From a support email:

“Fellow startup person here. Neat concept for Paprika. As a fellow startup-er (website to launch in 2 months) I was wondering how you guys plan to monetize?”

Here’s our response:

“We’re trying something different on Paprika. Usually we keep building until we have 3-4 levels of power in our applications, and we give the weakest of them away for free. Pretty standard process.

But for Paprika, we decided to only build one level at first. We headed straight for the finish line of the free account. Since midway through the beta, we’ve been building new features for Paprika. When these features launch, hopefully in a few weeks, they’ll exist in an account that resides above the free account.

The free account will stay free, and we’ll probably even eventually add some features to it. But most of our effort will be spent in trying to add value to accounts that extend the free account. Who knows if it was smart to go this way or not… But so far it’s seemed really great. A few things we noticed:

• Our adaption rate for subscribers has been much higher than on previous launches. We attribute that to a simple, less confusing singup process. People do not feel bad for picking the free account to try out the app… The free account is the app.
• We got this app launched much faster than usual. Getting the free account into the wild early let us monitor its uptake, and make sure that it was worth the effort to build the additional features we had planned.

And finally, we hope that when the paid features launch, we’ll have a built in audience of indoctrinated users that are excited to have the new features, as opposed to having had them all along. We think that regardless of what features exist in an app, users will want more. So why not start small!

I hope that helps! Please let us know when you launch your app.”

Paprika has been a great opportunity for us to experiment with our development process, and our sales process. Building apps is a very creative endeavor, – but you have to look at it with a manufacturing eye, – or else you’ll repeat your mistakes.