gizmo, you and the other guys (and girls) on here are all over the exact studies and discussions we had internally with respect to this product - i appreciate the discussion. Pricing and positioning this and future aspects of our business model has been my focus for the past 8 months.
The value of Xobni is built on two pillars: search and relationship management. This offering builds on that first pillar. Future offerings will build on the other pillar. We actually priced this offering below what we think was the optimal ARPU (average revenue per user). We did that for 3 reasons (1) we want a huge % of users on this paid product - upselling to future offerings will be one-click easy (2) we believe paying users are more evangelical (humans justify decisions they've already made) (3) as a business in our stage we believe it is less risky to monetize a larger user group at a lower ARPU than very few users at a higher ARPU
We are optimizing for the 2-5 year revenue scenario (not 6 month scenario) - in the not too distant future Xobni will be launching an enterprise offering, a blackberry application, and other premium offerings. I've been waiting a long time for this stage of building the business.
The value of Xobni is built on two pillars: search and relationship management. This offering builds on that first pillar. Future offerings will build on the other pillar. We actually priced this offering below what we think was the optimal ARPU (average revenue per user). We did that for 3 reasons (1) we want a huge % of users on this paid product - upselling to future offerings will be one-click easy (2) we believe paying users are more evangelical (humans justify decisions they've already made) (3) as a business in our stage we believe it is less risky to monetize a larger user group at a lower ARPU than very few users at a higher ARPU
We are optimizing for the 2-5 year revenue scenario (not 6 month scenario) - in the not too distant future Xobni will be launching an enterprise offering, a blackberry application, and other premium offerings. I've been waiting a long time for this stage of building the business.