Hacker News Reader

Comment by webwright | Hacker News Reader

REALLY well done. I'm very impressed-- one of the slicker edit implementations I've seen in a while! I hope it's a fun project rather than a business effort, though-- seems like competing with Posterous, WordPress, Weebly, and a bajillion other site builders/editors out there is going to be awfully hard when the going rate for such things is free (read: get funded or shift to a business market ASAP).

Apps like this have a reasonable viral loop (i.e. view a site built on it, see a button that says, "get your own Orb in 15 seconds!")... But if that's wildly successful, how exactly do you make money?

View on HN

Forgot to answer the question.

Feels like we have two options for making money.

1. Focus on the viral aspect and charge for upgrades like backup, long version control history, more templates, more pages, PDF conversion, larger file uploads, etc.

2. Focus on the enterprise and make it like an Enterprise wiki. Make features more suited for Intranets. Make it a pure pay product. We feel we have a big win in this field for the typical user because of our obsession with ease of use.

Sunny

3. Let users make money off ads on their page and take a cut?

Thanks, that's a great idea and something we are considering as well. It would be nice if we could make money off of premium features but the ad-sharing would let us at least pay the bandwidth costs.

Sunny

Make your first premium feature the ability to take ads off it.

I agree more with nl who posted above. Run ads on all sites by default, no rev split then charge users to remove ads.

A former company of mine did this. Many users hate ads on their personal sites and will gladly pay a reasonable amount to have them removed. Many also have no interest in making money off their sites. Besides doing a rev share complicates things a lot more.

helloooooo spammers

> more templates, more pages

Golden. Imagine every startup company that will sign up for a free site, then they get a bit more successful and want more than three pages or whatnot.

Same with the people who go from casual blogging to putting out a ton of posts.

Forget enterprises. They have too many wants/needs/requirements (usually they don't really need the features, but I digress...). Focus on consumers and users that are willing to pay for upgraded features.

The wordpress.com model is pretty tried and true (and making huge money), but it only works at pretty tremendous scale, I think. http://en.wordpress.com/products/

From what I understand, ads perform pretty poorly on blog sites (very little intent). That being said, you COULD try to go niche (say, make the best "blogging about products" platform and intent of the reader might be radically different).

What about education & higher ed? Seems like an enterprise wide (or district-wide, or campus-wide) tool for making dead simple webpages would be a killer way to spice up any class.

Don't go enterprise. The sales cycle will kill you.

If this was my service I'd do the following: 1) Everyone runs ads, you get the revenue (no revenue split) 2) Charge $5/month to take ads off 3) Charge $10/year for custom domains (make you you get a good affiliate deal for domain name reg, too) 4) Charge $XXX/year for large traffic sites (where XXX gives you a good profit on your costs)

Nice job, BTW.

My company built and owns CityMax which is a website builder for small businesses. We have about 20,000 paying customers there and are profitable. This is more of a "can we change the world?" effort.

One of the key differences we believe is the table of contents on the side. Blogs are a modern representation of newspapers, magazines and other periodicals. One of our goals is to see if we can make a modern representation of books.

One nice thing that we have found is that many of our staff actually have multiple sites for different uses. We use one each for our two companies. I've got one between my wife and I. I have one to keep personal notes. It doesn't feel like we are using them just because we built it either.

In many ways I use it like a wiki but organizing a wiki has always been a weak point for me. I always end up with orphan pages with no links to them. Also, wikis are almost categorically ugly for some reason. On the other hand, blogs are often beautiful.

One of our design goals was to be "beautiful." Please check out our template designer. We think it might be one of the best in the industry (blog, website builder, or otherwise).

Sunny

Quick initial comparo btw CityMax and Orbs (might as well...)

AKA: Challanger (Upstart) vs. Incumbent (Traditional)

1. Orbs throws you into the workflow without asking for anything. That is quite attractive compared to the traditional (CityMax) model. I really prefer to divulge my information if and only when I like the product.

2. I have decided: "Free" is the new 4 letter word. I don't want to see it until I decide I like the product.

3. Both have wierd names, it is tough to tell what either does from the outset.

Anyone else?

I think in this market the only way to survive is to go the Ning route and make something just that much better, which yours might be and make it all premium, with a free 30 day trial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com