Project 2 - Simple SAAS - Business Model

 

In the previous Project 2 post, I mentioned that one of the key outstanding design items was to come up with a business model for the site. I now have an idea of what I want to do, and this post I'll try and explain it.

The model is actually pretty simple:

The site will be based on a freemium model where all members will be able to post up to 5 articles for free. However, free articles will be (subtly) watermarked when then are viewed.  Something like this:

Subscribed users will be able to permanently post more articles ( 20?), and their published articles will not be watermarked as long as their subscription is active.

This model is simple, but it does hillight a couple of consideration points for a freemium business model

1. What features do paid subscribers get that free users don't
2. What happens when a subscription is cancelled. How do you gracefully remove the paid features when a subscription expires? 

In this case, I've chosen to watermark the pages for 'free plan' users, and to regress subscribed users to this model if they allow their subscription to expire. This should enable a few things

• The site will be useable for free users, giving people an incentive to use the site as a free service
• There will be tangible benefits for subscribing and maintaining a subscription, which should lead to people signing up for a subscription service assuming that is is appropriately priced.
• The penalty for letting a subscription lapse will be minor - all paid published articles will be permanently available, but will simply incur a watermark if the subscription lapses.

I'm reasonable happy with this concept.  It still needs some work (how much will the paid plan be per year? how many articles will this allow? How exactly will the free articles be watermarked), but this is enough to move forwards with.

With this concept sketched out, I am ready to start integrating the site into some real world services. I'll cover that process in future posts.

 

Interlude - Sickness and distractions

 Ugh. I've been sick. A nasty flu and a bonus round of bronchitis because I am just that lucky. 

As such, I haven't really been focused on moving forwards with Project 2.  Instead I've allowed myself to get distracted and started a couple of other things on the side. Did I mention that one of my biggest flaws is that I am great at starting things and terrible at finishing them? I think I might have.

However, it turns out that one of the projects was something simple that I was able to finish in a couple of days. As well as being terrible at finishing projects that I have started, I am also terrible at making decisions regarding what to work one.  I  dither so much over the 'what shall I work on today' question that I often just give up on being productive and choose brain rot instead. 

To fix that, I made a simple tool to help make decisions.  https://thedecisionator.com/ lets you create a list of choices to make, and then will randomly pick a choice from that list for you.  The lists of choices are stored to local browser storage, so they will persist between browser sessions on the same device

The site is another Vue/Vuetify/Typescript site that I've deployed via Cloud Flare pages.  It is intentionally bare bones, but it gets the job done.  The next time that I need to choose what to work on, I'll be covered!

Since one of the themes of this blog is side hustles and money making, it is interesting to consider if or how this site could be turned into a side hustle.  On the face of it, there don't seem to be too many options

• The site is too simple for advertisers to consider, it is unlikely to pass a provider review
• There is no realistic opportunity to 'upsell' to a  paid model.
• There isn't anything to subscribe t

About the only avenue I can think of is adding a donation link. I might look at this later.. but this would need some serious traffic numbers to be viable. This leads to marketing/traffic/seo considerations that I need to get across but which probably aren't worth it for a simple tool.

For not I am just happy to have something that I can use to help me be more decisive.  I might come back to making this a more profitable exercise later if I think of a good idea.