I certainly understand needing to support your family. But I understand why investors are so leery. Additional $$$ in the business and a redesign would probably result in more users but probably not a substantial increase in revenue. Your monetization strategy is not working at 6 million(impressive btw) users then why would it work at 12 million users. There is a very small ROI with the current strategy. Properly monetizing 6 million users would result in alot more than just beer money.
what you've done is awesome. With a few tweaks to the business model you could generate real revenue without needing to raise investment capital.
As someone who is in "this space" and a product guy, @Dumbfounder, needs to refocus then rework the design. Its not much many to edit a decent psd designer then get it chopped off and ready for xhtml.I've done many Its a cheap way to get a slick new design in no time at all. Refine later. I have access to some who do high quality psd+css w/ good turn around time. You tell them what you want, toss around ideas and you get yourself a final product that needs little work. I
His pages have too much going on. Less is more. You should be able to clean things up and drip one 250x250 px ad for say 10-15 cents. Once the ui is reworked this will come to life. I like what he is going but right now he is doing too much. If you want to chat him me up. I am a front end dev and we could probably build some interesting things.
I am pretty sure I could bring its full potential out within 2 month of so while not spending much month at all.
@dumbfounder. If passionate. Reach out to me today.I have some free time this week to dicuss if you want.
A redesign is only a piece of the puzzle, it will not make the site suddenly fundable. I need the time to work on a few fundamental things to position the site to be more attractive to both users and investors, and time is money.
I just reread what I wrote. Yikes! Please excuse all the auto-correct typos. Is this a "new" startup or is it part of your previously funded searchles company?
I completely understand that a redesign is only a piece of the puzzle but when dealing with visual site... design can be a huge piece of puzzle. It can also make a big difference in revenue.
Kinda just seems like an excuse to me...I don't have kids, so I can't empathize, however, it couldn't take THAT much time to work on monetization strategies. 6 million uniques on a consistent basis is pretty substantial attention, and attention = power, nowadays. Plus, why would an investor want to throw any more money at you when you've already somehow dropped well over a million bucks? I think if you just put some elbow grease in, you'd make it work.
All that investment money went into previous products, only the underlying tech was taken to create Twicsy. Only about $30k was actually invested into Twicsy itself after that (just to pay my terrible salary). Since then I paid to keep Twicsy afloat out of my own pocket until this year when it finally started breaking even on raw costs (still can't afford to pay myself a salary).
