Community Memberships

[drusepth]

In an effort to provide more features for more people, it's been suggested that something like a community-centric membership might be a good idea to explore (and I agree!).

To not muddle the complexity of other membership tiers, I think it's worthwhile to brainstorm a bit on how to best implement something that

1. Allows non-premium users to create and manage premium content, and
2. Benefits all users and/or Notebook.ai development

One approach could be to have community-based memberships allow creating anything, while having everything be public (to the benefit of others looking for ideas/examples/inspiration). This might get confusing when a user switches to a paid membership (and makes things private), and/or has existing private content that they need to manage separately. Might be a slick way to address this though.

Another approach is an ad-supported version of the site. We can explore this, but I'm generally not a big fan of adding ads to sites because they 1) generally negatively affect the experience, and 2) don't have a [worthwhile] upside in revenue streams. I can do more research on how much ads would have to bring in to be worthwhile, but as long as we have some users on premium, Notebook.ai's low costs should continue to pay for itself.

I'd love to hear some other approaches and/or feedback on these though. It would be great to have more users more actively using all that Notebook.ai offers.

[luminousreaver]

Email blast your current sponsors and ask for their feedback personally. Their dollars are worth more than my two cents. As for what my two cents are... here are some odd monetization ideas you could employ to the greatest possible benefit.

Pick and choose your favorites. Twist them around to suit your particular vision.

Premium Members buy into Content Curation, allowing them to vote on featured content on an all new Notebook.ai frontpage. This serves the two-fold purpose of giving Premium Members their rightfully purchased carrot while simultaneously encouraging free members to produce quality content AND thrusting forward Notebook.ai as a platform for writers. (Think DeviantArt for worldbuilding blurbs.)

Premium Members could simply buy into a privileged community. This community could have periodic contests, raffles, and such. The infrastructure you provide could ideal make this process as self-moderated as possible, but I suspect your Premium Membership will be cool peeps. Rewards could include being featured (free for you), cash prizes, extended membership, etc.

The reverse of what you've suggested. In light the "community focused" features I'm suggesting, Premium Members could have the right to share or, less radically, and easier time (algorithmically?) promoting their content on the aforementioned community frontpage. You can probably see the figures under the hood. Are your current free members interested in sharing? (I could be wrong, but I suspect that the majority of free members don't care to share.) Are your premium members looking to talk about their work? (Likewise I feel paying members are more invested in feedback.) Depending on your demographics and what you want to push with respect to how Notebook.ai grows as a community driven kind of thing, "Buy-to-Share" could become the new marketing thing. Under this scheme there could be contests held for free members to earn Premium Membership.

Premium Membership could come with increased profile customization (like profile widgets, name changes, and things of that nature), analytics to see which of your blurbs is the most popular... The ability to publically "like" other peoples' content. Saving confidential notes on other peoples' public content.

[rhyeen]

I think you're right to consider removing the feature-based paywall: I imagine a good percentage of users who come in contact with Notebook get turned off and churn due to some of its best features being behind a pretty high subscription. I think that's the last thing that you want, being a little guy in a big sea.

Why have a subscription?

If I were you, I'd carefully consider the purpose behind a subscription in the first place: is it to offset the cost of the infrastructure? It is to provide a meaningful income so that you can continue to make more features? Is it to get rich off an idea that people can't resist? Your subscription should reflect that.

Analysis of costs

Let's assume that it is 80% to pay for the server and 20% for development investment, and explore that as an example. If this is the case, the overbearing reason for subscriptions is to just keep the servers running. Well, what goes into server costs?

• Nodes/CPU
• Traffic frequency
• Traffic load
• Storage

Profiling your costs, where are the greatest costs? Being a small service, I imagine your nodes and trafficking are rolled up into a single cost, and your storage is another. So your costs are really:

• How often are HTTP requests made, and how big are those requests?
• What is taking up storage space?

I think in both those cases, the one thing that is going to make more of a difference than anything else is images. Universes' and their content are probably a small percentage of your storage requirements vs image stores. And for traffic, what does it matter if a user has 1,000 universes or 1? The app only pulls down one at a time anyway, so it would make no difference in cost for your nodes.

Analysis of current pricing model

In this, I think your pricing model of "unlimited universes", but "limited image upload" is warranted. You may be able to take it a step further. What if Starter users could not upload images. Instead, when they want to upload images, you refer them to an image upload site, such as imgur, they upload the image there, and you provide an easy way for them to link to that image. That way A) you don't have to store it, and B) you don't have to retrieve it. This alone may bring your costs down to (almost) a constant amount, even as you continue to scale.

In contrast, it doesn't make sense to limit the feature set (supposing our hypothetical reasoning for pricing (80% server 20% development)). Does having new and interesting pages cost you more or limit your development? Probably not. Then why paywall them? Probably because its the most enticing feature that is easy to enable/disable. This means the subscription is justifiable to you but not necessary the user; this turns potential subscribers off.

Suggestions

So what options do you have left, if you still need more than just image upload limits for subscriptions? @Lumireaver already mentioned a few good points. Let me add to it.

Ads/sponsers

You mentioned that you don't like the ad model, but that's probably because of the typical stigma of ads. Imagine instead that whenever a user logs on, they are greeted with a splash page with a message from you that says, "Hey, we don't like ads either, but we need some way to keep the server running for you. Instead of a generic ad, below is a link to <INSERT SPONSOR'S NAME HERE> that is helping to cover your free subscription costs. They'd love it if you showed some appreciation by checking out their site." Then don't show any more ads on your site. Having a custom ad on a custom page, with a custom message from you heart-to-heart with your users will be so much more respectful to your users, will have a much higher click-through rate to your sponsors (they'd appreciate it!) and would probably still have a better payout then random ads posted throughout your app.

I'm sure the right sponsor, such as artifexian, dndbeyond, etc. would really be enticed by such a model.

Lowering subscription costs

What percentage of your userbase are Premium members? I can't imagine it being as high as you'd like. $9 (or $7, whatever) per month is really high for a project of this size. What if you had a much lower subscription costs, like $2 a month (if you're worried about credit payment costs, have a 2 month free, then $12 a year membership). Anyone can afford that, and you may see a huge increase in subscriptions.

Patreon

If you're going to lower subscriptions, you might want to consider seeing if donations-with-benefits would be sufficient to replace your subscription model. Have the site be free, but have a Patreon page that you refer to. $1 membership tier. $2 membership tier. $9 membership tier. Whatever. Just offer cool things for each tier, such as...

Replace paywall with other options

The problem with paywalls is it's punishment instead of reward: it's spinned negatively. "We block you from these features unless you pay", rather then, "we give you something exceptional because you pay". Consider alternative subscription benefits:

• Early access to new features: have feature-flipped beta content that they can test out for you, give feedback, and when ready (aka when you have the next wave of cool features to dangle in front of them) release to the general public.
• Feature requests: Make it something more than just a github issue that they create. Make it a portal where people can see and vote on features, but they can only vote if they are premium members. There are services out there that provide such functionality.
• Custom CSS, banners, icons: give them someway they can really do some cool things with their content more than just text, but ensure it's only flavors, not full-fledged features. Otherwise, you're back to a paywall.
• Custom urls paths to their content's read view so they can post their content more "officially" than a random id in the path. May even consider custom domain naming, but that's a pretty big tech hurdle.