| Please review my app AND business model: http://www.lifesbook.com WHAT THE SITE DOES LifesBook is a private online diary (or journal) that works much the same way twitter works (in terms of SMS and hopefully user frequency of posts). To make an entry all you need to do is send in an SMS, make as many entries as you like whenever you like! If you start to get lazy with your entries (like you would with a normal diary) don't worry we can kindly remind you. THE BUSINESS So I think this is the kind of app that a few months ago you would see with no business model apart from ads, basically fuck that.
I have gone for the typical subscription based approach set at $9.99 per month for now, I hope to get this cost down and I will be able to when I get a bit of the economies of scale loving. I aim to and hope that I have created such a good product that $9.99 seems like great value. As you would expect after a user has been using the site for a few months the data (their entires) we store for them becomes really quiet valuable to the user. This makes me want to extend the trial period from the current week to as long as possible (eg 3 months) but SMS costs are just to crazy to be able to do that right now. What do you think about this business model and approach?? Its an app that I think allot of people would use if free but how can i make that financially viable? I don't think I can so thats why iv done what iv done. FEW MORE THINGS Due to the SMS cost I currently only have a UK number available, this may mean it will cost a user outside of the UK more to send a text in. I am not to sure. But either way I plan to add a US number as soon as its financially viable, I am guessing thats within the month. Search has just died on us in production, its a hosting issue and we are on to it.. Decided to release anyways. Meh FEEDBACK I want as much feedback as possible and not just on the app I also want feedback on the business behind it. |
Not just that. You copy your "translucent borders" from Facebook, your "close window" dialogue from the original lightbox and your feedback tab links to Getsatisfaction. The one original idea you had, putting notebook lines in the background, you couldn't even bother to sync up with the size of your font. (Aviary does this but they actually sync up the lines.)
Second off: How is this better than Tumblr? Do you know what Twitter is without ultrasimplicity? It's a downgraded version of a regular blog. That's why "Twitter+this" startups fail. Twitter is only good because it's so simple.
I use my blog as a diary. I write 20-30 posts a day about whatever comes to mind in the hopes that I can preserve it as a diary for half a century and then figure out a way to make use of it. Why would I pay $10 a month for something that gives me less than I've already got?
Third off: I like the header design but it's hard to navigate. I'm also a little offended that as your "famous diary person of choice" you picked Anne Frank, whose diary is most famous because the person that wrote it died. What's the implication? "You'll die so write stuff down?" For an online service, that's pretty obnoxious.
All that stuff aside, it looks nice, though I wonder just how much of this design you ripped off sources of which I'm not aware. (I could swear that font looks remarkably close to the "sparse black-on-white" that Posterous uses.)