I have just whipped through six posts on Vox and now I’ve come to what some people ONLY care about.

“How do I make money with this stuff?”

Ah yes - money. Money makes the world go round.  That’s what I get paid for - to help people figure all that out.  So this post is for YOU - our dear clients and the people of the world who are willing to invest cold hard cash into building the future.

My notes for this post say:

Hosted experience = money - biz model - chaNGE EXPERIENCE - MIGRATE USERS EXPERIENCE

That’s what I wrote down when I was thinking about creating this post.  I planned out a series of 10 posts, each one hitting on an important point - using SixApart’s new Vox service as a case study.

So no series of posts would be complete without something on “how to make money” - right?

And that is what I’m trying to do here - now:

1. By controlling the software in a hosted enviroment, the SaaS (software as a service) model enables one to control the spigot, the flow, to customize the offering, maintain backups and secruity, provide new features and functionality through to the user - and do that without one download or painful upgrade process.

2.  That’s the future as far as I’m concerned.  I won’t argue that fact here.

3.  What’s relevant to our discussion here is that SixApart is following up from their experiences with TypePad - and they know how to do this stuff.

4.  They know that they can BOTH charge for services while at the same time flow ads, affiliate deals, promos, on-demand content - and a whole lot more - once they’re popular.  MySpace is figuring that out right now.

5. Once you’ve got end-user subscribed and ‘hooked’, you need to keep up with the Joneses and never stop.  Never rest on your lauerels.  Keep going.  We ain’t done yet.

So that’s the base argument around SaaS and hosted models.

But there’s a kicker here. Something that is the MOST important reason for hosted models - yet its soemthing SixApart if NOT doing yet.  Open APIs.

With that - we can all work together and leverage and grow Vox into the potential that it really has. 

I’ve heard Jerry Yang say “I go to sleep every night thinking about how we’ll get our next 3 billion clicks.  That’s teh attitude you have ot have in this industry.

As long as you’re willing and able to deliver and provide effective, compelling experiences to folks - you’ll be successful. You just gotta listen to what they want and give it to them.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.