

Ask HN:  Ideas for Monetizing? - d4ft

Hi all-<p>I currently am working on a site that is similar to one techcrunch posted a few days back.  I have a super duper early demo if you want to take look available here:<p>onedatedaily.heroku.com<p>The concept is this:  Each day (eventually each hour) a new dater of each sex will be featured on the front page.  People will then be able to get some basic information, and if they like the featured dater, they can send them an email through our site.  This will likely be form based and require certain elements to reduce spam and stalkers (also we don't reveal the dater's email to avoid stalkers and weirdos).  If the dater likes what the person has to say, they can email them back.<p>The question is how to monetize.  I have a couple ideas and was wondering what you all thought:<p>1) Force anyone who wishes to email the dater to pay 1$ per email (some of this could be used to "pay" the dater for listing themselves.  A kind of incentive to get more daters)<p>2) Graduated scale emailing.  The first 50 free, then 1 dollar for the next 50, then 3$ for the next 50 etc.<p>3)  Force the featured dater to pay per email from vetted emailers. .10 an email or whatever<p>4) Freemium model -- Get more information and more tools by signing up with us.  Email of the day etc.<p>Thanks for looking guys, all suggestions welcome for both monetization and user experience stuff.  The UI is pretty suck, but I'm working on it.  I think the idea is decent, I'm just sorry I got beat to the punch by that one tech crunch had which looked, tbh, also sucky.
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nickFaraday
Seems to me that your somewhat limiting your revenue... The problem I see is
no one wants to make the first move, so everyone would want to be the
"featured" date and let everyone else do the "dating work" for them.

In this structure I'd think you want to charge the dater not the prospective
dates.

My suggestion would be lower the barrier for prospective dates to contact your
featured "date" by making it free.

1\. Charge your featured dates for the "feature" service.

2\. Charge more for "localized or placed features"... AKA I want to be
featured in LA, and site-wide.

3\. Make the entire database searchable, your featured dater functionality is
your hook, but no need to limit what who your members could find. (Maybe this
is an extra pay feature)

4\. One thing I have always wondered about dating sites is why none of them
have used alternate payment mechanics? For example, buy a date flowers from
(FTD, with your affiliate code) and get 20 free contacts, sign up for netflix
get 10 contacts, etc, etc...

