What we are trying to learn

With our last mashup (Tweetburner) we’ve blogged about the usage of the service. We did this to show what the first days of the mashup did to our server and visitor statistics. A lot of people loved this and, as we hope, learned from it. Last week we’ve been thinking on what we could share with the community this time.

During the start of Tweetburner, a lot of users and people at conferences asked that one question: ‘What’s your businessmodel’. We didn’t have one at that time. We sure could think of multiple models. Most of the times the conversation was continued with the question: ‘but it’s costing you money and time, right?’. But of course. We spend a lot of time building it and we needed to host the service. Which costs us money. So most of the times we ended up explaining why we build the service. Our primary purpose was to build a mashup in a weekend and see how it evolved in the early weeks of it’s life. We noticed that the community was interested in this experience, so we shared this via our blog.

Now we want to share our experiences again. This time we want to find out how to make a mashup cost-covering.

To make some money we need a simple ‘businessmodel’. Google AdSense will be integrated in the interface. These ads can be removed by donating. Donating is starting at $5. A donation will disable the ads forever. In addition to that we will add a donation button to the website where users can donate at any time. We will publish a list with the names of the people that donated on our website. Kindly inspired by the people of Phusion Passenger.

More information on the ‘businessmodel’ will be published soon.