Archive for the ‘ Monetization ’ Category

Going With Free

Make it free for people to connect and message each other on The Matching Game.

Why Not?

Well, for one, it’s the only revenue coming out of the site right now.

Plenty of sites have proven that a subscription model works with online dating. People are willing to pay a monthly fee to join an online dating community. If we go down this road and start offering it for free, it may be difficult to reverse the decision.

Why?

For one, we’re not making much money off the subscriptions yet (maybe $50 a month). We’ve become popular with a slightly younger crowd (18-25) and they may be a little less likely to pay. Either way, we’re not throwing away much revenue.

Since not that many people are paying, not that many people are connecting and meeting people through the site either. It frankly sucks to know that you have two people who may really enjoy meeting each other, but they’re not because you’re asking for a fee. Of course if they were serious about meeting each other they would probably just pay the fee, but given where we are at with the site, it seems better to lower any friction points and get as many people meeting through the site as possible.

How’s It Going?

We opened it up about a week ago and, not surprisingly, a lot of people are connecting and messaging now. Now we just need to figure out a way to monetize the site. So far in a few limited experiments advertising has not worked that well, so we may need to get creative.

2011
01/12
CATEGORY
Company
Monetization
The Matching Game
2 comments

Consulting

We’re starting an interesting new consulting project this year, which will help make ends meet while the products get up and running.

Why Not?

We currently have 4 products, all of which could use some attention. It’s hard to imagine being capable of building a successful company around these products if we’re distracted by consulting work. Consulting always ends up requiring more time than originally thought, and it brings with it certain responsibilities to the client, so it can be very detrimental to the progress of a product, let alone 4 products.

Why?

We did some short consulting gigs last year. In addition to the revenue, consulting is a chance to work with other teams, and share ideas in both directions. As we explained above, we don’t want large projects because we want to spend time on the products. But the smaller engagements we encounter tend to be short but intense. Through a friend, we’ve been introduced to a project that’s longer term but part time and flexible, so we’ll be able to bring in some revenue, work on a large scale site with lots of users. And there’s a good mix of technologies we know really well, so we’ll be able to contribute quickly (rails, haml, sass, jquery…) and some interesting technologies that we’ve played with but not yet used in production (redis and resque)

How’s It Going?

We’re starting on Monday. We’ll let you know how it works out.

2011
01/02
CATEGORY
Company
Monetization
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Post Mortem on Pricing

One month ago we changed our pricing to an all-you-can-eat model (monthly fee) that you would only have to pay if you wanted to read messages sent to you. You could send all the messages you wanted to.

How’d It Go?

Not as well as we hoped. We did see more people paying (up from about 1 person every 3 months to maybe 1 person every month), but we’re not very happy with the user experience. Now you can message someone for free but then the onus is on that person to pay where really the one paying should be the one initiating the contact. It also seemed like a lot of messages were going to waste because the other side didn’t want to pay.

Now this may simply be due to the fact that we’re not big enough yet to necessarily find you a match worth paying to meet, but, regardless, the user experience feels too frustrating.

So we’re going to try something new. We’re not entirely sure what yet, but we have a few ideas. We’ll be posting about them as soon as we have a firmer idea on what we want to do.

2010
11/23
CATEGORY
Monetization
The Matching Game
1 comment

All You Can Eat Pricing Change

We’re going to experiment with a new pricing scheme on The Matching Game. We were inspired by Cupidtino’s Pricing Scheme so frankly we’re going to copy it. It’s a monthly, all you can eat, payment structure where you have to pay a monthly fee to read all messages sent to you.

Why Not?
Couple of reasons:

  • Changing pricing schemes too frequently kind of sucks
  • Copying someone else’s idea always feels unsatisfying
  • The pricing scheme pushes the impetus to pay down to the person receiving the message, which isn’t exactly ideal

Why?
We like the idea of a monthly, all you can eat, payment structure. Charging people for each connection just doesn’t feel great. Creates too many purchasing decisions, which I think can be paralyzing. We think people will get more value out of the product with a monthly fee.

We also think people will be more likely to pay when they know a cute guy or girl is messaging them. Paying in order to message someone that you don’t know for sure is interested in messaging you back is a tough decision to make.

We don’t love the fact that we’re copying this directly, but I’ve always felt that our job is to create the best product / experience possible for our customers. If that means stealing an idea, then we should do that. We won’t, however, steal an idea just because someone else is doing it. If I can’t rationalize the idea without any mention that another company is doing it then I don’t understand the idea well enough to execute on it. In this case, though, we like the rationale a lot and want to give it a shot.

How’s It Going?

We’ll let you know. We’re launching the changes either today or on Monday.

Read our post-mortem on this change.

2010
10/22
CATEGORY
Company
Monetization
The Matching Game
1 comment
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