
Get it while it's cheap: Pinboard's revenue model - jasonlbaptiste
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-10310347-250.html
======
midnightmonster
If he's using PayPal's micropayments pricing (Fees = $0.05 + 5%), he's made
just shy of $12,000 on the site so far.

I can't decide what I think about that number, except that I expect it goes
farther in Romania.

~~~
patio11
One of the wonderful things about being a small business on the Internet is
that there are several favors (SEO considerations, viral marketing, word of
mouth, network effects) which make double-digit YoY growth practically a
given. (You are more or less incapable of saturating your market, something
that larger businesses have to worry about -- what does Facebook do after
signing up nearly every American who uses a computer regularly?)

If you keep at it, the miracle of compound interest will do all the rest.

Compare that to a more traditional day job, which typically gives you a higher
starting salary and then increases at 2 to 4% a year, with SHARPLY limited
options for ever getting out of that bracket no matter how good your
performance is.

------
dpcan
This payment method is doomed to fail.

Once it goes over $10, maybe $20, it's dead. No growth. This is NOT one of
those "everyone is doing it" kinds of services.

After this, their only hope is to turn to the current active user base and
start all over at $0.05 and make it a mandatory subscription payment instead.

Reason being: once it reaches the "it's not worth it" threshold, a new clone
will pop up and there just won't be any reason to use pinboard. At all.

~~~
piranha
I have better idea.

You could lower the price day by day when nobody registered and raise again if
there were registrations in last few days.

------
jasonlbaptiste
I would love to give this as a try as an experiment for a social news site for
technology. "Digg without the 17 year olds in mom's basement"

~~~
adamhowell
I'm considering it for a side-project I'm working on now -- but, man, it's so
hard for a site to gain traction even with free accounts, I'm not sure I have
the stones.

~~~
patio11
Try building something which provides value even if you're the only person
using it. (I have always admired Delicious for this. If every other person on
it died tomorrow it would still be an excellent bookmark manager.) Then you
don't need "traction", you just need more customers tomorrow than you have
today. Repeat times a few hundred.

~~~
isamuel
Agreed. Plus, if you build something that you would still use even if no one
else did, you're guaranteeing that at least one person wants to use what
you're making. Doing otherwise is surprisingly common, judging by some of the
products out there.

The reality, of course, is that you aren't a unique snowflake; lots of other
people are like you, and if you really like a product, chances are someone
else will too.

------
trapper
I was considering doing something like this for a site I made one weekend for
myself and my friends: limited spots. 5$ a spot per year, 1000 spots only. In
the end I couldn't be bothered setting up the payments because it was not
really worth it for small change, so now I just host it on our internal
network.

Pinboards pricing strategy might have worked better - great idea!

------
wmeredith
This is something like we did with 200nipples.com (t-shirts that start at $1 -
my buddy build an amazing shopping cart for it). It's always fun to watch the
mad dash for the first few shirts

