I thought about the monetization proposed for this... And it won't work.
When it comes to getting paid for this... You need to think like a billionaire. For example, Elon Musk didn't market Tesla cars to poor people at first. He created luxury cars and sold them at a premium. This strategy reduces the materials and labor force needed to produce the vehicles.
When I think back to the way people used to buy video games, it was extremely different. Rather than get on Steam and buy online, we went to GameStop for CD's and paid for each game one time - not on a monthly sub.
If you want to go old school in this day and age, then you need to change the fee for service model to something similar to what used to be considered normal. Let users buy the product one time and play around on it. And if you tailor it to an exclusive portion of the population who have enough dry powder and intelligence, then you may find the right market for this... Product.
No one buys a sub for an unknown entity because you haven't established any actual value yet. It's priceless, I mean worthless. In order to charge a recurring fee for service you have to have a loyal following. World of Warcraft is a great example of successful subscription based products. It's model worked because of the large following of gamers to previous Blizzard RTS games that were bought the old-fashioned way. The game was popular before it released.
Carl Milsted, Jr on Jun 24, 2025 1:53 PM
I have changed the pricing down to two plans: annual and lifetime. The [fake] yearly plan is 30 zorkmids/year at the moment. The lifetime several times that. There will probably be an early member discount when I get a true payment system set up.
With annual as the shortest membership, I can dispense with auto renewal. You have to manually renew each year, like a magazine subscription. Lifetime is like buying a game outright.
A no refund/no auto renew policy makes it possible to keep the price down while still making life expensive for spammers. Less getting nickled and dimed to death by payment processors.
As for the pseudonym account thing, that is gone. Instead, those whose screen name matches the name on their "card" will get a green checkmark by their name.
Morgen on Jun 25, 2025 9:18 AM
in response to
comment_183_1
That is a much better price model! I like the option to not fully commit to a lifetime membership for a cheaper annual one. The flexibility should improve memberships overall (I suspect most people will prefer the annual over the lifetime, unless you make the lifetime more attractive than the annual - your call but as a salesman I would highly recommend making the lifetime the preferred choice) and provide enough short-term capital gains to cover the budget for maintenance and hopefully compensate you for all the effort you've done.
Carl Milsted, Jr on Jun 25, 2025 10:26 AM
in response to
comment_183_2
Lifetime memberships are nice for starting up, but they are not sustainable long term without some kind of upsells -- which I'd rather stay away from. Need recurring income to keep the business running -- and to attract investors.
But yes, early lifetime members are kind of like investors, albeit without the legal hassles.
Morgen on Jun 26, 2025 11:16 AM
in response to
comment_183_3
I wasn't aware that you were planning to have investors fund the website. Out of curiosity what is the valuation of this crowd funding project? I'm asking for an angel investor potentially. And as a follow up question, how much estimated return on the investment is being considered? Do you already have the documents for seed funding?
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