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Comment by stangeek | Hacker News Reader

Thanks! No premium version is planned. We have another little idea to monetize, but need a bit more traction first... ;)

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If I may be a bit provocative: why spend all that energy and time if you're not sure you can make money with it?

Hello David this is a good question - we are absolutely positive we can make money with illico, but as I wrote above we need more traction (like x10 more).

It could well be due to aging, and growing more conservative about these things, but my current thinking is that leaving the most important part of a business - the part about making money - until fairly late in the game is not a good idea. There are certainly counter examples to this (Google, Facebook), but those companies are also outliers. Good luck, in any event, though!

I think it's just your battle-scarred self talking from painful experience!

@stangeek - can you not at least test part of your business model at the current level of traffic? Really worth getting those uncertainties out of the way... if only so you can start pivoting towards something workable right away instead of waiting a few more months.

The monetization plan is already there (in details), it's just that we don't want to spend time coding it if we don't have the required traction. Hope this makes more sense?

Hi Stan,

We did a group chat product at groupflier.com and got great traction on the free version but the SMS costs killed us and we had to switch to a paid model. Happy to trade PM on our experiences if you are interested and have a blog about it at:

http://gcrawshaw.posterous.com/group-texting-is-a-telco-game

They're not talking about the details of the plan, though. They're encouraging you to empirically test your belief that people will behave the way your business plan is expecting them to (paying you for whatever the service is, sticking around when you monetize them with ads, or whatever it is.)

x10 sounds absolutely doable when looking at what you already have! Keep it up!

Thank you!

"Draw Something" is one of the highest grossing apps on the UK appstore right now. They have a free and paid version. You could take some clues from them.

The great thing about getting money is that you can buy traction with it.

Draw Something (like Pictionary) is in a sweet spot. To begin with it's a game and people play with their friends. They leverage Facebook to find your friends that have the app already. You can still invite people that don't have it yet, but knowing someone already has the app makes it a lot easier to start a game.

They limited some features so they can charge for them. You only get a few colors but can buy more. You get "bombs" that act as hints and can buy more.

One thing they don't do yet is have a way to share your drawing (or animated replay) on Facebook. That would be a big help. I read about a "paint for cats" iPad app (I think the one below) that added a "Share this painting on Facebook" button and it blew up his traffic. Not sure it really applies to illico but it could to a more visual app. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paint-for-cats/id427702410?mt...

So you're thinking of a button to share the chat transcript on Facebook? That's interesting...

Not sure it would work well for this app, but I'm always looking for anything visual or easily shared, especially if your audience are likely heavy Facebook users.

The great thing about getting money is that you can buy traction with it.

That's one of the best lines I've read on HN in a while. I think it ought to be a mantra for app store developers.

Interesting, will look into this, thanks!

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