

Ask HN: What other business's revenue model do you resemble - sanj

I was chatting with an investor a few weeks back and he asked me this question:<p>"What other business's revenue model does your company resemble?"<p>It struck me as one of the more insightful questions I've had to wrestle with, and informs what your capital requirements may look like.<p>So far, LuckyCal has been identified as a consumer product that makes money based on its affiliate fees.  However, this isn't the way to a homerun.  The prosumer or business use of the product is enough to warrant charging for it, which is exciting.<p>Given that, it looks like a classic "Freemium" model, typified by flickr.com.<p>However, there's another set of capabilities that arise when an entire organization uses it.  The emergent abilities are worth even more, but also require buy-in at an enterprise level by an organization.  That falls outside of Freemium entirely.<p>The closest model I've been able to find is logmein.com, which is free for consumers, but which allows companies to track, control, secure and limit the product's capability after installing an enterprise license.<p>I'd appreciate any insight.  Making money in three different ways either seems inspired or foolish.  If someone else is out there doing it effectively, it'd help me solidify the argument for the former.<p>I'm eager to see what other canonical models appear.  I haven't seen a good taxonomy of revenue models on HN or elsewhere.  What's <i>your</i> plan?  And how does it resemble?
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wmeredith
We're an e-commerce solution and we charge a transaction fee.

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ram1024
I'd stick with Freemium as the category of your revenue model, it sounds
better than crippleware

for us, business 1 is ad-driven (ad-sense will be fine until we grow beyond
it). business 2 will be monthly subscription with maybe some branded schwag
revenue.

