Totspot's Blog - Home | Our Team | Contact | Subscribe

Making money as a startup

michaelbroukhim on July 23, 2008

A number of users have sent us emails since our launch asking us “How does TotSpot make money?” Fair question!

While, right now we are entirely focused on building a fantastic product and getting as many people as possible to join the TotSpot community, we do intend to make some money to make sure our developers are paid and everyone gets to eat around here.

So how does TotSpot work as a business? 3 ways we’ll be looking to make this work:

1) Book Printing & Photo Merchandise - We are actively thinking through and working on a book-printing solution to make it easy for users to convert their TotSpot pages into beautiful scrapbooks. There will also be options to purchase other related types of photo merchandise (e.g. prints, flipbooks, etc.).

2) TotSpot Plus - TotSpot is free and will always continue to be free. We will never take anything from the current free site and ask our users to pay for it in the future. That said, we are considering adding certain new features in the future that our users have asked us for, and we’ll ask those users to cover the costs through subscription accounts.

3) Advertisements - Right now, TotSpot is totally ad-free. We plan to introduce tasteful advertising on certain internal pages as we continue to grow. Our goal is to make ads as unobtrusive as possible (we will not turn profiles into billboards) and as useful as possible (we think there are some great products and services out there that our users would like to know about).

We hope that helps to answer the questions out there regarding our business model. Please do share any thoughts or suggestions you might have in the comments below, via Get Satisfaction, or email.

Shannon

I love TotSpot! I would definitely support option #1 and probably option #2, if the upgrades are very tempting. But please, no ads!

Kristin

I was going to suggest #1 for making your TotSpot pages into a printed “babybook” or “yearbook”. Can’t wait!!

Joe

Totspot has quickly become one of my favorite new sites. I am still haven’t mastered adding friends. For example, I have two children on Totspot but it is hard for me to add mutual friends easily. I’m sure I just need to play around a bit to figure it out but aside from that I love everything about the site. The Growth Chart inspired me to pull medical records for my children just so I could update the charts on Totspot. I tell everyone I know with children to take advantage of what Totspot offers. I look forward to the Book Printing. I think the opportunity to have something unique and easily assembled would make a great keepsake and gift. Keep up the great work.

Ailene Hert

I definitely like option #1. I would use that! Option #2, I probably wouldn’t use… with the way the gas and economy have been lately, I don’t know that I could justify a monthly subscription unless it was something SO fabulous that I absolutely could not pass up (which would be more along the lines of option #1). I don’t like option #3. Although, if TotSpot wanted advertisements on their own pages and blogs… that would be okay with me… but I don’t want my child’s pages having ads on them!

Kai Mai

I wrote a blog post(http://www.kai-mai.com/node/140) about kidmondo and totspot and suggested some revenue models:

there are a LOT of opportunities for partnerships and sponsored offering to sell to parents with children. Parents spend a lot of money(eg: 250k dollars) over the growing period of their children. Parents basically tell these sites everything about their children. so the sites know when and what to recommend to parents based on the stage of their children and the collective data from all other children/parents. Examples:

* when a child turns 5 months old, they can send parents a note like: “Jason needs to start eating solid food starting in a month. 3 out 5 parents on the site recommend x brand”
* when a child’s birthday is coming up, they can send birthday gift suggestions

These sites can also partner with hospitals to provide these kinds of child growth monitoring services.

Something to say?