Betting on the future - Part 2

September 10, 2008

This post has been held for quite some time and for the sake of finishing a thought, I’m just going to go ahead and post it. You’ve been warned.

This is a continuation of the first post I was writing about ‘Betting on the future‘ and the question was left of why not leave Banktastic as a free, ad-supported service?

Many of the social networking sites today are considered a success based on two things: a consumer market and sizable scale to be able charge for advertisements. I realized early on that since our market was not a consumer based one we were limited in its potential to hit those ‘Myspace’ like stats so we didn’t even try. Instead, we knew we were going to have to get smart on creating this community because we would never have those numbers and advertising only would only take the site so far. But we do have something extremely valuable. We have a focused, highly targeted community in a niche industry that are smart as hell and are often decision makers for their places of business. And there are businesses out there that are attracted to that community. I like to call them ‘premium eyeballs’.

It became apparent quickly that a single free network would only go so far by advertising only. The Banktastic community is growing each and every week and we love what the community has become but I also saw other groups in the industry that were already connected but just not online. So that’s when the idea of private networks came but with a twist.

The twist is the decision for those specialized networks to be public or private to Banktastic.com. We wanted to allow these offline networks to start interconnecting with one another and allowing information to flow in AND out of Banktastic and their own networks. Now, understand, the content is public not the membership. That is controlled entirely separately and is up to the user to decide who they want to share their profile with. My thought is you could provide value to people that need to connect privately but also connect with them an external public group that connects everyone together. And by tying everyone’s focused networks together at a ‘free’ center will improve how information flow is in the financial space.

Are we on the right track? What are we not thinking of? Hopefully my transparency encourages some comments because I never think we’ve got this whole thing figured out.

Tags: banktastic, Business, private networks, Thoughts