As for “Don’t Be Evil”—this is something I am concerned about.
Methods of monetization must be as closely aligned with positive outcomes for the end user as possible. From what I hear, Vanguard is a great model for doing this well. I haven’t yet studied the specifics.
There must be a moat that prevents less scrupulous companies from growing faster with a copycat product. One method is to be to be donation-driven, or funded by the government. Another would be solid branding that educates as to why other monetization models aren’t a good idea. This last one feels weaker, though.
Thank you for the questions and feedback, Bastiaan!
I’ll answer your question about the MVP / and money together; here is a yet-untested problem to solve:
People are spending hours per day on their phones; falling asleep with them; this disrupts their sleep, productivity, and their relationships.
I haven’t yet looked closely at how to solve this but some approaches might be a combination of:
Disrupting push notifications from offending apps
Sending counter-push-notifications to disrupt people in flow on the offending apps
Selectively hiding or de-colorizing the most offending app icons
Gamifying or otherwise disincentivizing high phone engagement (e.g. opt-in monetary penalty, some sort of social/addiction score)
Teaching people skills to disengage from phones using CBT
Accountability partners who can see the other’s engagement
Not only does this need to be proven to work, but they need to be self-funding, as you mentioned.
I’ll have to do some research first, but I assume there are opportunities for this to be self-funded—people do pay money for diet apps, exercise apps, and certain types of specialized phone alarms.
Interesting idea, but sparse on how you’d actually achieve this. What is your vision for what an MVP would actually do?
And, If you succeed, what stops this from becoming evil after all? Writing “Don’t be evil” helps, but it’s not enough.
How are you going to make money off of this? Without money there is a real risk of something slowly dying out.
Good luck!
As for “Don’t Be Evil”—this is something I am concerned about.
Methods of monetization must be as closely aligned with positive outcomes for the end user as possible. From what I hear, Vanguard is a great model for doing this well. I haven’t yet studied the specifics.
There must be a moat that prevents less scrupulous companies from growing faster with a copycat product. One method is to be to be donation-driven, or funded by the government. Another would be solid branding that educates as to why other monetization models aren’t a good idea. This last one feels weaker, though.
Thoughts on any of this is welcome!
Thank you for the questions and feedback, Bastiaan!
I’ll answer your question about the MVP / and money together; here is a yet-untested problem to solve:
People are spending hours per day on their phones; falling asleep with them; this disrupts their sleep, productivity, and their relationships.
I haven’t yet looked closely at how to solve this but some approaches might be a combination of:
Disrupting push notifications from offending apps
Sending counter-push-notifications to disrupt people in flow on the offending apps
Selectively hiding or de-colorizing the most offending app icons
Gamifying or otherwise disincentivizing high phone engagement (e.g. opt-in monetary penalty, some sort of social/addiction score)
Teaching people skills to disengage from phones using CBT
Accountability partners who can see the other’s engagement
Not only does this need to be proven to work, but they need to be self-funding, as you mentioned.
I’ll have to do some research first, but I assume there are opportunities for this to be self-funded—people do pay money for diet apps, exercise apps, and certain types of specialized phone alarms.