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Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

If they are able to build something that people like, it's an easy app category to monetize.

Is it? That's incredibly hand wavy.

For example I tried remember the milk but it immediately crippled itself with the iPhone sync. Not like they're billionaires either.

And their strategy includes leaving out a massive proportion of users by making IE a no go area.

What are their prices? I can't find the damn things anywhere. Am I going to get a £1000 bill when I reach 30 users?

They've a long way to go.

Product is great BTW, if a little programmer centric with the shortcut obsession, just pointing out great product doesn't mean great profits.

Asana is focused on designing something that only they like. Trello seems to have focused on actually empathizing with the "any person."

I think you're right - on it's own it probably is hard to monetize well.

BUT - there are good options available to them.

Once you have more than 30 people using it, if it jumps to say $5/person/month it is over $10000/year for the next 30 users.

There's the Yammer model: Free to use, until you want things like security controls (think "who sees which task"), customization ("match your company color scheme") and integration ("single sign on, Salesforce integration etc etc")

The truth is though that this is a feature for an enterprise software company. It makes perfect sense for someone like BMC, Citrix, VMWare/EMC, or even Atlassian (if they could afford them?) to buy them out to fill holes in their offerings. Their sales channels can push an enterprise version to existing customers and then is makes sense for everyone involved.

Asana is much more of a business app than Remember The Milk. Business apps that people like are very easy to monetize.

No, I respectfully but vehemently disagree. To-Do apps are a dime a dozen. No matter how much better any given app may be than another, there is very little reason to pay for a solution to the problem of to-do lists. There are just too many free options, and it is an easy problem to solve with a home-grown solution. Or Notepad. Or an actual notepad.

They need more.

I disagree. Lots of companies making money in this area. Unfuddle, Pivotal, all of Atlassian, all of 37 Signals, Yammer, Evernote, FogBugz, SharePoint, etc. If you can get consumer-like adoption and add business value, you can easily make money.

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