Gyaan Sutra On entrepreneurship and technology

Ryan Carson of dropsend has a post on TechCrunch today about how to make your web application successful.

Building a web app is no different than launching any other product - it needs to be backed by solid business principles. You’ll need funding, a real audience, a solid monetization model, a marketing plan, quality support, and good project management.

He says that the three vital questions, which will determine if you are able to create a profitable web application are:

• Who is it aimed at?
• Why will they use it?
• Will they pay for it?

He also talks about pricing your web applications, where he gives the percentage breakdown of the revenues from the paying users at DropSend.

• $5/mo plan: 13% of total revenue
• $9/mo plan: 17% of total revenue
• $19/mo plan: 20% of total revenue
• $99/mo plan: 50% of total revenue

Basically, if you make sure that people can get most of the stuff free, then they will. If you remove the high cost options, then you might get some more traffic but at the expense of a lot of money which was already on the table.