Diving into the business behind Hivemind »

Continuing with my theme of expanding on the wow.ly idea, today I'll give you my quick questionnaire answers related to the Hivemind project.

What's especially interesting about the Hivemind project from a business point of view is that it's the first of the wow.ly projects that has a consumer-facing revenue stream component to it. The hope being that, in addition to helping work towards the larger wow.ly goal (that I haven't laid out for you just yet), it also can be a self-sustaining, maybe even profitible, project of it's own.

We'll see how it works out in the real world, but here's my thinking on it as we just leave the starting gate:

Hivemind

What it offers:

A unique way to discover people and monitor groups of people on Twitter.

What makes it unique:

Ability to dynamically group people of a common theme or interest together. Dynamic monitoring of the groups you create.

Emotional tie to client:

Adds a sense of intelligent context to user discovery for Twitter.

Why and who should purchase:

Twitter users looking to find quality (as it relates to their own opinion of quality) people to follow and monitor.

Where to find prospects:

twitter.com, oneforty.com, facebook.com, google adsense and comments on various blogs addressing the topics of Twitter followers, figuring out who to follow, or how to keep up with who your compeition is following/paying attention to.

How to sell:

1. Get users to try the basic service.

2. Upsell premium version on timelyness and peace-of-mind that comes with monitoring a group.

Cost to reach 100X required customers:

$84,000 (assuming an insanely low $0.10 cost per-user-acquisition)

Expected conversion rate:

About 1% of free users should convert to premium version.

How much it costs:

$1 a month (6 month subscription min.?)

How many clients are needed to make 100k (annual):

About 840,000 users (with 1% conversion rate to premium product)

Estimated time to reach 100k:

About one year.

Resources needed:

Server to host site and code to run monitoring, system for accepting payments and managing subscriptions. One developer and min. freelance graphics/layout.

Existing competition:

http://tickery.net (cached system primarily built to showcase fluiddb system, no list building from results, no monitoring, no meta data added)

Current Subscribers:

332 at time of post (with 3 free monitors currently set up).

Current Income:

$0.00

Current Resources:

One developer (me) and freelance graphics/layout help (Pat)

Other Notes:

Though there is already existing competition, our model of focusing on dynamic data and monitoring is not currently being attempted or challenged.

The ability to tie into the larger wow.ly data set also gives us a unique advantage to improve performance and scale (via saving API calls for basic user information) and add unique meta data (conversationlist details, conversational social graph, etc.)

Our tracking features also add a unique component that the competition does not currently offer.

Next 3 Steps:

1. Improve the speed of the system with out compromising the dynamic nature (via short term caching and combining user data from other wow.ly data collection systems)

2. Make it simple (better explanation of what it does, how to use it, walk the user through the process better -- especially improve the upsell process and really give them a reason to try it)

3. Implement the upsell subscription bits (integrate with paypal to start)

Estimated time to complete 3 steps:

About 2 weeks.

And so there you have it. As you can see the above information showcases a few (currently) really weak points...primarily the 'how to sell' and of course all of the numbers are a complete guess/prayer at this point of the project (though I like to think fairly grounded in my experience of past systems I've been involved in that have had sim. approaches).

It's also interesting to see that this project already has a bit of serious competiation in Tickery.net...which, in it's current form, is very similar in many ways to what Hivemind does (in fact the developer behind it knows Whitney and I via Twitter but was unaware of our Hivemind application when he put Tickery together). Because of their approach to the problem, Tickery has really nice performance (when a user is already in the system) and is already starting to gain some attention (high profile Twitter user Robert Scoble even Tweeted about it).

To some that might be enough to kill the momentum or the passion for the project (given that we are so close to the starting gate and have so little invested in it already)...but to me, it's more validating than depressing and there are enough holes and weaknesses in Tickery's approach (and motivation) that I think we can co-exist quite nicely (and in fact help make each other stronger by championing the overall idea of grouping to find interesting people).

Anyway that's where I'm at with Hivemind right now. Thoughts? Feedback? Ideas? Questions?