> First off I'd change the name. It makes no sense, and is hard to pronounce at a glance.
Hell yeah, this has been a gut instinct since day 1. I've been trying to brainstorm new names, but have come up with nothing. I think a name change is a good idea, though, for sure.
> but you should have Facebook Connect at the very least.
Yeah, we're tied into Facebook Connect and Twitter: http://screenshots.markbao.com/a137e44e036028bb19f171c201b2f... -> http://screenshots.markbao.com/082acda74154efb50e52d95a11a1c... -> http://screenshots.markbao.com/b2baae910327fd86f658f2fd29c46...
> Do you have embeds? Can people embed a family video on their blog trivially from your site?
That's an oversight. Thanks, putting that on the imp list.
> Just spend some time figuring out how your users want to share these things (this is one of those rare instances where simply asking them will return high value info) and make that easy as pie.
Definitely a good idea. I think we put together a Ramamia user survey a while ago but never acted upon it for some reason. Probably a good time to get that rolling.
> So there's your traffic. Freemium seems to be almost a necessity here. I really can't think of an alternative monetization model that makes sense.
You're probably right. I had a gut instinct that while Premium would be the easiest and most reliable way to get conversions (no unpredictability in the conversions, in some way) it would be restricting to growth and customer acquisition. I think we've come to the consensus that freemium is probably the way to go.
Thank you again, Matt!
Even if you go the freemium route, check out AdWords. Getting the right combo of keywords can be a lot of work, but you may just find you can acquire paying users for much less than you make off of them. Especially since you're presumably using subscription billing here. And it's highly scalable, once you find the right audience you can probably buy them by the truckload.
Easily importing contacts from their Yahoo email or Google email, which are products this market actually uses, is a wonderful idea though.
Have you thought deeply about your SEO strategy yet, as opposed to your paid search strategy? I think you'll find that search results like "family photos" are going to be insanely competitive. Think long tail -- put a blog on your site and start writing articles along the general lines of "How do I send photos to my family?" You would be flabbergasted how many people in your market do natural language queries. (The long tail search queries at my site is quite amusing.)
> Freemium seems to be almost a necessity here. I really can't think of an alternative monetization model that makes sense.
Families may find comfort in knowing it's a paid service, since they are uploading personal photos and information. It is harder to trust something new that doesn't have a clear way of staying afloat.
>Do you have embeds? Can people embed a family video on their blog trivially from your site? Can they share it via Twitter with a click?
This might be useful for marketing. But I'd make sure your market actually use blogs and twitter to post personal family details before investing in building that.
This was one of our arguments for a fully premium service. Don't know how much weight this holds.
> But I'd make sure your market actually use blogs and twitter to post personal family details before investing in building that.
For Twitter, I can divulge some details from the database... 26 out of 6236 user rows have connected their account to Twitter, for a percentage of 0.416%.
Name- Very good chance we'll change it. Just haven't found anything we love yet.
Viral loops- Some of that basic stuff is there. A lot more need to be added. Since we didn't know if we wanted to go premium only, we wanted to hold off on implementing them.
Freemium- I think we're going to go this route after playing around with time limited trials over the past month.
The nice thing with this type of product is that people upload photos and videos of family members mainly to share with other family members, so right there you have inherently viral behavior. Your job now is to make it as frictionless as possible.
Add in those viral channels. Make it easy to share via Facebook or email. I can't sign up for the product to see what you have enabled, but you should have Facebook Connect at the very least. I'd use Google Friend Connect, Yahoo's equivalent, and MSN's as well to make it easy to import contacts and email them a photo or link to a group of photos with one click.
Do you have embeds? Can people embed a family video on their blog trivially from your site? Can they share it via Twitter with a click?
Just spend some time figuring out how your users want to share these things (this is one of those rare instances where simply asking them will return high value info) and make that easy as pie.
So there's your traffic. Freemium seems to be almost a necessity here. I really can't think of an alternative monetization model that makes sense.
Premium-only is death to viral spread. If you decide to go that route, I'd assume you'll have to purchase traffic via AdSense and the like. Get some metrics in place early so you can calculate CPA and RPU. Test with a few thousand bucks worth of ads. If your RPU turns out to be a large multiple of CPA you're set. Just know that with premium only you're aiming for relatively low traffic and relatively high RPU. Not a bad way to go for the right product, but you need to be insanely metrics-driven to make that work.