Here’s a tip: If you’re recruiting partners for a product launch, or you want to invite me to join your affiliate program, you just want to ask for help in marketing and promotion. That’s not a “joint venture”.
A joint venture is where 2 individuals or business entities are going to a deeper level of cooperation and collaboration – a prime example is my buddies Amit Mehta and Zac Johnson‘s newly-launched Magnetic Poetry Facebook Application.
There’s joint sharing and investment in product development and marketing, the partners might even form a new business entity to manage the business.
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On the other hand, if you’re looking for affiliates, you’re recruiting affiliates.
If you drop the term “joint venture” and misuse it, you lose a number of points right off the bat.
If in doubt, check out the Wikipedia definition of “joint venture“
Last month I spoke at the second Singapore Facebook Developers Garage (organized by Entrepreneur 27 Singapore (e27) and the Singapore PHP Users Group) for a session: “Facebook Apps: Goldmine or Hype?”
It was certainly an interesting session, and if you know me, I certainly wouldn’t waste my time if it was “hype”…
More interestingly, I got a chance to meet up with a number of skilled PHP, Ruby-On-Rails and CakePHP programmers and a number of them are pretty skilled developers. Already a number of Singapore-developed applications are making their mark on the social networks, and it’ll be interesting to see what comes up next.
This past Wednesday I joined a number of Facebook Application developers and sponsors on a “Marketing and Monetization of Facebook Applications: Hype or Goldmine?” at the second Singapore Facebook Developers Garage organized by the Entrepreneur 27 Singapore and Singapore PHP users group.
The panelists included:
Bernard Leong (Thymos Capital partner, and session moderator)
Leonard Lin (TYLER Projects managing partner – developer of Facebook application BattleStations!)
Kien Lee (Senatus founder – an investment holding company which owns more than 100 Facebook applications)
Talking to a number of budding entrepreneur’s at last evening’s Singapore Facebook Developers Garage and hearing about their growing pains served as an impetus to get this post out. Some of you whom I met up with at Affiliate Summit would have heard parts of this, but here it is in more detail…
No matter whether you live in Las Vegas, or Vancouver, BC, New York city or Singapore, the questions are the same – How do you grow your business?
I’m going to outline 3 discrete stages that I see business go through, and I’m going to paint some generalizations here. (generalizations refer to 90-95% of the people in each of these categories out there. So hold off on the flames, especially if you’re part of the 5-10% of “distribution curve busters” out there)
If you’ve spoken to me or exchanged emails, you’ll know that I’m a pragmatist at heart. Having see the rise of the dotcoms and dot-crashes soon after, I’m certainly not in this application if the end result of facebook monetization is mere “hype”.
Talking to Jason Bailey, whom I’m helping to launch his $uperRewards FB monetization system, I’ve seen the applications and case studies of successful FB applications which are making $100,000 – $200,000 a month.
These applications are probably in the top 5% of Facebook applications that turn a profit and a huge profit at that…and the reality of any capitalist society is that you must benchmark yourself against benchmark yourself against the leaders, rather than the other 90% of Facebook developers who are merely scrambling to find two nickels to rub together…
A business must be able to generate positive cashflow and must be able to sustain a comfortable lifestyle for the application creators. Anything less and you’re running a charity.
Let’s break this down for a moment…
An “average” application might generate $10,000 to $15,000 a month, which could be fairly reasonable…until you break that $15,000 by 30 days, or $500 a day.
$15,000 a month or $500 a day, with an assumption of 50,000 daily active users means you are generating 1 cent per daily user…that’s pretty pathetic…
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Instead, if you want to go big with Facebook Applications, you need to define your goal and reverse engineer the process.
I think $100,000 per month is a decent benchmark. (as a starting point…)
This past Wednesday I joined a number of Facebook Application developers and sponsors on a “Marketing and Monetization of Facebook Applications: Hype or Goldmine?” at the second Singapore Facebook Developers Garage organized by the 
