I need to found this social networking site ASAP. My question is how many users do I need to have to be able to pay off cost of operations? Are 50 users ok. Any books or nice references on this? [ September 10, 2008: Message edited by: Arvind Birla ]
ok I got 2 more who agreed in principle to the idea of signing up so that makes 5. Seriously will I ever be able to make money with it? I want to try it as an experiment and something I put in my resume for when I'm old like you guys.
My question is how many users do I need to have to be able to pay off cost of operations?
What costs will you incur before you start drawing an income? What will your ongoing costs be? How do you plan to draw revenue?
There is no 'magic number of users' equation. If you want to draw comparisons to the Ranch, we have well over 100,000 users and huge number of unique visitors per month and we only just manage to support a paid staff of zero.
Arvind Mahendra
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Originally posted by David O'Meara: Be fair, how long is a piece of string?
What costs will you incur before you start drawing an income? What will your ongoing costs be? How do you plan to draw revenue?
There is no 'magic number of users' equation. If you want to draw comparisons to the Ranch, we have well over 100,000 users and huge number of unique visitors per month and we only just manage to support a paid staff of zero.
I dont expect startup costs for the rights to a domain name+hosting too be more than 10 dollars so thats not much. The app itself should be the biggest cost an fb clone might cost me anything in the range of 500-1800. I may have to exceed budget on this. I could save this cost by getting acquainted well with Php and extend some kind of open source app but I don't have the inclination to do so. Then comes marketing costs. I have no idea how much advertising on the net would cost, printing flyers maybe to hand out to people. I think the first step would be to identify a niche where the playing field is still open. As for revenue,I think I would have to have some kind of business model like fb where if I get big enough I could sell profiles to interested companies till then I think I would consider myself lucky to get enough revenue from ad clicks to cover the domain rental and hosting cost.
The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny - it is the light that guides your way. - Heraclitus
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