The way I understand your profit model is that you are, essentially, trying to undercut the competition by operating at a loss until the amount of clients you have surpasses some undisclosed number (or your initial capital runs low?), at which point new customers will have to pay the market rate for your service, and your initial customers still don't pay anything?
If you make it far enough to start charging for your services, what incentive do you have to give the initial customers the same level of service as the paying ones?
I hope you understand I'm just expressing a healthy level of skepticism, not trying to degrade what looks like an awesome service.
Very good question, @kqr. Unlike our competitors, BuyMeACoffee is catering to small and big creators alike. Even if we waive the platform fee for the first 100k creators, there is still room for us to make money as there are millions of creators online. By making the entry barrier low, we are hoping to attract the maximum number of creators and initiate a network effect. 90% of our existing users are referred by other creators, directly or from their promotions :)
I probably don't understand quite what you are getting at. If you bear with me, I have an easier time with concrete examples: if I sign up now, and in two years' time, Steve signed up as part of the post-critical mass. So I bring in $0 to you while using your infrastructure, and Steve is also a smallish creator using the infrastructure just as much as me, but bringing in, say, $8 per month, on average.
If Steve and I both have trouble, it would make business to prioritise helping Steve, in order to be able to afford helping me, but I'd still be a second-tier user.
Thanks for taking time to explain your point. I understand what you mean.
As a consumer product marketed towards masses, it is highly improbable that there will ever occur an event when we have to prioritize one type of users over another.
Also, it is wrong to think that creators who we don't charge a platform fee are not valuable to us. Like I mentioned in my previous comment, BuyMeACoffee has an innate virality where each creator who shares his BMC link attract more creators to join the platform, making all our users more or less equally valuable. Does that make sense? I hope this answers your question.
Thank you for the response. The reason I'm insistent is that I've been looking for something just like BuyMeACoff.ee, and when things show up and appear perfect at no or nearly no cost I get suspicious! But looks like you have a good thing going. :)
If you make it far enough to start charging for your services, what incentive do you have to give the initial customers the same level of service as the paying ones?
I hope you understand I'm just expressing a healthy level of skepticism, not trying to degrade what looks like an awesome service.