The problem is that the online world can only be an analogue to the offline world to a certain extent; past that, it breaks down. So the issue of indies... well, we could probably say Dreamwidth is that, and here we both are. For that matter, a lot of the really big names, now, were once the equivalent of online indies: flickr, linkedin, photobucket, even facebook. Not all of them go the way of delicious.
The key is always the business plan, and there, I don't think it's a matter of whether it's an indie. Seems to me that your complaint is more about the attitude. As someone who owned an indie bookstore, and was surrounded by equally offbeat indie shops, I never ran into that attitude. I did plenty, in the big city, or the bigger college towns, and it turned me off, as well. Or maybe I just never saw myself as cool enough to carry off handing that attitude to anyone else. I was too acutely aware that I very much needed customers who, y'know, give me cash.
Online, though, the business plan is a little more wacky, because how do you rank the value of something that's barely had, oh, a generation, at most, to become something of value to anyone? It's not like with books, where you have hundreds of years of bookstores to know that people value books. Yet you can still come up with a business plan that consists of more than just four powerpoint slides and the obsessive idealism that if you build it, people will just show up with loads of cash.
Really, the key is in crunching the numbers -- based on expenses, and reasonable expectation of cost-of-purchase for paying users -- and determining where the breakeven point is. If it's too high -- if it'd take 50% of your users paying, to be able to carry the other 50% of non-paying, I don't know. Seems to me that's asking too much, at least at first. But then, I'm also a brickfront kind of business person. I still laugh when I see dot-com business plans that expect to make a profit in ten years. What? My investor would've thrown me out if I hadn't shown a profit inside of three. Sheesh.
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Date: 7 Oct 2011 04:02 am (UTC)The key is always the business plan, and there, I don't think it's a matter of whether it's an indie. Seems to me that your complaint is more about the attitude. As someone who owned an indie bookstore, and was surrounded by equally offbeat indie shops, I never ran into that attitude. I did plenty, in the big city, or the bigger college towns, and it turned me off, as well. Or maybe I just never saw myself as cool enough to carry off handing that attitude to anyone else. I was too acutely aware that I very much needed customers who, y'know, give me cash.
Online, though, the business plan is a little more wacky, because how do you rank the value of something that's barely had, oh, a generation, at most, to become something of value to anyone? It's not like with books, where you have hundreds of years of bookstores to know that people value books. Yet you can still come up with a business plan that consists of more than just four powerpoint slides and the obsessive idealism that if you build it, people will just show up with loads of cash.
Really, the key is in crunching the numbers -- based on expenses, and reasonable expectation of cost-of-purchase for paying users -- and determining where the breakeven point is. If it's too high -- if it'd take 50% of your users paying, to be able to carry the other 50% of non-paying, I don't know. Seems to me that's asking too much, at least at first. But then, I'm also a brickfront kind of business person. I still laugh when I see dot-com business plans that expect to make a profit in ten years. What? My investor would've thrown me out if I hadn't shown a profit inside of three. Sheesh.