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@Frederick you wanted me to mention you
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@linuxxx there you go
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@Stuxnet that's something I'm actively looking into. I talk to a lot of people trying to find a way to get people to use our service. To be honest, I found that at least in my country, there are quite a lot of people who would pay for a service if it doesn't sell their data. Also, if anyone would have an ide how we could implement a free version without selling data/targeted advertisment, it would be lovely.
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@Alice You're obviously not going to recreate Instagram (or any of the big name social media, for that matter) but a paid service.
You should establish your target audience and find ways to market to them. -
@Alice I will try to share it next week. I was working on it for some time, but it still need some final touches.
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@DawidCyron Are you talking to other techies?
You should avoid doing that if you are, unless of course that's your target audience.
You don't want to end up like PiedPiper in whatever season it was. They sent the PP beta to a lot of other developers who understood it. But the general public was confused.
So unless your target audience is a lot of techies, you should talk to truly random people. -
@Stuxnet I'm not talking to techies. I'm talking to normal, everyday people that I meet.
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@DawidCyron Hmm. Well I suppose. But I'd still be cautious.
Extreme analogy, but similar logic.
So there was that school shooting in Florida a few months ago. After that everyone was bitching for more gun control. A few weeks after the shooting, nobody was really talking about it. It lost the trendiness of the subject.
Perhaps people are all for it now, with the whole Facebook incident and privacy being a trendy subject. Perhaps I'm wrong, just me trying to be a slightly pessimistic but 100% realistic person. -
@Stuxnet I think even with that analogy in mind there will always be a subset of people that value privacy.
Problem is just finding enough of them to fund the project. -
@Stuxnet I get what you are saying. And I understand that it's a big risk. And I understand that people will be sceptical. But I guess it's something like high risk-high reward. As I said, I will try to publish whole business plan next week, and explain everything in detail.
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@Synti that's why I'm still considering this an option. The only problem that I have, is that I can't find a way to get money to host servers.
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@Stuxnet my apologises, didn’t read all the comments.
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@linuxxx any idea how to make it open source, while being able to get some profit off of it? I might be retarded, and I'm tired as fuck, but if we make it open source, wouldn't everyone be able to bypass subsciption or setup their own version?
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@j4cobgarby tech stack is not final. What would you change in it?
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@j4cobgarby and how about performance? Isn't node faster? Just wondering
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@j4cobgarby @DawidCyron Tbh I'm a php guy, what about that?
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@linuxxx i don't mind PHP, i've used it a few times but I wouldn't say i'm great at it, but i wouldn't mind using it
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@j4cobgarby I expected a hate towards php, I'm surprised!
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Well I'm not going to tell you how to run your business, but I do have a few suggestions:
- Don't build the platform yourself. I see a lot of startups try to build everything themselves and by the time they get to market they have no money left to spend on customer acquisition. Instead, use something like Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/) or HumHub (https://www.humhub.org/en) who have already done 90% of the work for you. If your service takes off then great! You can reinvest your profits to build a custom platform later after you have proof that there is a market for this product.
- You're going to need to spend some money on advertising if you want to get anywhere. A challenge you are going to have to overcome is that a large portion of your target market (privacy geeks) are going to have Adblockers installed. So you need to find some way of getting through to them. -
- As @SSDD mentioned, you should not give the founding team "profits for the next 3 years" instead you need to give them equity in the company (which means you need to incorporate). Also, when talking about equity you need to distribute 100% to the founding team instead of 5%. However, how you allocate the shares is up to you. For example, since you are looking for 9 people to work on the project you could give 8 of them 1,111 shares and 1 of them 1,112 shares out of a pool of 10,000 shares (you decide this at time of incorporation) meaning each person gets approximately 11.111% of the company. Alternatively, you could take 40% for yourself and give the other 8 people 7.5% each, etc.
- Also, you'll probably want to answer this question: Why should someone use my platform over one of the other privacy-focused social networks like Steemit and Mastodon? -
@DuckyMcDuckFace I didn’t even want to go into the business itself. There is no way this would work. Not at scale anyway. It would be a very niche niche social network.
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@DuckyMcDuckFace ok, thanks for the advice. I will change that. I just have to think of how to split the equity. When it comes to reasoning, it's in the business plan that I will share next Saturday, as I have a lot of work to do this week.
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@SSDD any reasoning why you think that the business will not work? I mean, I know that there are a lot of barriers and that this product is targeting a specific audience, but I don't think that it can't succeed. Look at Vero for example. It was great, got popular pretty quickly. It even had a chance to succeed, but they fucked up server management and infrastructure, along with a lack of features (they didn't even have desktop version!!!!). By any means, I'm not saying it will be easy and that it will succeed for sure, but I think that it is worth trying.
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One of my friends says, "Believe in quantity. Though you're selling something on very less profit but quantity will cover up all the expenses"
So if the membership fee is just few pennies, everyone would like to try. Unless you're planning to make big profit from that.
But the question is why should someone believe that you're not stealing their data. Can only being open source coverup this thing? -
@DawidCyron I don’t believe it can work because it’s such an obvious idea that has been talked about and discussed a million times in the past several years, that IF this could work, someone would have done it already.
Here is just one problem.
Social networks only work if everyone is on them. How many of your friends and family would be willing to pay? The minute one person doesn’t pay then the model is broken as if you want to share something with “whoever” then you need to go where they are. It then becomes to troublesome to maintain 2 platforms for the average user. -
@DawidCyron your’re also assuming that £1 per month per user will cover all staff, infrastructure, marketing etc. All costs.
Have you done ANY work or analysis at all to corroborate that?
And how does that cost limit users. If you’re charging a fixed amount a month, then you need to limit each users activity to make sure they don’t cost you more than they are paying, resulting in a dead business model. How does that work? -
@SSDD people from many countries will not even pay £1 for an year ☺️
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@amitgupta @Alice that's why I'm considering (as I would have to learn more about ads without targeting) an option for a free version, where we display ads, but not targeted. The only reason I didn't mention it, is the fact that I'm a little afraid of that idea. I don't know what users would think of it.
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@SSDD I know. But you have to realize that it's not a full-on plan yet. I started thinking about it some time ago, but I'm far from saying that I have everything planned. But who has when they are posting ideas here? I just wanted to inform people interested, and maybe find someone who would like to work on it with me.
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@SSDD I see that you are getting a lot of support here. What would you recommend me to do?
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@DawidCyron I’m not here to piss on anyone’s dreams mate. I’m just highlighting some business problems that you may not have thought about yet.
I wouldn’t propose to tell you what to do. My opinion, based on all of the fundamental problems that I listed above and the dozens more that haven’t come to light yet, is that this idea is a non-starter.
I hope you prove me wrong. -
@SSDD I understand and appreciate constructive criticism .I'm not saying that I won't work on it. That's why I'm also asking for an advice. Maybe there is something that could be changed in the whole business model? It just sounds like you know what you're talking about.
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@DawidCyron I’ve been through the startup ringer a few times. Raising various amounts of money from low tens of thousands to multiple millions... so far nothing has worked out 🤘 so yes, I have learned a lot by failing lol, which is actually a bit of a badge of honour in certain entrepreneurial circles. The point is to keep on keeping on which is why I’m not wanting to piss on your fire.
One option that springs to mind is that you could make the person really invested in your network be the one who pays. His payment then gets X number of his friends in for free.
This way the person who is SUPER into your idea (and I believe many would be) would be the one who pays, thus removing the barrier to entry for others.
This isn’t perfect either though because if joe smith is in my circle of friends and he’s also in yours, then who pays for him? Me or you?
It’s a tricky one for sure. I’ll ponder on it some more. -
@Alice I would even go as far as the arguing the opposite would be more likely to succeed.
- All information posted is public (including advertisers)
- No gimmicky tos that screw you over, it's just public.
- Powerful API, get your data or anyones (rate limit or it'll cost a fortune)
It makes for great marketing potential, there is no more privacy policy issue. Also has great arguments with regard to the whole censorship issue.
Paid social netwoek network that doesn't collect nor sell users data
Paid social netwoek network that doesn't collect nor sell users data