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Comment by newswasboring | Hacker News Reader

I know its frowned upon in HN to talk monetization early, but if I am not the product, how do you plan to sustain and grow this? I believe social media inherently has only one product, social interactions. If you users are not being charged, they are the product. Do you plan to charge content creators? Do you plan to charge for premium features? I ask because otherwise it might just go the way of Google+ and disappear in a few years.

One idea might be to go the Pateron way but with a free tier. But then its something akin to youtube/tiktok not really a social network.

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I came to ask the same question. I like the concept but if its going to disappear after 12 months its not worth the effort.

Thanks for the comment. Having an FAQ would have been a nice way to cover this as it seems you're not the only one!

We plan to monetise through paid premium features, none of which have been included in the first public version of the product. So previously didn't think it was relevant to talk monetisation!

I swear I am not trying to be a jerk, but I have heard this way too many times but have never seen this succeed in a way which adds to the service. Most of the times the paid premium feature is "no ads" or less wait times etc. Especially for a social networks, I can't even imagine what feature you can build which will make me pay you to be in touch with my friends.

One point against my argument might be reddit gold kind of stuff. They are more of a status signal. You can monetize status signals.

That's a solid point and hence why we've been reluctant to set out a future monetisation strategy. However...

In terms of monetising utility, Beeper/Texts.com seem to be getting a lot of attention, where they charge 10$ a month for their interoperable chat service. People seem to be happy to pay to have a centralised client for all their chats.

Otherwise as you've mentioned you have status signals, which is the case for Twitter Blue too. There's also the dating apps.

Same for me. I think it would be wise to think about monetization of these sort of apps before even writing code, and be up front about it towards potential customers (not users).

> frowned upon in HN to talk monetization early,

it is?

Would you pay for a subscription to a social network without ads? Doesn't seem too far from an actuality

This depends directly on whether my friends will pay to be on that network. Game servers are a great example. I will pay if my friends are also on the same server.

The problem is, there are way too many free options for us to organize. And this doesn't bring anything to the table which is spectacular.

Great points.

What would you consider spectacular? Social network app that delivers crack cocaine by a drone? The grail of immortality?

I think you're on to something

Great question. I feel like we have two kinds of social networks right now parasocial (tiktok/instagram/etc.) and social (facebook/reddit/etc.). And there is a huge lack of good second ones. A spectacular social network for me would focus on social relationships and do something to facilitate making new ones online.

I would agree with your categories there. Circles is clearly in the second category & although it's early days our aim with the product is to build a great utility for your social life, rather than yet another media saturated app.

For the desires you've stated above, is there any product that comes close?

Nothing comes close. I feel like there is a lot of emphasis on content discovery but none on people discovery. The biggest problem I have right now is its hard to find like minded people. Maybe subreddits come close but they are not as social as I want them to be. Like I don't really know these people. Our bond seldom goes beyond our shared interest in the subreddit topic. But in real life people meet over a shared topic but it expands into a more fulfilling relationship.

After writing all this out I feel like what I want is ok cupid but for finding friends. The problem with that seems to be every time someone tries to do that they have one leg in the dating world (and I understand why, its lucrative). For once can someone actually put people discovery at the center of their product?

That's really interesting - do you use anything like Meetup.com or are you on any discord/slack servers?

There is a cool app that I've been using called Lunchclub (https://lunchclub.com/), it links you with another person one time a week. Might be worth trying if you haven't already. Otherwise I'd really been keen to chat on how we could solve that problem!

Completely true about the people discovery apps (probably why most of them end up as dating or a hybrid dating/networking), so in my experience it seems that the only thing that overcomes this is strong interest based products focused on groups.

I do use meetup and weeples but they are ... not online native. I would love to chat more about this if you can provide a channel.

That's a great point. Our baseline assumption has been that, by and large, people would not pay for a social networking function on its own. So in that we've been hesitant to talk about monetisation with future features.

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