free startup ideas for technical cofounders
This is likely the first in a series of thoughts I have for startup ideas. I am, in many cases, not a subject-matter-expert, and am talking out of my ass. Is the idea valuable? Maybe. But it’s all about the execution.
You know what is annoying? Watching ads or being stuck behind an annoying paywall that was me to give out yet another credit card number and fill out another sign up form for yet another website.
It’s 2014, and it’s surprising to me that no one’s solved this problem. I would gladly pay 10-50 cents to read a single New York Times article even though I have no intention of ever signing up for a subscription, or pay some change to click through a 30-second video ad I am likely muting anyway.
Let me pay per view, goddammit, and please don’t make me sign up and give my credit card to another god-awful website.
And no, please don’t say Bitcoin is the answer to this, there’s many reasons why decentralized Bitcoin will not be your microtransaction salvation but the primary reason is the long (and I mean, days-long) transaction times.
Competitive Analysis: There may be a few startups tackling this idea, and a few giants too (e.g. Paypal ‘micropayments’ seems to be a thing no one is using), but no clear leader in this space. You have flattr, which seems to be all about donations/social motivation, and bitwall, which looks promising but I don’t see anywhere. Google Wallet may have promised this too? I don’t know. All I know is that I’m still seeing site-specific paywalls and ads I’m forced to endure everywhere.
Go-to-market: The obvious go-to-market are these content providers and media companies that are slapping paywalls around everything. You could also go for the ‘skip ads on streaming video’ angle (e.g., Vimeo, Hulu, Youtube [who probably won’t play with you cuz they are Google]). For either approach, the key is having a really strong non-technical co-founder (and possibly investors) who have connections to hustle you into at least one of these markets and have them implement your technology on a trial/test basis. Focus on one market first, dominate, then move to another (e.g., media -> streaming video -> blogs -> hell, even funding open source software features?)
Potential Technical Approach: I may be missing something, but this seems relatively straightforward. You use some variation of OAuth? E.g., companies register their site with your SaaS service, and you provide a button that redirects you to the payment provider (your SaaS service), where the user is prompted with a simple button that approves the payment and redirects back to the content.
Users ‘fill’ their account ten bucks at a time from a credit card or bank account, and have to manually approve recharges once the bucket runs dry. Companies get their payouts once per month. You take a % cut of what companies earn on payouts.
Challenges (technical and otherwise):
- how do you work with content providers and get them to use your stuff? see my point about strong non-technical cofounders/investors above. your technology could be cool as hell but without this your business will go nowhere
- how to make this easy and painless for the user? e.g. If I have to fill out a signup form for every site I make a transaction to, you are back in paywall hell. So avoid this.
- how do you handle fraud and/or detect money-laundering?
- how do you tackle growth? Maybe some ‘viral’ way of issuing micro-credits to your friends to incentivize them to sign up for an account. E.g., you can ‘share’ this article or video for up to ‘n’ times for free, just enter in the n emails of the targets to share to.
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If you spend millions of dollars on this but it doesn’t work out for you don’t blame me ☺If it does work out, you can buy me a beer or hire me or something.
