answerly

I spent ten years running various types of sales organizations and have never had a positive experience in outsourcing sales. I have hired outside consultants with experience selling in certain areas to make warm introductions to companies in their rolodex. But, in these cases, me or my team always handled the sales process. The consultant simply received a spiff if one of their warm leads turned into a sale. Sales is just too core of a function to be trusted to outsiders. Also, early on, the sales process is your best source of constructive feedback on the product, pricing, etc. You need to hear that directly- an outsider won't be able to communicate that effectively.

You will need to be very careful about which sites you allow users to extract content from as many larger sites have TOS which prevent this type of activity. You could be opening yourself up to some nasty DMCA take down notices depending on how you plan on displaying/redistributing the scraped content.

The three main levers in a subscription business are:

1) the premium: this is the enticement which gets people to try out your product. Most typically it is a free trial period.

2) the fees: what does the service cost the user. My experience has been that if your price point is under about $10 per month, you are better off charging a quarterly or annual subscription.

3)the features: what does the user "get" for a monthly/annual fee. The best features have a high perceived value to the user but a low delivery cost to the provider. The worst subscription business focus on the wrong features which are very high cost to deliver but have a very low perceived value to the user.

Some other things to think about: 1) You need to test like crazy on each of these levers. I have seen examples where a $14.95 price point has performed 30% better than a $15 price point. Make basic assumptions about the different elements you want to test, but make sure to let the data make decisions for you.

2) If you offer a free trial, make sure to get the credit card number up front.

3) Be very upfront with disclosures on your billing process and have a very liberal refund process. Anyone can request a charge back from their credit card company for any reason and too many charge backs will sink your income stream. Make it easier for someone to get a refund from you and you can prevent these types of issues.

4) be very focused on retention. Retaining existing users is much easier than acquiring new ones.

The Drudge Report established itself as a player early on by breaking major stories like the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. I think Drudge's success has more to do with the fact that they are a tier one news source versus the simplicity of their design. Also, keep in mind that Drudge built that audience over a period of nearly 15 years.

+1 for the mini. They are cheap and portable.