156 karma · joined June 15, 2007
We've built Notejoy as a collaborative notes app. So it's not only great for personal notes, but also great for easily sharing notes with your team with real-time editing, @mentions, threaded comments, and more.
But also built with a lot of the productivity features you expect from a note-taking app, including Mac, Windows, iOS apps, keyboard shortcuts / markdown accelerators, syntax highlighting, clean distraction-free interface, and more.
However, I think what we saw in the last 5 years was an unhealthy focus on free where products that people may have been willing to pay for were driven to free because they were either subsidized by VC dollars, subsidized by cash cow business like Google's search, or eventual acquisitions by acquirers not necessarily looking for sustainable businesses. This may well have eroded a lot of potential value in that consumers have gotten used to these services being free and will likely not be willing to pay for them in the future.
Are you planning on direct sales or remnant advertising? Early on you'll likely be only leveraging remnant advertising since direct sales requires a large sales team or sales rep firms.
The next question is how much of your traffic is expected to be US vs international. US traffic still has some value, versus most international countries (outside of a few top markets like UK, Canada, etc) have very little online ad spend. Take a look at the following data of internet ad spend per capita in top countries to help scale revenue projections depending on expected country traffic:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pGQagieY9vfGVnTGpCmbg...
You'll next want to calculate number of impressions you expect on a daily or monthly basis. Just take expected growth rates for unique visitors and come up with some realistic estimates of page views per visit and number of ads per page.
Then take a look at this recent PubMatic report to get some estimates on average remnant advertising CPMs for multiple verticals:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/03/how-to-try-spotify-imme...
Check out David Pakman's post for more details on how bad the label deals are for most music consumption apps:
http://dpakman.wordpress.com/2008/12/27/invest-in-music-star...
http://knol.google.com/k/larry-h/google-apps-discussion-grou...