Met Technokitten today. As a mobile marketer and moblogger I was interested to find out her take on what we’re up to with Moblog Technology. My broad business model is to sell the software, SMEs will use it in the same kinds of ways they’re starting to use blogging. Larger organisations will use it to power marketing campaigns and capture frontline stuff, like the 7/7 and Buncefield images we’ve had recently. Technokitten didn’t particularly go for this, not seeing the market, which is what JC has been saying all along kind of. I was really forced to eat humble pie when TK totally went for the community being the valuable thing.

The business plan that dare not speak it’s name recently has been the “Why don’t we just monetise the site?” plan. I’ve been against this for a while. I was not convinced that the effort we put it will generate a proportional return. We’ve got to build the community size quite dramatically and make subscription a much more attractive deal. I just didn’t see that turning that much revenue, but I’m starting to wonder if we could do it. We’d have to focus right down on growing the userbase, that and only that would be the criteria. But if we could grow it by a factor of ten - to 50,000 people - then we might have something.

There are about a million ways we could increase the likelihood of the site generating some money, and we could spend that money in turn on marketing to promote the site further. I think the site needs to have it’s version of passing through the eye of the needle to some extent. It’s just not a business at the moment, every corner of the site oozes hobbyishness. If it wants to make money it has to shape up and fast. But linking to JC on Blogger just reminded me that it’s not impossible for a site to rebrand big time :-).