Quote:
Originally Posted by latepaul
I suspect that without a lot of start-up money cash-flow would be a very tricky balance. Probably you'd either fail completely or level out at a small-to-medium size site (1,000s users) where you couldn't grow easily to the next level without more money. Which could be fine but certainly not an Amazon-killer.
There is a solution to the money issue: find a big backer prepared to invest lots of money up front and wait months or years for you to establish yourself before you're profitable. That gives you time to develop the site. Time to attract users. Time to attract advertisers. However that's basically what Goodreads did and they probably would never have got the VC money if they had hamstrung themselves by promising never to capitalize on one of the biggest assets they had - the user data.
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I was really hoping GR would start SELLING ebooks and become a viable competitor! They had the eyeballs and some of it set up and working. Then mysteriously about 6 months or so ago, they stopped allowing sales of ePUB. I had one book up there for sale...and when I went to add...I think it was Dragons, the only option was to add it for free download. I'm guessing now they were already in discussions to sell and they didn't want to spend resources on the program.
But that would have been another possible business model had they wanted to really pursue it.