mobile-apps, startup-costs, investorsI have an app idea that I’ve gotten great potential-user feedback from via mostly unbiased students and school faculty. I’m a front-end dev and need to hire my mobile dev to handle the bulk of the work, which is costly.
Let’s say the app hasn’t been done before and has the potential for 100k users at the very bottom-end of the spectrum. My costs are going to range in the 15k area. I don’t like the idea of charging too much for the app or invasive ads. I’ve considered having a free version with minimal ads and a 0.99 cent version without ads.
Edit: The investor needs justification for supplying the capital. Obviously the justification needed is ROI. How I can best justify app development costs through a given monetization method to achieve that ROI? I understand most of it is subjective but I’m trying to get the idea of what’s typically the best option for monetization at a given number of users. My hypothetical number is 100k users. Given that information, is it likely going to be more lucrative to use ads or charge $0.99 to justify the costs to the investor?
It seems you’re asking two questions:
It is the year 2015. The only investors who are usually interested in paying for you to build your product are friends & family (easy-going angel investors).
If you already have an app with 100k (active) users, that’s a different story. If you have that many users, good stats about month-to-month usage, it barely matters how you make the money, given that you are truly experiencing growth.
I think the best answer to provide is that it depends on your app. Take a look at something like Youtube. Ads work fine because of the high volume of usage. Now look at Instagram. They are just recently introducing promoted (but targeted) content. Snapchat just announced it’s going to start offering a service to replay for about USD $1.
If people enjoy using your service or find some value in it that keeps them on your site, you’ll find a way to make money that aligns with the vision you have for your product’s future.
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