Btw, apparently you have a decent amount of traffic (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/tipjoy.com/). Is the problem that very few of your visitors convert to tippers?
The twitter integration, for example, is completely unmeasured by compete.
Finally, traffic is a poor metric for a payments site. Transaction volume is what matters.
Ohh, and I'm not being that open. If we were profitable, we wouldn't be shutting down.
Feel free to smack me if I'm prying, but I'd be fascinated to know a rough ballpark for what transaction volume was.
You said, if you were profitable, you wouldn't be shutting down. But if you think there should be a way to make social payments work then don't you think its just a matter of time when you would be profitable.
I mean minimum profitability also doesn't really justify what is called in other posts the 'opportunity cost', but if you are working on something big and still believe there is customer value then profitability will come eventually.
And if that belief is still there then maybe just buckle down for sometime in a paying gig and then go back again. It might take your mind of it for sometime which might actually give you some good insights on how to take it ahead.
I though, still understand that there could be other personal reasons for you to do this, in which case please feel free to not respond.
Thanks again for the post and best of luck for the future.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that the highest number on that graph is accurate and sustainable. Even if it were, it is well below the level the business needs, because you need truly massive scale to make a living solely on transaction costs.
350k visitors * 1% conversion (+) * < $1 in transaction fees = < $3,500 in gross revenue. Now, deduct the cut of the CC interchange fees. Uh oh.
+ Where a conversion actually means cash money exchanged hands. I remember there being some notion of promises/pledges which could be swapped around without actually generating an exchange of cash money. Promises are lovely things but they demonstrate interest a lot less readily than observable flows of cash money (since they're cheap and ephemeral, presumably why the system was instituted) and it is difficult to spend your 1% cut of the value of a promise.
- Conversions from 'visitors' to pledgers
- Conversions from pledgers to payers
- Avg monthly payment (volume of tips) per payer
(Btw, doesn't Compete often underestimate by a factor of 2 or so?)
I wish we had more time to make things like http://tatatweet.com, but better. We'd take 100% of the transaction volume, and help the twitter app market grow. I'll certainly build things in my spare time for that market.