Monetising already live niche community
Hello all,
My first post in here and I thought I'd start with a challenge for you all. Here my current setup:
- launched a niche, cloud based web portal that let's doctors in Germany look up categorisation codes for patient treatments. Before my web portal they did this from memory, via physical paper book or very old 1990's software. There is huge time saving for them using my portal.
- within 6 months I have 17,000 unique visitors on the site monthly and about 3,000 monthly returning visitors monthly
- the portal is free and no registration required
I'd love to monetise this, as it creates value for the users. In my head there are 2 options:
- per month price for a user - eg €10/month that gives them access to unlimited lookups a month and I limit free usage to 5 lookups or something like that.
- B2B advertising embedded on categorisation code pages (eg if a user looks up the code for knee replacement, I could show an ad for the newest knee replacement treatment). This is a huge industry, and currently very hard for companies who produce medicine or medical devices to market to specific audience to directly (eg its really hard for a company which manufactures knee replacements to market to knee replacement doctors, you get the point...). The issue here is that I have no clue about how to run ads, what to charge, how to contact B2B businesses. This is definitely my preferred route though.
Keen to hear some thoughts and suggestions, especially as I think this just he a common issue people encounter after building up communities.
Thank you!
Frank
The way I think about it is that individuals are cheap while businesses are willing to pay money.
Given that, if you start charging doctors you might loose a number of them.
I would recommend doing things in this order (it might be the slow way around, but would likely be a more solid business):
Keep you site free, but require registration. Ideally in the account creation process ask for not only name, but also the clinic name, etc.
Go for ads - especially given the service is free and the audience is very valuable.
Use the information from step 1 to ask doctors for their needs, and to reach out to clinics to see what their needs are. Build these out and add optional paid features. You can add disabling ads as a feature, but doctors might actually want them.
If things in step 1 fail and you want to try to make more money, feel free to disable the free site in a small region to see how it affects your business.
It's a business they use the service just charge them a fee.
Although, you might require them to register for a free 3 month trial after so many free visit(track using a cookie)
Also, offer a yearly subscription.
Sounds good!
Freemium model such as cbinsights or crunchbase along ads
Sorry to be that guy, but it sounds like you have a lot of data, is that all clean and licensed properly? Just asking to make sure you don't get into trouble down the road.
Hi Thomas - thanks and very valid point to raise. It's actually one of the few things I've spent some money on getting proper advice and making sure everything is setup correctly in line with whatever regulation/legals there is. I've also got a licensing agreement for the actual medical codes that I paid a 1-off fee for (which was not much), that allows me to use it on a commercial basis.
Having said all that, very keen to hear your thoughts on how you think best way forward is?
(tiny side comment, just tried to click on the link to Budget Fox on your profile with latest Chrome and it immediately pops up with a "download this web page" prompt? Might be worth checking?)
oh, and do send me an email, I'm currently re-re-relearning all the current SEO things and I'm happy to dig through your pages.
yes, thank you http/s on http port 80 isn't a thing. you're the second one to tell me today and I fixed it right away :)
Back to your product, talk with the users you have, maybe a popunder that shows when they come for a second or third time. Get the emails, get to chat with them, figure what would help them to use your app more efficiently. It might be something like bookmarks or access to doctors-only commentary. You could tease the later one very easily to visitors "5 comments on this from Dr. Schmidt and Prof. Mayr (AKH Wien)" and of course references that go deeper like referencing to papers on the disease.
I'd say away from selling data to companies, there's enough shit like that already going on and it would severely shift your focus in regard "who's my customer".
Just charge everyone. Write on the site that its now 10 euros but they can have a free 3 month trial if they give you their credit card