Dave Morgan over at OnlinSpin said something that hits home.
Be patient about monetization…. Monetization efforts should be patient and not rushed. Google, Facebook, Craigslist and many others have proven that monetization will always catch up for the best services.
When I was trying to sell my local restaurant guide WestChesterMenu.com (because I was moving–not because I was abandoning the concept) my first prospect looked immediately past a great model and great metrics showing consistent growth in traffic and subscriber adoption (restaurants paying for hosted menus) and did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to determine what the financial payoff for his firm would be. He wasn’t impressed.
That’s funny because I was immediately not impressed too!
It obviously didn’t work out but I learned something: most people are not conceptual. Here I was trying to invent a new local model that would be sustainable (in fact, the site could really be focused on other things aside from restaurants)–knowing that money would follow when the model and supporting technology were improved. He was all dollars and cents.
What’s the moral of the story? There’s conceptual folks and there’s folks that focus on minutiae. Granted, both are needed to run a successful business, but if you’re the visionary type who wants to try new things, get used to folks wrinkling their brows at you.
Just wink back at them and get on with it!
