As a young man in his early 20s, I joined two friends and together we started what became www.bigeye.ug. If someone had asked me; ‘How do you plan to monetize this?’, I don’t think we would have started it. If Facebook had bothered to answer that question before anything, there would be no Facebook.
Yet now I realize the monetization gospel has been popularized. Ortega Group is currently working on some applications. And one of the first questions that people ask; ‘how do you plan to monetize it?’ And not that I am against the part of financially benefiting off innovations. It’s simply that it’s the right question at the wrong time.
I belong to the school of thought that says, people should worry more about adoption for their product than monetization. You must be obsessing about the things that will make people use your tool more than how you make money off the tool. Because you will end up optimizing for different things depending on the school of thought you pursue at the start.
Obsessing about adoption will mean obsessing about that user experience and interface. You will think like the user, imagine that journey and build something that solves a problem, something that people want to use. It’s important to finesse this part of the equation before you worry about the money component of that equation. Because once the users are locked in, monetization becomes the easiest of steps.
I thought this was always basic knowledge back then, everyone knew that it was always about the user. But that seems to have changed, everyone seems to be looking for a quick way out, build something, attach a price and run out to the next thing. How times have changed!
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash