Wow, Matt—thank you very much for the thorough suggestions.
> First off I'd change the name. It makes no sense, and is hard to pronounce at a glance.
Hell yeah, this has been a gut instinct since day 1. I've been trying to brainstorm new names, but have come up with nothing. I think a name change is a good idea, though, for sure.
> but you should have Facebook Connect at the very least.
> Do you have embeds? Can people embed a family video on their blog trivially from your site?
That's an oversight. Thanks, putting that on the imp list.
> Just spend some time figuring out how your users want to share these things (this is one of those rare instances where simply asking them will return high value info) and make that easy as pie.
Definitely a good idea. I think we put together a Ramamia user survey a while ago but never acted upon it for some reason. Probably a good time to get that rolling.
> So there's your traffic. Freemium seems to be almost a necessity here. I really can't think of an alternative monetization model that makes sense.
You're probably right. I had a gut instinct that while Premium would be the easiest and most reliable way to get conversions (no unpredictability in the conversions, in some way) it would be restricting to growth and customer acquisition. I think we've come to the consensus that freemium is probably the way to go.
Yeah coming up with names is wicked hard in the age of domain squatters. You'll find one I'm sure.
Even if you go the freemium route, check out AdWords. Getting the right combo of keywords can be a lot of work, but you may just find you can acquire paying users for much less than you make off of them. Especially since you're presumably using subscription billing here. And it's highly scalable, once you find the right audience you can probably buy them by the truckload.
We did a quick run with AdWords and it turned out to be total crap. The volume of searches for stuff like "family website" was abysmal and the CPCs for stuff like "family photos" was out of the water. So, yeah. We're definitely looking to do it, but not without some conversion % estimates.
I think we'd be better off giving families an option for a "public page". Focusing on SEO over SEM would be a better long term goal. The CAC and conversion numbers didn't make sense with the small test we did for SEM. then again, that might be a bad way of looking at it since we used such a small sample.
> First off I'd change the name. It makes no sense, and is hard to pronounce at a glance.
Hell yeah, this has been a gut instinct since day 1. I've been trying to brainstorm new names, but have come up with nothing. I think a name change is a good idea, though, for sure.
> but you should have Facebook Connect at the very least.
Yeah, we're tied into Facebook Connect and Twitter: http://screenshots.markbao.com/a137e44e036028bb19f171c201b2f... -> http://screenshots.markbao.com/082acda74154efb50e52d95a11a1c... -> http://screenshots.markbao.com/b2baae910327fd86f658f2fd29c46...
> Do you have embeds? Can people embed a family video on their blog trivially from your site?
That's an oversight. Thanks, putting that on the imp list.
> Just spend some time figuring out how your users want to share these things (this is one of those rare instances where simply asking them will return high value info) and make that easy as pie.
Definitely a good idea. I think we put together a Ramamia user survey a while ago but never acted upon it for some reason. Probably a good time to get that rolling.
> So there's your traffic. Freemium seems to be almost a necessity here. I really can't think of an alternative monetization model that makes sense.
You're probably right. I had a gut instinct that while Premium would be the easiest and most reliable way to get conversions (no unpredictability in the conversions, in some way) it would be restricting to growth and customer acquisition. I think we've come to the consensus that freemium is probably the way to go.
Thank you again, Matt!