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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

Well that kind of proves once again that there's not money in this thing. $2m a year in revenue off 20m users. Not to mention the SMS fees which likely mean they are losing cash hand over fist.

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I could be way off here, but I thought that once you get above a certain level of SMS traffic, you can actually negotiate a rev-share deal with the networks. After all, they're making a LOT of money from their subscribers off all that SMS traffic.

Incoming messages in India does not cost anything to the recipient, and smsgupshup is mainly a one to many broadcast system.

The article doesn't mention the costs (at least I didn't see). They could be paying the bills.

Hence my use of "likely". It's entirely SMS based, so the SMS use must be massive... 100s of millions. Multiply that even by a good bulk discount and the total is significantly more than $150k.

But even if they are making 100% profit--an impossible amount--they are only making $2m a year. They'd be better off selling sandwiches.

No, it just proves that indeed this thing has legs. Once that's possible so is monetization.

Because something is popular doesn't mean it can be monetized. If you give me a tasty free lunch every day I'll keep coming back. I might even bring friends. When it gets to 20m free lunches every day that just means free shit's popular, not that it's a good business.

I just said the possibility is there. If you can't come up with a way to monetize that, it's your fault.

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