
Microtransaction startup inspired by lessons from my failed new media site - rmbusch
http://picopass.com
======
rmbusch
I was trying to build a new media site for several months but I faced several
problems.

(1) They are capital-intensive, even at small scale

(2) Audience growth is either slow and free or paid and really bad

(3) It struck me as perverse that the only good way to get paid for work and
content is by conversions luring your audience to advertisers

The first two aren't terrible sins. Some industries are harder to break into
than others. I'm not terribly high on capital or time right now, so it just
didn't make sense for me.

But number 3 really stuck out to me.

I've talked to a lot of people about the problem now, and while some just
aren't willing to pay for any content ever, a lot expressed frustration that
they'd love to read paywalled articles from time-to-time except it's not worth
getting an entire subscription to do it.

Some people even talked about wanting "some way to let a website know how
amazing" some articles are.

This spawned Pico-- a microtransaction platform we hope will eventually become
ubiquitous on the internet for one-time micropayments for articles, videos,
you name it. A lot of the internet isn't (and shouldn't) be behind paywalls,
so Pico will also have microtip options (and will tally microtips with a "X
users Picotipped this" sort of message to let people know how popular content
is).

We're going to have a bit of a chicken-egg challenge: Pico is worthless to
users if creators and publishers aren't adopting it, and its not beneficial to
creators and publishers if there aren't any users to pay them on it. But we
think if we start small, demonstrate the potential of this revenue stream both
for creators to generate more revenue and for users to reward and incentivize
good content, and push hard to grow it, Pico could change the way we pay for
content on the internet.

