Questions For Startups Killing Free Membership And Going Pay Only • Hacker News Board

Re: Questions For Startups Killing Free Membership And Going Pay Only

#11

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Jan 23, 2009, 11:03 AM UTC

jim-greer wrote: post #5

I used to work at Pogo, EA's web games site. When I started it was all free, but we added a subscription tier with more features, more games, etc. When I left two years ago Pogo had about 15 million monthly uniques and 1.5 million paid subscribers (at $40/year, a great business). So our ratio was 10% - that was way above our expectations. Pogo has a very die-hard community - I'd plan on getting more like 5% if you ex…

That's exactly what we did at ww.com / camarades.com when the collapse of bubble 1.0 forced us to change strategies. Fortunately we had our plan ready to roll when the crunch came, we added a whole slew of (paid) features to the existing service, which remained free (and still is today). This allowed us to offset the drop in advertising revenue.

Re: Questions For Startups Killing Free Membership And Going Pay Only

#12

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 23, 2009, 11:22 AM UTC

sam_in_nyc wrote: post #9

raffi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a TinyMCE plugin that talks to a web service I wrote. It does require a proxy script on the server side. My wordpress plugin comes with one of those. Getting ready to go beta with the whole thing soon.

Not to burst your bubble, but a lot of people write their blogs in a word processor.. then just c+p it into WordPress.

[deleted]

Re: Questions For Startups Killing Free Membership And Going Pay Only

#13

Post by sam_in_nyc » Fri, Jan 23, 2009, 8:37 PM UTC

raffi wrote: post #10

sam_in_nyc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to burst your bubble, but a lot of people write their blogs in a word processor.. then just c+p it into WordPress.

One of my challenges is educating my market on the differences. 1) A word processor provides spellcheck, grammar check, and some text enrichment aka style checking. My software provides spellcheck, minor grammar things, and very heavy text enrichment. Desktop software comparable to my text enrichment technology retails for $130. My spellchecker also detects homophones (where, were, etc.) which the Firefox spellchecke…

It sounds really great. I didn't say all users use a word processor.. just that a lot of them do. Besides that, writing content for the web has been around for a very long time, and people have seemed to managed to write pretty good content.

I like how you've realized the challenge of "education your market," very strong words there, and it sounds like you have some plan put together.

I think 2) is the greatest draw, the convenience factor.

Best of luck.

Re: Questions For Startups Killing Free Membership And Going Pay Only

#14

Post by raffi » Sat, Jan 24, 2009, 7:10 AM UTC

sam_in_nyc wrote: post #13

raffi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my challenges is educating my market on the differences. 1) A word processor provides spellcheck, grammar check, and some text enrichment aka style checking. My software provides spellcheck, minor grammar things, and very heavy text enrichment. Desktop software comparable to my text enrichment technology retails for $130. My spellchecker also detects homophones (where, were, etc.) which the Firefox spellchecke…

It sounds really great. I didn't say all users use a word processor.. just that a lot of them do. Besides that, writing content for the web has been around for a very long time, and people have seemed to managed to write pretty good content. I like how you've realized the challenge of "education your market," very strong words there, and it sounds like you have some plan put together. I think 2) is the greatest draw,…

This thread will go on forever with our tit for tat responses. But thanks for the encouragement!

People have written quality content for awhile now, agreed. They did so before the word processor too. My claim is that I will speed up the polishing process for writers using my product.

My tool is a billy club, bopping writers over the head with their bad habits. We all have them. How many engineers write "utilize" over "use". You may think, "who cares?" but read a paper where everything is said with complex words, passive voice, etc.--it gets dense.

One of my favorite books is Write to the Point by Bill Stott. He advocates concise writing to communicate ideas quickly. I breezed through his book like it was a Neil Stephenson novel. This is a testimony to the difference clear writing makes.

Sure, I'm hocking a product, but I also believe in what it does.