free" is the new 4 letter word. I don't want to see it until I decide I like the product.
3. Both have wierd names, it is tough to tell what either does from the outset.
Anyone else?
Apps like this have a reasonable viral loop (i.e. view a site built on it, see a button that says, "get your own Orb in 15 seconds!")... But if that's wildly successful, how exactly do you make money?