One of the ideal things about taking TogetherLoop with me at sea was that it revealed some issues in crappy bandwidth situations. That also led to some necessary but nice changes. I had to chunk video uploads, which in turn meant that I could show a progress bar, which is neat.
But the other thing that's neat is that a small number of my friends, some of whom know each other, are using it. It's not a huge frequency, it's about what I would expect for a social network not built to drive engagement. That's super satisfying. It demonstrates, if anecdotally, that there's a need for this. I'm not sure if others would be willing to pay for it, but I guess I'll find out when I get to the point of eventually asking people for money. I'll still keep the OG's in for free for life.
This is for me, first. I find it useful as a place to post stuff, not for an audience, but for me and a few people that I think might be interested. If it can do that, I'm satisfied. I already have 60+ photos up there, which seeds my future "on this day" feature. So now I have to start asking myself what the next goals and milestones are.
The next milestone is signup that isn't invite based. Right now I have to approve everyone. I need to set up a seamless onboarding process that also validates a real email.
After that, accept money, start enforcing the two-tier membership. I want it to be free for read-only folks. They can like stuff, but not post anything. That's where you get grandparents or whatever in to look at your baby and/or cat photos. To post stuff, I think I wanna do $3/month, in 6-month increments. I consider this successful if it can break even. If it can turn into a lifestyle business, meaning a real job that pays the bills (see my "offboarding" post), even better.
I don't have any ambitions beyond that. Not yet, at least. I think this has been so much fun to work on because it's for the fun of making it, and making it for me and friends. Right now, I need something to cling to that feeds the soul. It's been a rough few months.
No comments yet.