Ask HN: Ideas for Monetizing?
I currently am working on a site that is similar to one techcrunch posted a few days back. I have a super duper early demo if you want to take look available here:
onedatedaily.heroku.com
The concept is this: Each day (eventually each hour) a new dater of each sex will be featured on the front page. People will then be able to get some basic information, and if they like the featured dater, they can send them an email through our site. This will likely be form based and require certain elements to reduce spam and stalkers (also we don't reveal the dater's email to avoid stalkers and weirdos). If the dater likes what the person has to say, they can email them back.
The question is how to monetize. I have a couple ideas and was wondering what you all thought:
1) Force anyone who wishes to email the dater to pay 1$ per email (some of this could be used to "pay" the dater for listing themselves. A kind of incentive to get more daters)
2) Graduated scale emailing. The first 50 free, then 1 dollar for the next 50, then 3$ for the next 50 etc.
3) Force the featured dater to pay per email from vetted emailers. .10 an email or whatever
4) Freemium model -- Get more information and more tools by signing up with us. Email of the day etc.
Thanks for looking guys, all suggestions welcome for both monetization and user experience stuff. The UI is pretty suck, but I'm working on it. I think the idea is decent, I'm just sorry I got beat to the punch by that one tech crunch had which looked, tbh, also sucky.