Wow I had the idea to do exactly this only a few days ago.
Launching Posterous Groups: Smart email lists made easy
51–57 of 57 posts
Re: Launching Posterous Groups: Smart email lists made easy
#52Why would someone use this over google groups?
better member management (people don't have to create accounts); photos, video, audio, documents are all supported natively; web view is far superior. Give it a shot and let us know what you think!
Re: Launching Posterous Groups: Smart email lists made easy
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agreed. But which is it? The decision on any of those models, if not properly considered, could have impacts that reverberate through their product and userbase. Advertising, done wrong, could break their clean aesthetic. Affiliate marketing, done wrong, could hurt people's trust. You get the idea. The business model is a part of the design, in that it works in concert with it - and people are eager to see th…
Sachin's mentioned planned premium features in the past, so I think that's a good bet. They could also do one-off deals with big companies, like they once did with Coca-cola and Loopt recently did with Virgin. They've got a good brand and smart founders, I expect they will do just fine.
Honestly, I startups often say "premium features" because that's something that users understand and aren't scared by.
Posterous has raise $5M, so they really need at least a $40M exit, preferably bigger. Are they really going to make enough for that kind of exit from a small percentage of their users paying, say, $5-10/month for premium blogging features? Doubtful.
I think their plan, as well as that of many other startups, is to grow as much as possible and then either find a way to monetize their large number of free users or get bought by a company that wants some combination of the users, the employees, and the technology. But the average user won't be reassured when seeing this in an FAQ:
"It's free, what's the catch?"
"We want to get as many users as possible while making no money, and then we'll find some way to either bring in revenue or sell the company"
Users would worry that Posterous either will die one day when they run out of money or eventually realize they need to make money and ruin the product. But "you'll always be able to keep your same free product, but we'll add some even better features that cost money" isn't scary.
This isn't unique to Posterous. I don't remember which startup there was, but I saw "premium features" on the FAQ of another startup and literally laughed out loud because I knew that the combination of the amount of funding they had raised and the small amount that most users would be willing to pay meant that that was a lie.
Re: Launching Posterous Groups: Smart email lists made easy
#54Cool. What is Posterous's business model?
I think a good business model would be sell this either as a SaaS service or sell the server outright as software to enterprises.
This model of running groups has minimal friction in maintaining records of team discussions (as opposed to setting up internal mailing lists) that will get archived in a central place instead of valuable discussion info hidden away in individual end-user inboxes.
Re: Launching Posterous Groups: Smart email lists made easy
#55Re: Launching Posterous Groups: Smart email lists made easy
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Absolutely, you can be a part of any combination of public and private groups that you like. 2. It should go to a custom email address and will function as a reply to the post. The sender's name is the author of post or reply in that notification.
I think you read 1 inside-out. The question was basically if groups can be nested inside groups.
Whoops... well, then the answer to #1 is no, they can't.