the goose

1. Find out what people want: Replies on their mobile
2. Go and get it: TBD
3. Give it to them: TBD

It looks like I’ve found out what people want from Agtweet.  I sent out a survey a couple of days ago and I got a surprising 112 replies.  I was surprised, not only because 112 was getting on for 20% of agtweets followers, but also because of the content.  First up – perhaps not suprisingly given that Meteor customers make up almost half of AgTweets subscribers despite only a quarter of them having an ‘085′ number. 

About 80% wanted to be able to have @replies sent to their phone by text.  This is something twitter themselves are no longer offering.  The reason?  Well, sending text messages in Europe costs money.  Footing the bill for the millions of replies that are sent every day would be unsustainable.  Hence, maybe there is an opportunity here.  About 20% of respondants want to be able to receive replies and would be willing to pay ‘a small fee’ for the privilege.  I used the term small fee in the survey rather than a specific amount, because what a small if is, is pretty subjective.  Among the Meteor customers, this figure actually rose to 30% willing to pay something for the privilege of replies.

So here we are.  20% don’t need replies, 80% want them but only a third of those are willing to pay.  I asked a final question which was ‘how could agtweet pay for itself?’  My favourite answer was “GET A JOB”.  They obviously haven’t read my blog (or my last jobs performance appraisal for that matter).  People took a lot of time in their answers.  There was no shining moment of revelation reading through these but there were some good ideas.  In brief they were:

1. Get sponsorship (operator, government)
2. Charge a 10c fee per message sent
3. Allow people to buy bundles of text
4. Pay a small monthly subscription

Sponsorship is something I already looked into via approaching advertising agencies and it takes a bit of lobbying.  It also doesn’t really fit with my get hundreds of people paying tens of euro a month objective.

I do like the idea of charging a small fee per text received but the premium rate messaging regime in Ireland doesn’t really allow it.  The smallest premium rate fee available is 30c of which you can expect to get about 8c in revenue inclusive of VAT.  I did look at trying to make this work but it didn’t really stack up.

Buying bundles of texts is the approach taken by http://www.twitsms.co.uk.  They’re rates are pretty low with 4c a message.  It is run by an Australian couple who are makinga play on a worldwide basis.  I know from experience that making a margin on a text message is not an easy game.  Scaling issues abound along with customer support issues.

Finally, the ’small monthly’ subscription came up as a suggestion.  I like this best because it fits with building up a predictable cash flow.  The only trick would be geting the price point right.

While all of this surveying was going on, I’ve had 12 people trialling the reply service.  This has produced some useful usage information.

The graph to the right shows how many replies each of the testers have been receiving.  The figures are taken after 11 days of the trial.

I’m not sure if 12 people is a large enough sample but something about this graph jumped out at me.  About 30% of the users were getting a lot more usage than the other 70% – which somewhat aligns with the willingness to pay in the survey I ran.

In summary:

20% don’t want @replies at all on their phone

80% do – but only 30% of them would be willing to pay.  So – the question I have to ask here is – is it gonna be worthwhile trying to charge anyone at all?  What would be considered a ’small fee’?  Ideally I’d like to come up with a solution that kept everyone happy.  In other words, a free or small fee for replies for the light users and a slightly higher fee for the heavy users.