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)
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…)