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Comment by stangeek | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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!

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