The second start-up that I want to talk about in my series of blogs on start-ups is an interesting start-up called http://www.dropmocks.com/.
This is a very simple photo sharing application. To share your photos, all you need to do is drag and drop the photos to the webpage and you get a link that you can then share with all your friends for free.
All this can be done under 2 minutes!
No registration or sign-up required!
No advertisements!
Now this is simplicity at its best.
Question now is how they will make money. I see the following options for them:
- Adopt Freemium model: You can upload photos for a specific size, say, 1 GB for free. If you want to share bigger albums, you need to sign-up and pay for the premium services. For this model to work, they need to make sure that
- The free service is very useful by itself
- Strong differentiation and feature sets of the premium or the paid service from the basic service. They could add regular features like the multiple albums, unlimited storage, one-click sharing with Facebook, twitter, etc.
- Get acquired: I think there is good possibility that they will get acquired by one of the bigger social networking sites (not necessarily other photo sharing sites) if they grow big enough. They will get the users. This is one start-up which needs to really go all out social marketing to get users by getting blogged about, tweeted, creating Facebook fan pages and everything else that can be thought about.
Pitfalls they need to avoid:
- Never sacrifice the simplicity of their application. This is their core value.
- Do not fall into the trap of generating advertising revenue. This can potentially kill the start-up.
Here is wishing them all the very best in their journey to success !!!!!!
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